If you’ve ever fantasized about living at Hogwarts Castle (as all Potterheads do), then here’s some good news for you. The Georgian House hotel in London is offering its guests a Harry Potter Hotel Package, with Hogwarts-themed bedrooms that are designed to resemble Harry’s fictional dorm room.

The Gregorian House is a four-star hotel built in 1851 and still run by the descendants of the original owners. While the hotel traditionally offers Victoria Classic and Belgravia Boutique rooms, they’ve decided to take full advantage of the renewed worldwide interest in Harry Potter, ever since J K Rowling released a new Harry Potter story on her website, Pottermore.

Aptly named ‘The Georgian House’s Wizard Chambers’, the two transformed rooms contain everything that a would-be wizard might need – four-poster beds, potion bottles, cauldrons, spell books, and even battered trunks. The interiors are done up with ‘Hogwartsian’ accents, perfectly capturing the essence of the Potter universe.

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Apparently, there’s much more to a pink flower than meets the eye – there’s also gold, orange, yellow, purple, blue and red.How do we know this? Well, it’s all thanks to tetrachromats like Concetta Antico. Her unique condition enables her to see 100 times more color than the average person.

“My world speaks to me very strongly and then I can’t wait to paint it,” said Concetta, an artist based in San Diego. “I’ve been told that you see gray, mostly, in a shadow. Well, shadows are fabulous. I see emerald greens, I see magentas, I see lilacs, I see blues.”

The reason for Concetta’s amazing ability to see the world from a different perspective is the extra receptors in her eyes. Most people have three types of cones – structures in the eye that are designed to absorb particular wavelengths of light and transmit them to the brain – in their eyes. But tetrachromats like Concetta have four cones, so while the average person can only see 1 million colors, they can potentially view 99 million!

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You can say Chinese artist Han Xiaoming has great ‘taste’ in art – he actually uses his tongue as a brush to create paintings! Luckily, he doesn’t use oil paints or acrylic, just sweetened food dye.

Han, 35, claims he came up with the technique while trying his hand at traditional Chinese sugar painting. The ancient art form involves the use of melted sugar to create figures such as dragons, monkeys, fish, dogs, birds and flowers. Halfway through his work, however, sweet-toothed Han got hungry and decided to take a sip of the sugary paints used to paint the sugar artworks. He loved the taste so much that he finally ended up abandoning the paintbrush and continued to paint with his tongue. Eventually, he completely switched to using his tongue as a tool for his art.

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Lucia Pittalis, an Italian makeup artist and portrait painter, is a master of disguise – she can give herself a whole new identity with just a few strokes of makeup. All she needs are a few cosmetics, makeup tools, and wigs. The 43-year-old mostly chooses to turn herself into famous musicians, actors and fictional characters – both male and female.

Some of Lucia’s most epic transformations have been into iconic figures such as Marlon Brando, Walter White, and Bette Davis. She has also morphed into pop icons like Iggy Azalea, and movie characters like Rambo, Rocky, and Don Vito Corleone.

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You don’t really need to spend thousands of dollars on Swarovski crystals or hair extensions to give your car a neat makeover. An inexpensive Sharpie can do the job just as well, if you’re creative enough. Like this woman who used dozens of Sharpies and put in 100 hours of hard work to convert her husband’s 1995 Nissan Skyline GTR into a mind-blowing piece of art.

Collen Kelton, a US military officer stationed in Japan, had always hated the dull silver color of his R33 GTR. So he told his then-girlfriend Allison that she could doodle a few scratches on the bumper. But when he saw how beautiful her designs looked, he was compelled to ask her to keep going.

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Artist Jordan Mang-osan is a master of pyrography – an incredibly rare and beautiful artform that involves decorating slabs of wood with burn marks. While most other pyrography artists prefer to use specialized tools, Jordan prefers to harness the power of the sun with the help of a magnifying glass. Jordan uses the special technique to create beautiful landscapes and portraits on wood.

To create a piece, he starts off by sketching a design on to a piece of wood. He then uses a magnifying glass to concentrate solar heat on selected areas of the artwork. The heat etches permanent darkened lines into the wood, so intricate that it’s hard to imagine the artist’s hands never really touch the wooden canvas. The work is tedious, however – it takes several months of dedicated effort to manipulate the sun’s rays and etch each detail of the complex pieces.

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Chinese businessman Qian Fenglei is the kind of friend everyone would want. This real-life Richie Rich has recently gifted specially embossed gold iPhone 6 smartphones to all his former high school classmates, at a reunion dinner. The inscription on the phones reads: ‘Class of 1992, Maoshan Middle School’.

Qian is the chairman of Universal International Holdings (Hong Kong) Limited, and is quite well known for his generosity. He was previously in the news for donating two million yuan towards relief work after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. And he also gave all his former classmates an iPhone 5 during a previous reunion. Guess they know what they’ll be getting when Apple launches their new generation of phones.

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Singaporean artist Ivan Hoo is an ace at creating optical illusions. Using pastels and pencils on wood, he illustrates highly realistic objects such as spilled cola, cracked eggs, broken vases and crumpled paper. It all looks three-dimensional until you touch it and realise that it’s not.

Ivan said that he chose to work with wood because of its texture and the way it holds color. “By working on wood, it gives me a lot of dimension and ideas to create something close to reality and it works really well with pastels too,” he explained.

“I started to experiment on wood some years back with mainly portraits as my subject before going further with a different concept,” he added. “I started to think of ideas and draw things that we could see ‘happening’ on a piece of wood, so the very first idea that struck me was the dripping effect. That was my first anamorphic work.”

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To pay tribute to Serbian inventor and electrical engineering genius Nikola Tesla, artist Phil Hansen recently created a portrait of him using only electric sparks.

A time lapse video of Hansen creating the painting shows him connecting a couple of wires to a large battery. He then brings the two naked ends of the wire together to produce sparks. He uses the sparks to create burn marks of varying darkness on paper, creating the eyes, nose and other features of Tesla’s face until the mind-blowing portrait is complete.

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While most graphic designers use high-tech software to create images, Álvaro Franca has chosen to return to the basics. Using a vintage typewriter, he creates incredibly detailed portraits of his favorite authors.

Franca begins the process by creating a reference image on his computer. This allows him to plan out the areas of light and dark shading on the portrait. Once the reference is ready, he uses it as a guide and proceeds to choose the letters and the number of strikes he needs to achieve the desired level of darkness.

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Satoshi Araki, an artist from Tokyo, creates highly realistic miniature models of towns, vehicles, and a lot of other objects from everyday life. He is particularly skilled at making small-scale dioramas of chaotic cityscapes that are affected by urban decay, pollution, or warfare.

Satoshi mostly uses styrofoam board to make these incredibly intricate and complex models – he cuts them down to the desired shape and size, paints them, and then glues them together. He explains on his blog that he uses Google Image Search to pull up images that he later uses as a visual reference. These images help him create scenes that are very life-like, down to the smallest detail.

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Israeli-born fashion designer Elie Tahari has created an ‘iPhone Dress’ as a way of paying tribute to Apple’s latest product offering. While the design of the dress is a very basic black silhouette, it is made of a special mesh ‘techno-fabric’ that allows over 50 iPhones to be sewn into it.

The iPhone Dress isn’t exactly what you’d call wearable, but Tahari’s intention was to make a statement about the fusion of fashion and technology, and to honor the iPhone 6. “I’m inspired by the iPhone,” he said. “I’ve always been. The only device I really have is an iPhone.”

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If you’re secretly worried about your smartphone addiction, then the new NoPhone might be just the thing you need. It’s the perfect smartphone placebo – it looks and feels exactly like a smartphone, but it does nothing. It’s just a piece of plastic that you can carry around in your hand to fool yourself.

NoPhone is currently a prototype that will cost a measly $12 once it hits the market. Its makers are trying to raise $30,000 on Kickstarter in order to cover production and marketing costs. They describe the device as a ‘technology-free alternative to constant hand-to-phone contact that allows you to stay connected with the real world’.

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Bill McBride, from Washington DC, is the proud owner of the world’s largest collection of Darth Vader memorabilia. The 42-year-old Star Wars fan has been working on the massive collection for the past 20 years, spending over $280,000 on 60,000 items including figurines, artwork and replica lightsabers.

Bill’s obsession with the iconic Star Wars villain began when he was five years old. “The moment Darth Vader burst on screen in Star Wars, I was immediately a fan of the character,” he said. “When you have the imposing, powerful presence of David Prowse, the other-worldly voice of James Earl Jones, all wrapped up in one of the coolest, most amazing costumes in movie history, you can’t help but fall in love.”

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Who knew that a child’s meaningless doodles could have so much potential? Toronto-based artist Ruth Oosterman takes creativity to a whole new level by converting her two-year-old daughter Eve’s scribbles into beautiful paintings.

Ruth is so artistic that she is able to transform Eve’s random lines into recognizable shapes. A random curve becomes an elephant’s ear, and crooked lines become the gnarled branches of a tree. Nothing seems to escape her eye – she can spot the outline of a woman’s face or the hooked nose of a bird where most people would just see haphazard scratches.

It all started by accident when Eve discovered her mother’s ink pen and loved using it. “That was part of the reason I used watercolor on that very first drawing because I knew the beautiful effect it would have on the paper. The ink pen marks immediately become a type of paint once you touch it with a wet paintbrush. It makes it easier to blend into the colors I add and also adds a dark intensity that I wouldn’t be able to create otherwise.”

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