Meticulously Detailed Drawings Made with Graphite and Chalk

Paul Cadden is a Scottish-born hyperrealist artist who creates painfully realistic artworks using only graphite and chalk.

I’ve posted some pretty realistic drawings in the past, like Rajacenna’s detailed celebrity portraits, Juan Francisco Casas’ photo-like ballpoint pen drawings, or Paul Lung’s pencil artworks, but the pieces you’re about to see are on a whole other level. Using simple materials like graphite and white chalk, Paul Cadden is able to replicate complex photos down to the tiniest details. Whether it’s the countless wrinkles on an old man’s face, the smoke from a lit cigarette or the water dripping from someone’s face, he makes it look unbelievably realistic.

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In Indonesia Football Is Played with a Ball of Fire

Sepak Bola Api, or The Fireball Game, is a unique game Indonesians play to welcome the month of Ramadan. It’s a lot like football only they have to kick a flaming fireball.

It seems regular football is pretty boring. At least that’s the feeling I get after discovering similar games like Footdoubleball, Cycle Ball or Burton-on-the-Water. The latest addition to the list of games that makes football look easy is an Indonesian tradition that had people kick a flaming football in celebration of Ramadan. It’s called Sepak Bola Api and is usually celebrated in the Yogyakarta, Bogor, Tasikmalaya, and Papua regions of the Southeastern Asia archipelago. Just like in the regular game of football, two teams of 11 eleven players kick a ball and try to shoot it in the opposing goal. But that’s easier said than done when playing barefoot and kicking a flaming ball.

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Aphrodisiac – America’s Hottest Ice Cream Truck

Hot is good even when it comes to ice cream, and Aphrodisiac, a unique Miami ice cream truck that comes with smoking hot spray-painted models is the perfect proof.

As if ice cream wasn’t tasty enough, Miami photographer Justin Price and Costa-Rican model Jacqueline Suzanne thought it would taste even better if served by scantily clad babes. According to Aphrodisiac Ice Cream’s official site, the concept was born late one night, when Justin and Jacqueline were at a Miami club, drunk and craving ice cream. It was 4 in the morning and every place selling the cold creamy delight was closed, and they were thinking it would be great if they had a place that sold ice cream that late, after all they couldn’t be the only drunk people in Miami craving the frosty dessert. But since they both have jobs that require them to travel a lot, Justin said that if they owned an ice cream shop they would be paying rent even when they were out of town, so he suggested an ice cream truck. Jacqueline then figured out that people coming out of clubs at 4 am are drunk and looking to hookup, so why not serve them ice cream with natural aphrodisiac in it, or better yet have scorching hot models serving it. And that, my friends, is how the sexiest ice cream truck in Miami (and probably America) came to be.

 

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Disabled Street Beggar Creates Beautiful Typography, Sells It to Font Supplier

Chui Xianren, a disabled street beggar from Shangdong, China, has recently become an online star after photos of his beautiful handwriting were posted on a popular Chinese site. Now Founder Electronics, the biggest Chinese font supplier in the world has decided to acquire his unique typography.

There are many talented font designers out there, but the case of Chui Xianren is a special one. The 49-year-old from Hei Longjiang province, northeastern China, was seriously injured when a barrel of fuel exploded at his work place, 18 years ago. His face and hands suffered severe burns and all but his fore and index fingers were paralyzed. Although he was unable to work, Chuy somehow still managed to practice his handwriting and started supporting himself by begging in the streets and showcasing his amazing talent by writing with colored chalk.

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Florida Gator Expert Opens Hug-an-Alligator Business

Ever wished you could go up to an alligator and just give him a great big hug? Well, thanks to a nutty gator expert from Florida, now you can.

Gator Man Mike has recently moved from the Everglades to Naples, Florida and decided to give people from his new home the chance to really bond with alligators. The man is charging locals and tourists visiting Tin City $5 for the chance to share  a hug and get their picture taken with one of his pet alligators, and believe it or not business seems to be going ok. Although gators have a velcro nozzle on their snouts to make sure they don’t decide to take a bite out of paying customers, city officials did have some safety concerns and only allowed Mike to open his wacky business after he got a $1 million liability insurance.

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Jason Sho Green’s Mind-Blowing Doodle Portraits

Jason Sho Green uses a simple ball-point pen to create incredibly intricate portraits that are actually made of other smaller drawings.

Whether we’re good at it or not, we all like to doodle, but American artist Jason Sho Green has taken the pastime to  a whole new level with his amazing doodle portraits that look like modern-day mosaics. Seen from a distance, his works looked like detailed recreations of his subjects, for which he uses shadows to outline the fine characteristics of the face, but as you approach them you realize there’s a lot more to them. Jason actually uses a ball-point pen to “assemble” his portraits from various doodles, including images of people, animals and fantastic creatures.

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Russian Artist Paints with Molotov Cocktails

Radya Timofey, a 23-year-old Russian artist is taking the art world by storm with a series of original paintings made by throwing Molotov cocktails at his canvases.

They are often used to cause chaos, but young Radya Timofey is turning Molotov cocktails into art tools to create beautiful portraits of soldiers who fought in World War II. He uses a mix of home-made napalm and oil-based substances to sketch the outlines of the portraits and then throws a Molotov cocktail at the canvas, setting it ablaze. After the artwork has stopped burning, a charred figure is revealed. Although the actual “painting” takes place in abandoned outdoor areas, Radya Timofey says “of course it’s dangerous to use fire like this, but we are careful. We put them on the hospital as a testament to their bravery, in life they literally did have to put their faces in the fire to fight the Nazis.”

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Coolest Finds of the Week #15

Sea of Blood – Whales Slaughtered on the Beaches of Faeroe (Environmental Graffiti)

Fully Functional Nikon DSLR Halloween Costume (Petapixel)

Awesome Shaolin Kung-Fu Kid Is Awesome (YouTube)

India’s Real-Life Slumdog Millionaire (Asylum)

Halloween Creepiness – The Enfield Poltergeist Story (Daily Mail)

Jail Made Even Scarier for Halloween (Inside Local)

Disturbing Baby Chewbacca Doll (Technabob)

Artist Covers Entire Hotel Room in Knitting (The Sun)

Polish Priests Bless Manhole Covers to Keep Them Safe (Orange News)

13 Most Incredibly Shaped Islands on Earth (Environmental Graffiti)

12-Year-Old Builds Real-Life Angry Birds Game Using Pumpkins

Sam Beards, a 12-year-old Angry Birds fan from England, has taken his obsession with the popular video game to a whole new level, by creating a real-life version using pumpkins and a giant cannon.

Just like millions of people around the world, Sam spent hours every day playing Angry Birds on the tiny screen of his iPod, but when he got the idea of making a real-life adaptation of his favorite game using a pumpkin cannon his father built last Halloween, he jumped at the opportunity. In Angry Birds, players have to shoot various types of birds at their mortal enemy, the pigs, using a slingshot, but in Sam Beads version, people use the giant cannon to shoot pumpkins painted as the popular birds at other pumpkins painted as pigs.

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Young Artist Uses Gravity as Her Paintbrush

Toronto-based artist Amy Shackleton creates amazingly detailed paintings without using brushes, or even her fingers. Instead she just relies on gravity to slowly guide the paint across the canvas.

It’s almost impossible to believe anyone can paint such beautiful artworks without a paintbrush, but actually doing it all by using the laws of gravity? That can’t be true, right? Actually it can, and if you’re not going to take my word for it, just check out the timelapse video at the bottom of the page, that features around 30 hours of work compressed into just two minutes. I watched it several times, and I still can’t get over how talented this girl is.

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World’s Largest Collection of Clowns Is Kind of Creepy

Ortrud Kastaun, a 61-year-old woman from Germany, has set a new Guinness record for the world’s largest collection of clown related items.

Orty, as her friends know her, has been collecting clowns for the last 15 years, and has so far amassed 2,053 different clown-related items. She’s had to move to a bigger house that would accommodate all her creepy smiling buddies, and has even opened a small clown museum close to her home, in Essen. But Kastaun hasn’t always been obsessed with clowns; it all started in 1995, when she was a recovering alcoholic going through therapy. “I remember being in therapy one day putting a jigsaw together. The image was of a clown in a jack-in-the-box. Something just clicked. From that I day on I began collecting clowns,” Orty remembers. It was a tough time for her but she credits clown for helping her get passed it.

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India’s Richest Man Won’t Move into Billion-Dollar Home for Fear of Curse

The 27-storey, billion-dollar tower home in Mumbai, called Antilia, was completed a year ago but India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, and his family refuse to move in for fear of bad-luck curse.

Dubbed the most expensive home in the world, Antilia has been dominating the Mumbai skyline ever since it was completed last October, but Mukesh Ambani, who is ranked by Forbes as the ninth wealthiest person in the world with a fortune of $27billion, has been reluctant to move in. There’s been a lot of speculation around the subject, considering the chairman of Reliance Industries spent around $1 billion building the impressive tower home for him and his family, but according to reports cited by the Daily Mail, the reason is the building fails to conform with the ancient Indian architectural principles of vastu shastra.

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Stunning Landscapes Are Actually Built in a Fish Tank

They may look like some of the most beautiful places on Earth, but they are actually miniature topographies of fictitious environments, built in a large fish tank, by New-York-based artist Kim Keever.

The pictures below look a lot like traditional paintings, but the process in which they are created is anything but traditional. In a era when technology allows artists to create large-scale works with a few clicks of a mouse, Kim Keever chooses to construct his surreal landscapes by hand. Using hand-crafted plaster molds, various found objects, color pigments and lighting, he manages to create realistic worlds captured with a large-format camera. Keever places his dioramas inside a 200-gallon fish tank, fills it with water, arranges the lighting and adds pigments at just the right moment, before trying to take the perfect picture. Although he uses a digital darkroom to emphasize color and tone, his photographs are unaltered in the process.

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Swallowable Perfume Makes Your Sweat Smell Nice

Netherlands-based artist Lucy McCrae teamed up with a synthetic biologist to create a perfume pill that actually turns your sweat into a fragrance.

Swear has never been known for its nice odour, but that’s all going to change as soon as “Swallowable Parfum” becomes a reality. Australian artist Lucy McCrae is currently working on a revolutionary pill designed to deliver perfume directly into the body, turning the skin into an atomiser. ‘Swallowable Parfum is a digestible scented capsule that emits a unique odor through your own perspiration,’ McCrae writes on her website. The pill will essentially turn sweat into a fragrance that will have its own characteristic for every person, because we are genetically unique.

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Japanese Art Collective Turns Street Rats into Taxidermied Pikachus

Chim Pom, an art collective from japan, have found an ingenious way of dealing with Tokyo’s rat problem while attracting the attention of Pokemon fans; they caught some street rats and turned them into real-life taxidermied Pikachus.

But how does anyone come up with such a crazy idea? Well, it was all about the concept of “super rat”. The rats of Center-gai street, in Tokyo’s Shibuya ward got the nickname “super rats”because of their alleged immunity to human-made poison. They’re a real nuisance and aren’t afraid to come out of their hiding places even when people are walking by. Apparently there are thousands of giant rats lurking around the place, and this got the six members of Chim Pom about the famous anime character Pikachu, from the hit series Pokemon. they decided to catch some of these super street rats and turn them into real-life versions of the yellow, electrically-charged cartoon rat.

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