You could swear these old photos were taken decades ago, and have been stored away some place collecting dust, but in fact these tiny artworks are painstakingly drawn by Paul Chiappe, with a simple pencil. Mind blown yet?

28-year-old artist Paul Chiappe, from Edinburgh, Scotland, has been drawing with pencils ever since primary school, and throughout the years his skills have improved to such a degree that he’s now able to create detailed photographic artworks. I remember even in primary school meticulously copying images for art class,” Chiappe remembers. “I would end up drawing dolphins and things from wildlife books. Basically, anything I would draw I’d make sure it was as realistic as possible.” Now he’s become an expert at creating Victorian-style photographic artworks in such stunning detail that you actually need a magnifying glass to tell them apart from real photographs.

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Alexander Stupkin, a 30-year-old car enthusiast from Odessa, Ukraine, has spent the last two years turning his old Mitsubishi Eclipse into a gorgeous Lamborghini Reventon replica.

It’s barely been two weeks since we posted an article about Wang Jian, the 28-year-old Chinese farmer who built his own Lamborghini Reventon from scrap, and now we have another Lambo fan who decided to built his own dream car. His name is Alexander Stupkin, a young Ukrainian jeweler from Odessa. Apparently he has always been a fan of beautiful sports cars, and since he was already working in a field that requires patience and accuracy, he decided to try his luck with tunning. Although he had no experience with tunning cars, with the help of family and friends, Alexander managed to transform an old 2003 Mitsubishi Eclipse he bought in 2008 into a stunning replica of his Italian dream car, the Lamborghini Reventon. It’s true the build process took over two years, but the end-result is really impressive, if you ask me.

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Meet Tina Leopard, a Chinese blogger and model who earlier this year sparked controversy among Internet users after photos showing her extremely sharp chin and large anime-like eyes went viral on Sina Weibo, China’s version of Twitter.

Apparently, there’s a new fashion trend sweeping across China – the anime look. The country’s most popular social media sites are practically flooded with tons of photos of young people clearly going out of their way to look as much like an anime character as possible. The trend took off last summer, when a girl going by the name of KOKO uploaded photos and videos showing her thin body, pointy chin and disproportionately large eyes. It turned out she used all kinds of makeup tricks to achieve her anime look, and her photos were apparently also altered in Photoshop, but that didn’t seem to matter much to people who wanted to look like the characters in popular Japanese cartoons. And while some of them actually look pretty cool, others are just plain freaky. Case in point, Tina Leopard, a young Chinese model whose extreme facial features have often been compared to those of an alien.

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They look like something aliens might have created, but the large-scale snow circles spread around the Les Arcs sky resort, in the French Alps, are actually the work of one man –  British artist Simon Beck.

Using an orienteering compass, measuring tape and a pair of snowshoes, 54-year-old Simon Beck turns the hills and frozen lakes around Les Arcs into geometrically-perfect immaculate masterpieces. His intricate prints are huge, often spanning the equivalent size of six football fields, but while you’d be tempted to think Beck needs at least several days to complete just one of these patterns, he really only needs about 10 hours, on average. Hard to believe, considering they’re all done by walking with snow shoes, but Mr. Beck doesn’t mind the exercise. In fact, that’s what made him take up the unusual habit. Because of some problems with his feet, the artist cannot run anymore, so plodding on level snow was the least painful way of getting some exercise. And he’s not one to hold back, walking around in the snow until he’s completely exhausted, and using a headlamp if it gets dark first.

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In what may very well be the worst wedding proposal in history, a Russian man hired a whole film crew to stage a deadly car crash and see if the woman he wanted to marry really loved him to death.

Most people already know, or at least think they know the person they want to marry truly loves them, before they pop the big question, but 30-year-old Alexey Bykov, from Omsk, Russia, wanted to make absolutely sure. Instead of taking the easy route, like making his girlfriend Irina take a lie detector test, he decided to fake his own gruesome death to see what her reaction would be. So the young Russian hired a movie director, stuntmen, make-up artists, and even a script writer to stage a car crash in which he lost his life. They made sure everything looked as realistic as possible, by using crashed cars, smoke, ambulances and carnage, so the poor girl didn’t for a minute think she was the victim of a very creepy prank.

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A Ukrainian couple from the village of Akimova, in the Zaporozhye region have spent 10 years building their own fairy tale castle. And because of their resemblance to the popular animation characters, they are known as Shrek and Fiona by the locals.

Anatoly and Larisa Galitsky love children, so one day they decided to built a castle-themed cafe where they could come and play in a fairy tale setting. The courtyard was supposed to be full of swings and carousels for the kids to enjoy, while the castle interior was designed to look like what they read in popular stories. But alas, the real world has its own villains, and in the Galitskys’ case it was the local sanitation department who just wouldn’t authorize the build of a public cafe on the site of an old landfill. After several attempts to convince the authorities to approve their project, Anatoly finally decided to give up and make his castle into a unique residence. The real-life Shrek drew up the plans himself, and after 10 long years, he and his beloved Fiona finally have a castle to call their own. The entire structure covers an area of 300 square meters, has three large halls, a bedroom and a huge kitchen. The three stone walls also house a bathhouse and a garage. Of the castle’s six pointy towers, only one is actually hollow, the rest are just for show.

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Pierre Emmanuel Godet is a French self-taught artist living in Barcelona who creates incredible artworks with a single continuous line. And as if that wasn’t impressive enough, the little doodles that make up his artworks tell the tale of the subjects he’s trying to depict.

On his blog, Pierre Emmanuel Godet says he used to work in Research Engineering, in his native country of France, but he had always been more interested in art, so one day he decided to take a leap of faith and become a professional artist. Although he has an impressive collection of oil and acrylic paintings, his one-line drawings are by far him most amazing works of art. He started this unique series in 2010, while exploring the idea of making art with very few materials. Godet’s first attempts were chalk drawings on the streets of Dublin, Ireland, but as he got better he transposed them on canvas, with Indian ink. In the beginning he created simple shapes, like animals and symbols, but as he became more experience he moved on to more elaborate works, like celebrity portraits. Each of these amazing renditions is unique and contains objects, shapes and stories related to the person they’re depicting. It’s hard to tell from a distance, but if you look closely, you can see that almost all the doodles (apart from exceptions like the eyes, or the nose) are linked together in a continuous line.

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Sergei and Vyacheslav Savelyv are two twin brothers with an extraordinary talent for doodling. They uses colored pens and pencils to draw what seem like endless circular doodles and create incredibly detailed portraits of world famous icons.

Sergei and Vyacheslav Savelyv have so far displayed their wonderful artworks only in their home town of Petrozavodsk, in Russia’s Karelia region, but I think you’ll agree their talent deserves worldwide recognition. The creative duo who works under the name “SaveL” have an impressive doodle portrait portfolio of famous celebrities like Johnny Depp, Robert De Niro or Antonio Banderas, all created with ordinary pens of pencils. Their technique looks a lot like what many of us used to do on the back of our notebooks in school to check is a pen still worked, only their loops form very detailed images. We’ve seen some truly mind-blowing doodle art in the past, like the works of Sagaki Keita or Jason Sho Green, but while they assembled their masterpieces out of tiny little drawings, these Russian twins use the simplest form of doodling to create intricate portraits.

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In what can only be described as a titanic effort, boat-model enthusiast Jason King, from England, has spent two and a half years building an exact 1:100 scale replica of the Titanic. The 40-year-old used all kinds of scrap materials, from old clockworks to broken VCRs and managed to finish his masterpiece on April 15, exactly 100 years after the real Titanic sunk.

Titanic buffs have built replicas of the famous boat before, but Jason King wanted his to be perfect, right down to the number of benches on its deck. To pull off his perfect 1:100 replica, the man actually bought 150 books on the Titanic and consulted every photo of the vessel he could find. Jason knew most people would never notice the tiny details, but he wanted to make sure no one could ever “pick holes in it”. So he painstakingly recreated every single part of the original Titanic to scale, right in hid home study. Although he admits he had some model experience behind him, the Titanic project still took him two and a half years to complete. But that actually kept him out of his wife’s way, so that made her happy.

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Elena Zhuravskaya, an amateur artist from Kiev, Ukraine, uses fish bones, scales and even their boiled eyes to assemble amazing paintings on velvet canvases. Although her work is virtually  unknown outside her native country, I hope this article changes that.

I found photos of Elena’s works on a wonderful-yet-obscure blog called Viola, and after doing some “digging” I was able to find more info on this wonderful artist and her unique trade. Ms Zhuravskaya, who works as an architect in Kiev, has a very interesting hobby – she likes to use fish leftovers (bones, scales, eyes) to create detailed ivory-like paintings on dark velvet canvases. The self-taught artist has invented a number of bone-processing techniques which allow her to manipulate the fine medium into whatever shape she desires, although she admits working with such delicate materials is a painstaking process. So far, her fishy artworks have been displayed in various galleries around Kiev, leaving art-enthusiasts in awe of both her bizarre medium choice and amazing attention to detail.

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Sergey Pakhomov, an artist from Russia’s Perm region has recently made headlines in his home country for using various types of pasta to make miniature models of cars, planes, boats and even a small pasta town.

If you’ve at least heard of Canada’s wacky Spaghetti Bridge Building Championship, then you already know pasta can also be used outside the kitchen. Take Sergey Pakhomov, an amateur artist who discovered Italian pasta is a great material for creating detailed miniature models. It all started six years ago, when Pakhomov was working for a PR company, and was asked to do a creative advertisement for a Russian macaroni company. He was brainstorming one night and came up with the idea of creating various thing out of macaroni. The advertisement campaign was eventually canceled, but the idea stuck with him, and after studying the works of other artists who had used stuff like vermicelli or rigatoni to make art, he decided to pursue a career in pasta models. After six years of experimenting with the strange medium, Sergey Pakhomov has an impressive collection of over 30 miniature pasta models, some of which are pretty complex.

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Did you ever wish those cute anime girls were actually real? It turns out they actually can be. Well, sort of… Japanese model Ana Amemiya has become somewhat famous in her country for always wearing an anime mask on her head, whether she’s at photo shoots or on stage. We’re way beyond cosplay here, people.

According to RocketNews24, the 22-year-old half-human, half-anime model made her debut in 2010, as a gravure idol (Japanese glamour idol that is generally more provocative than regular models, though not to the point of posing nude). She was signed by Excel Human Agency, released her first DVD in December 2010, and even had her own daikmakura pillow cover. What sets Anna Amemiya apart from any other model in the world is her signature anime head. She basically has the head of a smiling anime girl and the body of a real woman, which apparently (for some strange reason) appeals to some Japanese men. It’s important to note that Anna never takes off her mask, so nobody knows what she really looks like.

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Aptly named “Sleeping Beauty“, a controversial art exhibit at the National Art Museum of Ukraine has real-life sleeping beauties waiting to be “woken up” by true love’s kiss, just like in the famous fairytale by Charles Perrault. Only these fair maidens are bound by contact to marry their suitors if they open their eyes while being kissed.

Earlier this month, a group of young women were chosen to be part of an an unusual art installation designed by Canadian-Ukrainian artist Taras Polataiko. Each one has agreed to lay down on a pedestal-style bed for three days waiting to be woken up by true love’s kiss. Unlike the sleeping beauty in Perrault’s story, these girls are not under any curse, nor have they been poisoned, they just volunteered to be part of a really unique art project and hopefully find the love of their lives. Because the contract they agreed to sign clearly states that if any of them open their eyes while being kissed by any of the male visitors, they are obliged to marry them. To make things interesting, each of the visitors is also required to sign a contract that obligates them to marry the sleeping beauty if she opens her eyes during the kiss. Pretty serious stuff…

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If you’ve seen any of the Batman movies from the latest trilogy, you know how cool his motorcycle looks, and probably understand why this Vietnamese bike enthusiast couldn’t resist the thought of owning his very own Batpod, even if that meant having to build it himself.

Dubbed the “Vietnamese Dark Knight”, the young man behind this impressive scrap-part motorcycle has been identified as Tùng Lâm, from Vietnam’s Lang Son province. About a month ago, the builder posted a YouTube video of himself riding a prototype of the home-made Batpod which went viral receiving about 370,000 views in just 10 days. Although it was obvious the replica was not yet finished, the video still managed to draw a lot of attention and left many viewers curious to know if he had built it himself, what parts he used or how long it took him. There were some trolls commentators who said it was a poor effort that looked almost nothing like the Batpod in the Dark Knight films, but overall the reaction to the video was positive. Yesterday, almost a month from the first video, another one was posted, this time of the completed bike.

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60-year-old Mangas Colaradas, born and raised in Swansea, Wales, has lived as a Native American Indian for the last two decades, after divorcing his wife. He wears traditional Apache clothing and respects their beliefs, but lives in a three-bed suburban house.

Mangas, who was apparently once known as “Mr. Davies”, refuses to disclose his former name and only answers to his Indian one, adopted in honor of a great Apache tribe leader. Regardless of what others may think of him, the British Apache says he’s the real deal, and that he dresses and lives like an Indian all the time. “I dress like this all the time, I’m not just some weekend Indian. I don’t put it on to show off, I put it on because I want to wear it”, Mangas was quoted by This Is South Wales. The father of six divorced his wife during the 1990s and embraced the Apache Indian lifestyle. In 1997, he even traveled to the US and tried to live on a Red Indian reservation, but wasn’t allowed to by the American Government. He then moved to Spain where he live in a tepee, in the mountains and forests around Torremolinos. “I prefer being out in the wild, watching the wolves or bats or spiders going by”, Mangas says.

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