28-year-old Noortje Zijlstra is a part of a new group of Dutch artists who are gaining recognition for their fusion of taxidermy and art. Noortje, in particular, takes the macabre practice of taxidermy to the next level – some of her pieces include a white dove’s head mounted on a shuttlecock,  a stuffed squirrel standing on its hind legs with a test tube in its throat serving as a flower holder, and a single preserved baby chicken leg mounted on a wooden stand, covered in fluffy white feathers. Her studio is also home to a family of mice with their hides replaced by decorative colored sugar.

“My work fuses taxidermy and art, sometimes creating work that may shock or even revolt, but I hope it serves as a catalyst for conversation,” she said. Her latest work involves a frozen crow carcass; she’s not yet sure what it’s going to become, but she hopes that the final piece gets people talking. During an interview with AFP, she demonstrated how she cuts into the bird’s breastbone before removing its insides. “This is what I do,” she said. “I take its ‘jacket’ off and use it as a medium for art. As soon as that happens, it ceases to be a dead animal.”

Read More »

Alberto Frigo is a man on a mission – for the past 11 years the 36-year old Italian has been photographing every single object that his right hand has touched. And he plans on continuing the bizarre project until he reaches retirement in the year 2040.

Frigo said that he had been fascinated about the idea of recording his life many years before he began the project. He tried embedded cameras for a while, but found the experience frustrating. Writing a journal did not appeal to him either, because the writing eventually fades.

The idea finally came to him in September 2003, and he started photographing every object his right hand came into contact with. Soon, he got so addicted to it that he simply couldn’t stop. And now it’s become a habit. “At this stage, my left hand now naturally photographs my right hand using objects without me really thinking about it.”

Read More »

Dutch artist Stephan Brusche is an expert when it comes to transforming humble bananas into stunning artworks. The 37-year-old graphic designer carves the skin and flesh of the fruit to transform it into a variety of characters and animals – right from Marilyn Monroe and Homer Simpson to cute animals like giraffes, elephants or fish, and even biblical scenes.

Stephan says he began working with bananas on a whim. “It all started a few years back when I just started using Instagram. I was at work and I just wanted to post something,” he told the guys at Bored Panda. “I then noticed my banana and I figured it would make a nice post if I just drew a little happy face on it. I took a ballpoint pen and just started drawing. I was pretty amazed how pleasant a banana peel is to draw on. So the next day I did it again, now a pissed-off face.”

Read More »

Shanghai-based artist ‘Red’ Hong Yi has made a name for herself in the art world by creating larger-than-life portraits of celebrities using unconventional materials. For her latest masterpiece Red used 20,000 teabags to depict a tea maker practicing his trade.

To create the incredibly complex portrait, Hong Yi stained the tea bags individually by steeping them in hot water, to create 10 different shades of brown. Hong managed to achieve this level of color variation by changing the boiling temperature for every teabag and the amount of water used. For the really dark tones, she used food dyes. Once the tea bags were ready, she carefully arranged them to form the portrait, then stapled and attached them to wiremesh before hanging them from a wooden frame.

Read More »

While most proud parents hang up their kids’ art on their refrigerators, this Canadian dad has found a permanent way of celebrating his son’s work – by turning them into tattoos!

Keith Anderson, from Peterborough, Ontario, has been tattooing his son Kai’s drawings and doodles on his arms, ever since Kai was four years old. Now that Kai is 11, Keith has one tattoo to show for each year – parts of which were inked by Kai himself.

“Each one of these tattoos on my right arm my son has drawn over the years,” the proud father said in an interview with photographer Chance Faulkner. “The first tattoo is from when he was four; he is now 11. We add once a year from his drawing.”

Read More »

Japanese designer Kiyoyuki Amano has combined fashion and technology to create futuristic short skirts that illuminate the wearer’s thighs. Aptly named ‘Hikaru Skirt’, which means ‘Shining Skirt’, the garment comes equipped with LED lights and the miniature gyro sensors on the inside. So the skirt lights up, and the color and pattern of the light changes every time the wearer moves.

Amano said that he first placed light bulbs inside a skirt on a whim, and that’s when he noticed that it created a pleasant illumination of the thighs. So he worked on the design some more and soon created a whole line of LED-illuminated minis. The Hikaru skirts, he said, are meant to bridge the gap between everyday fashion and cosplay.

Read More »

Anthropology sophomore Van Truong recently combined art and biology in an effort to ace her final exam in December. While most of her college mates used lists and flashcards to memorize stuff, Van used a whiteboard to write out all her notes in the form of ‘Starry Night’, Van Gogh’s famous masterpiece.

“I knew I had to study for this exam, and I knew I’d be writing on this whiteboard for hours,” she said. “So I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if I did it in a form where people didn’t know how to feel about it?’”

So when she got to Smathers Library on the University of Florida’s Gainesville campus, she started to write down all her notes with the words forming a replica of Van Gogh’s iconic painting. Three hours later, the masterpiece was complete.

Read More »

Award-winning Italian artist Guido Daniele has an exceptional talent – he can transform human hands into ‘handimals’, hyper-realistic animal portraits.

With a career as an illustrator spanning over 40 years, Guido began to explore and experiment with body art and using the human body as a canvas in 1990. Gradually, he perfected the art of making his models contort their bodies into specific positions and using his painting skills to turn them into realistic portraits and scenes.

Read More »

It’s easy to assume that there’s only one way to view the world, but in reality, different species perceive their surroundings very differently, based on the shape of their heads and the positioning of their eyes. We may never know if they see things that we can’t, but with this new range of immersive helmets, humans can finally get a glimpse of what it’s like to be in an animal’s shoes. Or head!

The fascinating aluminium helmets were created by Irish artists Anne Cleary and Dennis Connolly, from the architecture firm Cleary Connolly. Inspired by the pioneering experiments of psychologist George Malcolm Stratton in the early twentieth century, the duo spent several years trying to invent a device that could explore ‘the mysteries of visual perception’.

Read More »

Hyperrealistic paintings are always awe-inspiring, and the works of German artist Mike Dargas are no exception. His precise paintings are so rooted in reality that it’s easy to mistake them for real-life photographs. In his artworks, the 31-year-old artist from Cologne depicts human models in a plethora of emotions – lost in thought or internal conflict, or simply relaxed and radiating a heavenly grace.

Mike has been painting since childhood, and developed his talents by later attending art school. He worked as a tattoo artist in his early twenties, and eventually opened his own studio in Cologne. Inspired by artists such as Dali, Breton and H. R. Giger, he began to experiment with surrealism and realism.

Read More »

The street theatre scene in Barcelona was completely transformed in 2010, with the invention of the Rodafonio – perhaps the weirdest musical contraption in the world. Created by renowned designer and musician César Alvarez Bayer, it consists of a gigantic wheel that’s four meters high and only 15 cm wide, like a huge waffle iron.

The wheel can accommodate a crew of five – the members of the Catalan music band ‘Factoria Circular’. Three musicians sit inside the wheel in their respective metal circles, playing their musical instruments – a guitar, a saxophone, and a set of drums – to various tunes, while occasionally spinning inside the giant wheel. The other two members are actors who pedal the wheel into motion, bringing the huge mechanical device to life.

Read More »

Californian artist Loren Stump is a master of the ancient Italian glass art of murrine. The age-old technique involves fusing canes of glass together and slicing through them to reveal intricately patterned sections. It’s a lot like slicing through a Swiss cake roll or a loaf of bread to reveal a beautiful cross-section filled with mind-boggling classical imagery such as Da Vinci’s Virgin on the Rocks.

To create a murrine, Stump works backwards – he starts with a two-dimensional image. He then layers different colors of molten glass around a core, heating and stretching it into a rod. When cooled, the rod can be sliced into the desired thickness, with each slice possessing the same pattern in the cross-section. Murrine was first practiced over 4,000 years ago in the Mideast, and later revived by Venetian glassmakers in the early 16th century.

Read More »

If you think squeezing your feet into an uncomfortable pair of heels is painful, then Israeli jewelry designer Naomi Kizhner’s hardcore jewelry is probably not for you. Her innovative pieces are meant to be inserted into the wearer’s veins, harnessing kinetic power from the body’s involuntary movements to produce electricity.

The collection, named ‘Energy Addicts’, features invasive pieces of gold jewelry that have golden spikes at each end, which are inserted into the wearer’s veins in two places. The continuous flow of blood turns the golden wheel inside the design, eventually creating sufficient kinetic energy to produce electricity that is sufficient to light up an LED and soon maybe even charge mobile devices.

Read More »

San Francisco-based artist Rebecca Szetto uses paintbrushes to create her amazing artworks, but not in the way you would expect. Since 1999, she has been carving the handles of old discarded paintbrushes and turning the essential painting tools into actual works of art.

Rebecca’s unique project began almost 16 years ago, while working as faux painting artist, which basically involved making things look old. “I’d amassed a hefty amount of eco-guilt from the sheer amount of waste, in both material and labor, I witnessed. I began collecting brushes and sandpapers from jobsites for many years with no particular end in mind,” she told Bored Panda. Eventually, she decided to either throw away the used paintbrushes or somehow make use of them, as she was running out of storage space. So she started carving the handles into busts of refined Renaissance women, with the paint-covered hairs acting as elegant gowns.

Read More »

Dutch artist Stefan Bleekrode has been blessed with the most amazing talent – he can draw amazingly detailed sketches of cities he has visited, using only his razor-sharp memory as reference .

The 28-year-old has used his superhuman power of recollection to create ‘Cityscapes’,  a series of sketches of some of the world’s most famous cities, like London, New York and Paris. Stefan’s drawings are so mindbogglingly detailed that it’s almost impossible to believe he relies solely on his memory. Using just ink, he composes dense and realistic images of buildings, streets, lights, bridges and any other details his mind picks up. His sophisticated techniques – stark tonal contrasts, precise perspective, and stunning detail –  make each drawing look photographic, as if they were captured from an aerial vantage point.

Read More »