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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CW Roelle is often referred to as the “Wire Magician” and looking at his breathtakingly intricate wire artworks, it’s easy to see why. The Rhode Island-based artist somehow manages to twist black metal wire into detailed masterpieces that resemble pencil drawings.

The first time CW Roelle used wire as an art medium was in 1997, during the second semester of his junior year of college. One day, when drawing a model, he suddenly felt he wanted to reach in, grab the lines of his drawing and just move it around. That night he started redrawing his classroom works with wire. Over the years, his skills improved immensely, and Roelle is now able to create detailed works of art with nothing but metal wire. Some of his pieces can take just a few hours to complete, but there have been some that have taken the artist as long as four months to finish. He says most of his medium-size artworks take about two-three weeks, which is actually less than his realistic pencil drawings take. Because they are all handmade, no two wire drawings are the same.

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German artist Nina Boesch uses discarded New York Metro Cards to create beautiful mosaics inspired by the Big Apple. The resourceful collage master reckons she has used about 30,000 metro cards, so far.

To most New-Yorkers, the iconic metro card becomes just a useless piece of plastic after they’ve gotten on the subway, but for Nina Boesch it becomes an invaluable piece of art precisely after it’s been thrown away. The 33-year old artist gathers material for her amazing mosaics scouring the metro stations of New York City. “I can’t leave a subway station without looking around, it’s almost OCD at this point,” she says. “Sometimes you’re lucky and you find a whole stack of them.” She has become famous for using hundreds of these yellow, black and blue pieces of plastic to create intricate collages, each with its own New York-inspired theme. So far she has assembled portraits of famous New-Yorkers like Woody Allen and Catherine Hepburn, as well as renditions of the Statue of Liberty, yellow cabs or the New York Subway.

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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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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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Australian artist Guy Withby, aka WorkbyKnight (WBK), creates portraits of musicians, political figures and other celebrities by assembling hundreds of buttons from computer keyboards, typewriters and phones.

“”The hand made days are gone. Our food, our clothes, our furniture, our homes, our lives are manufactured. Life is factory made.” WBK is factory made art for a manufactured world. With a quite reflection on an analogue past.” This is how Guy Withby describes his works on Deviant Art. You can clearly see that a large part of his art is indeed influenced by the transition from the analog days to the digital era, as he uses old type sets, type writer keys, analogue numbers, analogue timepieces to represent the by-gone analog times, and computer keys, calculator buttons phone buttons to represent the digital age. He manages to arrange all these tiny pieces into detailed portraits of artistic, historical or political personalities who played a role in this transition. Every art piece consists of hundreds of buttons that serve as pixels, and Withby makes sure he uses an assortment of both analog and digital-representing keys, instead of a single type, which would definitely make his job a lot easier. Although his art is time-consuming, the results are nothing short of spectacular.

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Adelaide-based artist Emma Hack, 39, creates incredible works of art where she paints male and female models and makes them blend into complex background images.

If you’re one of the 300 million people who watched Gotye’s video for the international hit “Somebody That I Used to Know“, then you’re probably already a fan of Emma Hack, and just didn’t know it yet. She’s the mastermind behind the unique music video where Gotye and Kimbra gradually transform into painted works of art that morph into the background until they become entirely camouflaged. Emma worked with the artists for 23 very long hours, but the public reactions to their work made the efforts worth it for all parties involved. Although she’s been a camouflage artist for 22 years, Emma says she feels her career has just now started taking off and she’s finally being taken seriously as an artist.

Paul Smith suffered from severe spastic cerebral palsy from a very young age. The loss of fine motor control of his hands made impossible for him to perform the most basics of tasks, like eating, bathing or clothing himself, but through sheer willpower he managed to become one of the most acclaimed typewriter artists in history.

Born in September1921, in Philadelphia, Paul Smith was diagnosed with severe spastic cerebral palsy as a child, but although this terrible condition made it impossible for him to express himself or attend school like any other child, it didn’t stop him from having a remarkable life. At age 15, Paul started working with the typewriter to create art, and slowly refined his technique until he was able to create real masterpieces. He would use his left hand to steady the right, so because he couldn’t type with both hands the artist would lock the “Shift” key and create most of his works with the characters “@ # $ % ^ & * ( ) _”. He spent 2-3 hours a day typing away on his typewriter while listening to Classical music, and each of his artworks would take him anywhere from 2 weeks to 3 months. Over 70 years of artistic activity, Paul Lung created hundreds of beautiful typewriter art pieces, most of which he simply gave away.

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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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If you didn’t believe in the power of art to change an entire community’s history and fortune, then Sheffield, also known as Tasmania’s Town of Murals, is the perfect example to convince you.

Despite being located in a spectacular natural setting, at the foothills of Mount Roland, in north-western Tasmania, the small town of Sheffield needed something more to help it overcome a steady economic decline. The population of this typical Tasmanian settlement went up dramatically when construction of several hydroelectric plants began in the area, but once the development was complete, workers started moving away to newer prospects, which led to a decline both in population and local economy. By the mid 1980s, the people of Sheffield realized the gorgeous setting wasn’t enough to attract enough tourists to boost their economy, so they formed a tourism association that decided to follow the example of a Canadian town that had a similar economic clump, and turn Sheffield into an outdoor mural art gallery.

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For his latest series, aptly entitled “Blow Job – Work of Blowing”, Brazilian artist Fernando de la Rocque has created images of political and religious icons using marijuana smoke. Needless to say that has sparked a great deal of controversy in the art world.

We’ve seen some pretty unique works of art created with smoke, like the ghost paintings of Rob Tarbell or the smoke-painted bottles of Jim Dingilian, but none as controversial as Fernando de la Rocque’s. The daring artist using a unique technique to paint images onto a white canvas – he blows marijuana smoke on pre-cut stencils laid down on the canvas to dye paint and shade the desired areas. The results are pretty impressive, but it’s the bizarre technique that attracted the most attention, with many wondering how he must feel after completing one of his smoky artworks.

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Usually, we only feature hotels on Oddity Central if they’re built on an old oil rig or if they look like a hamster cage, but the Esplendor Hotel in Buenos Aires isn’t weird like that. The only reason we decide to write about is because of incredible collection of portraits made from unusual materials located inside.

Although it’s known as one of the best hotels in the Argentinian capital, the Esplendor Buenos Aires Hotel is worth visiting just for the impressive portraits displayed around the hotel, including in the lobby, restaurant or all over the corridors. And while many hotels do their best to treat their clients to some fine art, what the Esplendor offers is truly special – portraits of various South American celebrities, from football legend Diego Armando Maradona to revolutionary Ernesto Che Guevara, made from all kinds of unusual materials.

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21-year-old Japanese artist Nagai Hideyuki creates amazing sketchbook drawings which viewed from the right angle create a realistic 3D illusion.

We’ve featured some pretty impressive three-dimensional art in the past, and young Hideyuki’s works are right up there with the best. Using a technique known as anamorphosis, the talented Japanese is able to create mind-boggling masterpieces that seem to come to life right out of his sketchbook. At 17, Nagai dreamed of becoming a cartoonist, but soon realized drawing comics wasn’t the thing for him. Then, three years later, he stumbled upon Julian Beever’s street art, and instantly fell in love with the idea of creating 3D artworks. Unfortunately, he discovered drawing on the streets of Japan was illegal, so he started looking for another way to exercise his talents. That’s how his intriguing sketchbook art was born.

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