German artist Philipp Weber specializes in hyper-realistic paintings of female models which can hardly be distinguished from high-resolution photographs at first glance.

Born in 1974 in Rostock, Germany, Philipp Weber showed an inclination for the arts when he was only three-years-old, and continued to impress both his parents and his art teachers as he grew. Weber graduated from the prestigious University of Arts in Berlin in 2002 with top grades, and has been wowing art critics with his awe-inspiring hyper-realistic paintings. Looking at how incredibly detailed his artworks can be, it’s easy to see why some of them can take the artist months, sometimes even years to complete.

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If you’re struggling to pass the time in this difficult period, this specially-printed toilet paper that lets you use poop as paint to make art may be just what the doctor ordered.

PooPaint is a new type of toilet paper designed to make potty training fun and entertaining by allowing you to paint with poop when wiping your child’s bottom. Featuring a variety of printed images with dotted line sections that you are supposed to fill in with the leftover poop on a toddler’s bottom, PooPaint guarantees some truly special and smelly quality time with your child. It’s like a coloring book, only instead of crayons, you’re using poop.

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An Indian entrepreneur has comes up with an ingenious and ultra expensive way to reunite pet owners with the pets they had to leave behind in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic – an all-pet charter plane to fly the animals back to their owners.

Deepika Singh, a young entrepreneur and cyber security researcher in Mumbai, came up with the idea of an all-pet chartered plane when she was arranging a jet to fly in some relatives from Delhi. Some of them wanted to travel with their pets, but the others refused, so she ended up having to look for another plane for them. She realized that she couldn’t have been the only one to experience this issue, so she devised a plan to reunite pets abandoned during the national lockdown with their owners, without cramming them in cargo shipments.

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Fueled by her passion for makeup, a 21-year-old self-taught makeup artist from Vietnam has become a master at using her own face to create all sorts of crazy optical illusions.

Hoa Trang has always been fascinated by makeup, but she could never afford to take professional classes, so she decided to teach herself, by watching online tutorials and following Instagram influencers like Mimi Choi (who she credits as one of her inspirations). She started experimenting with facial illusions only three years ago, but because the style was relatively new in Vietnam, she got a lot of attention online and managed to build up a sizable following on social networks like Instagram and Facebook.

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Looking at the tattoos of Mexican artist Yatzil Elizalde, your first reflex is to squint, thinking there is something wrong with your eyes, but it’s just the artist’s unique ‘blurry effect’ style playing tricks on you.

Coming up with a unique tattooing style usually requires a lot of experience and confidence, so it was really surprising for us to learn that the creator of these stunning double vision tattoos was only 25-years-old. Even more surprising was the fact that she had started out as a visual artist, before taking up tattooing six years ago and opening her own studio in Hermosillo, Mexico’s Sonora state.

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Andoni Bastarrika, a multi-media artist from Spain’s Basque Country, has been getting a lot of attention for his ultra-realistic animal sculptures made almost exclusively with sand.

Bastarrika has been entertaining beach-goers in his native Basque Country region for almost a decade now, but he only recently garnered international acclaim, after a photo of one of his sand sculptures – a life-size sitting bull – recently went viral on Reddit. People couldn’t stop talking about how lifelike the sculpture looked, from the subtle muscle definition to the hair-like sand detailing on its forehead. Soon photos of other of Bastarrika’s realistic sand animals started circulating on various social media networks.

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A Japanese mother-of-three who took up food art as a way to entertain her daughters struck gold on Instagram after specializing in cute fried egg artworks.

Etoni Mama is often described as a master of kyaraben (or Charaben), the Japanese art of arranging various foods as elaborate, eye-catching designs, but it was her fried egg ideas that really helped her made a name for herself on popular social networks like Instagram and Twitter. Using fried eggs as the main element of her artistic kyaraben pieces, and various other edible ingredients as accessories, the Japanese mom creates all kinds of edible renditions of popular cartoon characters, iconic scenes and cute animals.

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Yartsa Gunbu, a fungus that infects ghost moth caterpillars on the Tibetan Plateau, is considered by far the most expensive parasite in the world, fetching up to $50,000 a pound.

A close relative of the tropical parasite that infects ants and turns them into zombies, Ophiocordyceps sinensis is only found on the Tibetan Plateau, where it infects the larvae of ghost moths while they are buried deep underground and feeding on plant roots. The larvae are most vulnerable in the summer, when they shed their skins, becoming more easily infected. The parasite slowly grows in its hose by consuming it during the fall and winter, and just when the snow starts to melt, it pushes its dying larvae host upward and grows a plant-like, spore-filled stalk that pierces the ground, becoming the way to spot the valuable Yartsa Gunbu. It is then harvested by local villagers and sold modest prices that turn into a fortune as the fungus passes through several middleman, costing the final client more that three times its weight in gold.

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An eerie art installation located in a barren field in the Finnish countryside recently went viral after someone accidentally stumbled upon it while searching on Google Maps.

With quarantine and isolation measures still in place in many countries around the world, people are spending a lot of time online looking for cool places to visit once they can travel again. Many a re using free tools like Google Maps and end going deeper down the rabbit hole than they originally anticipated. That’s probably how some people recently discovered The Silent People, a creepy-looking art installation that left them scratching their heads about why anyone would fill a field with hundreds of scarecrows and dress them as real people.

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Chicago-based Jim Bachor is one of those rare street artists’ whose works can be classified as both art pieces and a public service. The man specializes in fixing up pot holes by filling them up with his beautiful and durable mosaics.

In fact Jim’s career as a pothole artist began with a trip to the ancient city of Pompeii, in Italy, where he learned just how durable mosaics really were. The tour guide pointed at a 2,000-year-old artwork and said that although it had been set in mortar, the marble and glass pieces had not faded. The realization of the artwork’s staying power blew him away, and a few months later he was in Italy learning the secrets of ancient mosaic art. He pursued it as a hobby for a few years, but then he started doing commission works and in May of 2013 he got the idea of applying his skill to fixing a pesky pothole in his neighborhood.

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Let’s face it, the internet is full of photos of beautiful girls, but it’s not every day that you stumble upon beauty that takes your breath away. 11-year-old Amina Ependieva is one such striking beauty.

Despite getting a lot of attention on Russian social media over the last five months, Amina Ependieva remains a very mysterious figure. Discovered by Chechen photographer Amina Arsakova, the 11-year-old made quite an impression when photos were posted on Arsakova’s Instagram account. Her post usually received about 1,000 likes on average, but the photos of Ependieva received over 10,000 likes, and hundreds of comments either praising her unearthly beauty or asking if she was a real person.

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The Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in Tasmania, Australia, isn’t the only museum to have shut its gates because of the Covid-19 pandemic, but it stands out because of its unique, human artwork.

As hard as it is to believe, Tim is both a man and an artwork. A former tattoo parlor owner from Zurich, in Switzerland, he agreed to have his back tattooed by artist Belgian artist Wim Delvoye in 2006, and has been exhibiting his body art in museums and art galleries ever since. He has been coming to MONA since 2011, for stints that can last up to six months at a time and see him sitting with his legs crossed on a plinth, in complete silence, showing off Delvoye’s artwork. And even though MONA closed down on March 18, he continues to sit in the empty museum for six hours a day. That is his job…

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Joe Bagley, a 20-year-old self-confessed “jungle boy”, has turned his one-bedroom apartment in Loughborough, UK, into an indoor jungle with over 1,400 potted plants.

From cacti and succulents to tropical flowers and vines, you can find all sorts of plants growing in Joe Bagley’s home. They are everywhere, on the dining table, on bookshelves, even in the bathroom, pretty much wherever there is any spare space that hasn’t been occupied by something else. There isn’t that much space available, s cramming 1,400 potted plants into it has made it look like a sort of indoor urban jungle. As you can imagine, looking after so many houseplants takes a bit of time, and Joe admits that he spends most of his free time watering them and making sure they are healthy.

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A young art teacher from China’s Shanxi Province was recently praised online for spending three months working on a detailed chalk rendition of a traditional masterpiece.

When Zhao Wenrui, an art teacher in Fanzhi County, decided to draw a chalk version of Along the River during the Qingming Festival he just wanted to do something interesting for his students, to surprise them when they cam e back from the coronavirus quarantine. He certainly didn’t set out to use eight chalkboards side by side, five buckets of chalk and work on it for no less than three months, but then he found himself unable to ignore any of the details depicted in the treasured panoramic artwork.

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Le Le, a British Shorthair cat from Wuhan, China, has become a symbol of resistance during the current pandemic, showing us human that if she could survive by herself in a locked apartment for 40 days, then we can handle a bit of social distancing and isolation too.

This story of feline endurance and survival began in January of 2020, when the Covid-19 crisis in Wuhan was still in its infancy. One by one, Le Le’s human family had to be hospitalized after becoming infected with the coronavirus, and before the Chinese New Year (January 25) rolled up, the heavily pregnant cat had been left by herself. Her owners had decided not to hire someone look after her, or even check in on her from time to time, because they didn’t known whether their home was contaminated with the virus or not. So they just opened a bag of cat food and hoped for thee best.

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