Of all the unusual ways to get a massage, this has got to be the weirdest one. 51-year-old Li Chia rolls himself down 30 concrete steps every morning at Xi’an Changle Park. Once he gets to the bottom, he rocks himself back up to the top again without getting up, using a careful, self-taught technique. He claims that by doing this he receives a thorough massage that addresses all the pressure points in his body.

“I got the idea from rolling on pebbles at a health club, and when I couldn’t find any pebbles at my local park, I decided to try the stairs and was surprised to find it really works,” Chia explained. “I have always been a great fan of Chinese massage and the possibility that pressure points can do all sorts of things including relieving stress. After all, that’s why massage is so popular,” he said. “However, I don’t believe that any masseuse will be able to give me the sort of massage I get from the impact of the stairs. I find it’s a great way to relieve pressure and has all sorts of other health benefits as well.”

Read More »

The paintings of Mexican artist Cristiam Ramos are, quite literally, like a breath of minty fresh air! The 34-year-old creates celebrity portraits using nothing but tubes of ordinary toothpaste. Some of his notable works include paintings of Robin Williams, Miley Cyrus, Emma Watson, Lady Gaga and Sir Elton John. They’ve all been crafted using various brands of the oral hygiene product.

Painting with toothpaste is a lot harder than it sounds, and Ramos spends up to 200 hours and 30 tubes on a single piece. “It is very difficult to make these as the toothpaste becomes very sticky and dries quickly,” he explained. “The smell can also be overwhelming, which was challenging during the long days of up to 10 hours painting.”

Read More »

Through her work, artist and illustrator Yulia Brodskaya demonstrates that you don’t need complicated tools or expensive materials to create brilliant art. She works with simple materials used in everyday life – paper and glue. Using a technique known as quilling, she weaves multi-colored strips of paper into breathtaking three-dimensional patterns.

Yulia, who started her career as a graphic designer and illustrator in 2006, quickly abandoned computer programs to work with paper. “I believe that one of the main reasons I enjoy the paper craft, is due to my love of the material: paper,” she explained.

“I’ve always had a special fascination for paper, it has taken me a while to find my own way of working with it. Now I draw with paper instead of on it. And then it took a little longer to find out that the technique I have been using so intensively is called quilling – it involves the use of strips of paper that can be rolled, shaped, and glued to the background.”

Read More »

British artist Chris Wood creates breathtaking pieces of art using only two simple things – light and glass. He is an expert at painstakingly arranging small squares of delicate glass that reflect light in a certain way, thereby creating exquisitely colorful light patterns that dazzle the eye.

Chris uses dichroic (two-color) glass, containing a special coating that alters the wavelength of light. So when he directs light through his wall-mounted glass structure, the glass alters the color and direction of the reflected light, resulting in a complex array of colors in continually changing patterns.

Read More »

Svitlana Postlega is a talented Ukrainian artist who recreates iconic paintings using plasticine. Her portfolio consists of three-dimensional replicas of some of the most famous works of art in history, such as The Creation of Adam by Michelangelo, Vitruvian Man by Leonardo Da Vinci, and Kissing by Alex Gray.

43-year-old Svitlana makes a living as an economist at the Ministry of Labor and Social Policy in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev. She took up plasticine modelling as a way to relax and forget her problems. She often works throughout the night to fight depression, which she developed as a result of her divorce.

Read More »

Late last month, German artist Michael Sailstorfer made a surprising announcement –  he said that he had buried 24-carat gold bars on the Outer Harbor beach in the town of Folkestone, in South East England, and that it was ‘finders-keepers’. In the wake of this unusual news, hundreds of people have been thronging the beach, hoping to uncover at least a small portion of the hidden fortune.

The eccentric artist said that the project was his contribution to the town’s art festival, The Folkestone Triennial, which began last Saturday. He named the installation ‘Folkestone Digs’, and described it as a unique project to get people involved in art. The event was funded by Bristol-based designers ‘Situations’.

As a part of the installation, Sailstorfer hid 30 gold bars of varying sizes – 10g and 20g – in the sands of Outer Harbor. It might not sound like much, but each bar could be worth hundreds of dollars, and people get to keep everything they find. Sailstorfer encouraged people to start their search a couple of days before the festival actually started. As expected, hundreds of diggers turned up at the beach with buckets and spades, hoping to strike gold.

Read More »

Artist Sandy Byers owns a vast collection of credit cards, but surprisingly, she doesn’t use any of them to shop. Instead, she uses them as a replacement for paintbrushes, especially when she doesn’t have any handy.

Sandy has always been rather unconventional – she actually quit her cushy job at Microsoft 12 years ago to become a full-time painter. And last year, she took another leap towards the bizarre – she completely abandoned the paintbrush and started using plastic credit cards to paint. Her finished pieces are so beautiful, it’s hard to tell that there were no brushes involved whatsoever.

She developed her unique technique when she visited Marymere Falls in Olympic National Park in 2013. She was about to start painting outdoors after a hiking for about a mile with her husband, when she realised that she’d forgotten her paintbrushes. Going back to the car to get them was simply out of question. “I did not have the heart to ask to go back and get my brushes,” she said. “So I looked around and I just took out my credit card and started painting with it. You gotta find something to paint with when the scene is there and you’ve done the work to get that far.”

Read More »

Most people aren’t aware of this, but an alarmingly large number of cats die of leukemia every year. To raise awareness about the plight of these suffering cats, Maria Torero has converted her own two-story, eight-room apartment into a feline hospice. The 45-year-old nurse from Lima, Peru, currently has 175 patients residing with her, and spends over $1,500 a month just to care for them.

Maria has been caring for the diseased cats for the past five years now – she brings unwanted strays into her home and nurses them as they slowly succumb to their deadly illness. The mother-of-three doesn’t distinguish between her own children and her cat-patients. In fact, she says that she considers it her duty as a nurse to take in creatures that no one else wants to care for.

Read More »

The talented Sumie painters of Kousyuuya Studio in Nikko, Japan can paint the body of a dragon with a single stroke of the brush. The delicate technique is known as ‘hitofude ryuu’, which literally means ‘dragon with one stroke’, and it’s been around for four generations.

Watching these painters create a perfect dragon – with all the shades and scales – in just a couple of seconds is a true delight. It all looks so effortless, but there’s a lot of hard work and practice involved in getting the stroke right.

To create a single dragon painting, the Sumie artists first make the ornate head with various flourishes, using a smaller brush. Then, they dip a much larger sumie brush into the desired paint color and simply swipe it across the canvas in one swift movement. You really have to watch a video to realize the brilliance of the technique.

Read More »

While most people prefer their ice-cream frozen, Baghdad-based artist Othman Toma likes it melted. He uses multi-colored melting treats as a medium for his art, instead of normal paint. And it works incredibly well. In fact, to the untrained eye, his artworks seem painted with regular watercolors.

Toma paints all sorts of stuff using ice cream – lions, tigers, women’s faces, popular monuments, and more. It’s  just marvelous how he manages to get such a wide array of colors with very few shades of the cold dessert. All he needs to do is reach out into his freezer, and he’s ready to paint!

Read More »

While most makeup artists tend to follow the conventional rules of of the trade, 25-year-old Laura Jenkinson prefers to do her own thing. For the past year, she has been using all her colorful cosmetics and makeup brushes to recreate popular cartoon characters on her mouth and chin. She paints them in such a way that her mouth becomes their mouth as well, making the characters instantly come alive.

London-based Laura has so far painted a host of characters on her mouth, including The Cookie Monster, Shrek, Taz the Tasmanian Devil and several others from Disney movies, Looney Tunes, Pixar, and South Park. Last week, she did Robin Williams’ genie from Aladdin as a tribute to the actor. She does the paintings so accurately that every time her lips move, it appears as though the character is talking.

Read More »

Mark Bustos is a New York hair stylist with a heart of gold. He spends his Sundays – his only day off from work at an upscale salon – giving free haircuts and shaves to the homeless. His heartwarming story has gone viral on Instagram, where he posts photographs of his unusual weekend escapades.

Every Sunday, Mark sets out through the city in search of anyone who might need a trim or a shave. Once he spots someone who fits the description, he approaches them with a simple phrase: “I want to do something nice for you today.” He then proceeds with the haircut and repeats the process for up to six different people.

Read More »

Multi-talented British artist Ben Long has been making exquisite illustrations on the dusty rear doors of commercial trucks since the early 2000s. The 35-year-old uses only one finger to ‘scribe into the layer of dirt built-up from exhaust emissions’.

He calls the project ‘The Great Travelling Art Exhibition’, which is an ongoing series of his mobile canvases traveling all over the UK. Long, who studied at the Camberwell College of Art and Design in London, describes the project as an expansion of the ‘daubing and crude slogans that commonly adorn commercial freight vehicles’.

The idea for the drawings came to him during his early days as an artist, when he had little financial backing. By using dusty trucks as his canvas, he was able to express his creativity without a studio or a gallery. Although he has now advanced in his art career, Long continues to draw on greight vehicles, because it helps him appeal to people who don’t relate to the kind of contemporary art that is generally displayed in museums and galleries.

Read More »

A couple of UK-based artists have created a bizarre body-hugging suit made entirely out of raw chicken skin. The disgusting outfit is apparently meant to make a statement against our vanity-driven culture. The two artists – Victor Ivanov and Lewis G – are now parading the completed suit called FLESH around the streets of London and at famous landmarks like the Trafalgar Square and Camden Lock.

Victor Ivanov is so disgusted with the current ‘selfie’ craze that he predicts the world might just end with ‘everyone standing on the ashes taking selfies’. In an interview with Art Map London, Victor explained that he originally developed an interest in flesh at university, as a way of working with biodegradable matter. “It’s a little crass because obviously it’s a very direct approach to interpreting our environment but nonetheless something that I want to experience first hand,” he admitted. Read More »

A teenage boy from Corsicana, Texas, recently ran away from home and found refuge in the unlikeliest of places – at Walmart! Employees of the Corsicana Walmart discovered the 14-year-old kid after he had been living at the store for four days straight. To their great surprise, he had built a secret hidden compound for himself where he managed to live undetected.

News channels in the U.S. have released exclusive photographs of the two campsites that the teenager had built. One was located on the baby products-aisle, behind big stroller boxes. The second one was behind stacks of paper towels and toilet paper on a different aisle.

Surprisingly, customers who had walked down these aisles didn’t have the slightest suspicion of the teenager’s presence. “You never expect that you’re at Walmart and someone has been living there for four days. That’s crazy,” said Walmart customer Myrna Aguilar.

Read More »