Excessories Odd-Yssey – The Ultimate Shoe and Hand-Bag Art Car

To show off her love for style and fashion, artist Kelly Lyles turned her old Honda Odyssey into the ultimate fashion-themed art car.

Appropriately named Excessories Odd-Yssey, this lavish art car is covered with dozens of fashion accessories, from hand bags, to shoes, glasses and jewelry. The hood of of the car is decorated with a magnetic Paperdoll version of the owner, together with a series of magnetic outfits. The inside of Excessories Odd-Yssey, including the dashboard, is covered with colorful clothes.

Driving around in the Excessories Odd-Yssey, on the streets of the mostly gray Seattle, Kelly Lyles manages to bring some color to the rainy city. She has done so for the last 20 years, since she created her first art car.

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Artists Create World’s Largest Sand Sculpture

Measuring a total of 22.43 meters in height, this detailed sand sculpture, created at the Zhoushan Sand Sculpture Festival, in China, has been acknowledged as the world’s tallest sand sculpture.

Officials from the Guinness Book of Records arrived in Zhoushan, on Wednesday, September 29, and after careful measurement, confirmed the sand masterpiece will be going into the record books. Depicting a Nigerian story of how a hummingbird managed to become the king of all animals, the 22.43 meter-tall sand sculpture was created by over 30 artists, during 75 days.

This year, the Zhoushan Sand Sculpture Festival gave sand artists the opportunity to express themselves on the theme of a trip to Africa.

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World’s First Smart ForTwo Wrapped in Cardboard

In an attempt to prove their products are by no means disposable, German car maker Smart has teamed up with a cardboard manufacturer and designer Sarah Illenberger to created the world’s first cardboard-wrapped Smart.

It might sound and look stupid, but this cardboard Smart aims to somehow disprove the rumors that Smart cars are disposable. They want to show the world that even covered by heaps of  high-quality reusable cardboard blocks, their Smart ForTwo model makes a lasting impression. I don’t know about the “lasting” part, but it’s definitely caught my attention.

Renowned designer Sarah Illenberger applied all the cardboard blocks by hand, in a pixel-like fashion that she feels emphasizes the sustainability of both the car and material.

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Food Artist Creates Life-Size Suckling Pig Cake

I’ve posted my share of awesome-looking cakes on Oddity Central, but Michelle’s Wibowo’s suckling pig cake looks incredibly realistic.

Created for the Experimental Food Society Spectacular, an event that took place during the past weekend, Michelle’s suckling pig cake was a big hit, and has made the headlines of various online publications. The Experimental Food Society is made up of a group of “ground-breaking gourmet artists that demonstrate there is more to life than just swallowing.”

Michelle Wibowo has a degree in Architecture, but decided to pursue her passion in cake decorating and sugarcraft, and is now one of the most talented cake decorator in the world. She developed her skills by decorating thousands of cakes in cake shops around London, and now works from her own studio, in West Sussex.

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Welsh Artist Paints with Jam and Marmite on Toast

Nathan Wyburn, a young Welsh artist from Ebbw Vale, has created a series of celebrity portraits with jam and marmite, on a canvas made of toast.

The first time you lay eyes on Nathan Wyburn’s artworks, you don’t know whether to frame it or eat it. But, even though his art mediums might seem a bit weird, 20-year-old Nathan is an established artist, with a worldwide online following. Uploaded videos of his work have been watched by millions of people and made Nathan Wyburn somewhat of an Internet celebrity.

Some of Nathan’s past projects include a portrait of Simon Cowell made of 30 pieces of Marmite-covered toast, and Lady Gaga in sugar. His latest works were commissioned  by a new Costa Coffee shop, in Towcester, and feature the portraits of international celebrities David Beckham and Cheryl Cole, painted on toast.

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Quilling – The Art of Turning Paper Strips into Intricate Artworks

Quilling has been around for hundreds of years, but it’s still as impressive and popular now as it was during the Renaissance.

The art of quilling first became popular during the Renaissance, when nuns and monks would use it to roll gold-gilded paper and decorate religious objects, as an alternative to the expensive gold filigree. Later, during the 18th and 19th centuries, it became a favorite pass-time of English ladies who created wonderful decorations for their furniture and candles, through quilling.

Basically, the quilling process consists of cutting strips of paper, and rolling them with a special tool. It sounds simple enough, but special skill is required to create more advanced shapes like marquises, arrowheads or holly leaves. All through the years, the art of quilling has remained almost unchanged, but new specialty supplies now allow quilling masters to create anything from detailed 3-D figures to wall-sized museum installations.

Because it requires so few supplies, quilling is available to anyone with enough patience to give it a try, and with a little bit of practice you’ll be creating some pretty amazing paper artworks, just like iron-maiden-art, whose works I think show the beauty of quilling.

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50,000 Milk Cartons Make a Great Castle

Built back in May, during an event that took place in Granada, Spain, this recycled castle was made of 50,000 empty milk cartons.

Designed by the students of the Facultad de Arquitectura de Granada (Granada’s Architectural College), the milk carton castle of Granada was built exclusively out of  tens of thousands of empty milk cartons, gathered by over 5,000 primary school children. The three schools that gathered the most number of milk cartons had the privilege to attend the unveiling ceremony and see the end result of their efforts.

The 29-meters-long, 14.07-meter wide and 7-meter-high milk carton castle was acknowledged by the Guinness Book of Records as the biggest sculpture ever made with recycled materials.

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The Mentally Ill Toys of Martin Kittsteiner

A German toymaker has designed a series of cuddly toys, each suffering from serious mental illnesses like depression and hallucination.

36-year-old Martin Kittsteiner, from Hamburg, says the idea to create the bizarre toys started from a joke between him and his girlfriend, who has a lot of stuffed toys, but he soon started to see the potential of the idea. Each of his cuddly toys has its own disease and symptoms, and comes with a medical history, referral letter and treatment plan. Martin hopes his unique creations will help families with children suffering from mental illnesses.

You can order your very own mentally ill toy from Martin Kittsteiner’s website, for $40 each. There, you can also play a mini-game and try to diagnose the toys’ problems.

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Eggcubism – The Art of Painting on Egg Cartons

Using the unique shape and texture of the egg carton to his advantage, Dutch artist Enno de Kroon creates fragmented and multifaceted images. He calls this new art form “eggcubism“.

Enno de Kroon says he has always experimented with distortions of perspective, and has had egg cartons around his studio for a long time, but needed to build up the courage to work with such an unusual art medium. Since the hindrances of the egg carton offer such a different perspective, depending on the angle it’s viewed from, Enno de Kroon was forced to approach painting in a whole new way.

Inspired by famous cubism masters like Picasso and Braque, who showed everyone how to take an object, a person or landscape, and show it from various angles, Enno de Kroon made looking at his artworks an interactive experience, where viewers had to discover the perfect viewing angles. But unlike traditional cubism, where there is just one right angle to an artwork, eggcubism features various viewing options, that turn a beautiful smiling lady into a five-eyed freak.

Check out more of Enno de Kroon’s amazing eggcubism masterpieces on his Flickr stream.

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Ti Jian Zi – The Ancient Art of Shuttlecock Kicking

One of the most popular traditional Chinese arts, Ti Jian Zi, known in the western world as shuttlecock kicking, requires a great deal of skill and practice.

The game of shuttlecock kicking is believed to have been invented sometime during the Han Dynasty (206 BC – 220 AD) and gradually increased in popularity,  to a point where shops that specialized in the making of shuttlecocks began appearing all over China. The art of shuttlecock kicking reached its climax during the Qing Dynasty, when competitions were held between masters of the game from all over the country.

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The Typewriter Artworks of Keira Rathbone

British artist Keira Rathbone uses typewriters, instead of brushes and pencils, to create amazing portraits and drawings.

27-year-old Keira Rathbone, from London, first started experimenting with typewriter art, when she was in university. She baought an old typewriter, from a flee market, in the hope that she would soon use it to write something. By the middle of her first year at the university, she hadn’t come up with anything to put down on paper, so she decided to use it as a drawing tool. The first results were promising, and young Keira quickly realized she would be exploring this new art form much further.

Fast forward to present day and Keira Rathbone is an established artist with her very own niche, praised by the entire artworld. She now has an arsenal of 30 typewriters which she has used to create unique portraits of Barrack Obama, Kate Moss, Marylin Monroe, and others.

Keira Rathbone says she simply turns the roller to move the sheet of paper, and uses different characters to create the shapes she wants. It might sound easy enough, but creating detailed artworks from simple letters, numbers and punctuation is definitely not the easiest thing to do.

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The Weird Art of Dimitri Tsykalov

Dimitri Tsykalov is one of the few artists out there who don’t discriminate between carnivores and omnivores, he creates art for both. The truth is this Russian artist just likes to experiment with a variety art mediums.

In “Meat”, one of the most disturbing art projects I’ve ever seen, Tsykalov  took a bunch of naked models and fitted them with weapons and armor fashioned from bloody pieces of meat. I can’t even imagine what it must be like to be covered in nothing but chunks of red meat, but I’ll bet those models took some really long showers after the photo shoot.

His unique skulls, carved in fruits and vegetables, are not as shocking as his experience in the world of meat, but the level of detail and the unconventional medium draw just as much attention. Read More »

Skull Artist Creates Skull Out of Human Brain Slices

Noah Scanlin, the skull artist of Skull-A-Day.com was allowed to play with around 400 human brain slices, at the ever-creepy Mutter Museum, in Philadelphia.

Last month, Noah Scanlin visited the Mutter Museum, and was asked if he could create one of his famous skull artworks, right there, in the museum. Honored by the request, Noah accepted, but was worried he was going t work with fragile mediums, like glass jars. Luckily, the Mutter Museum had just acquired a few hundred slices of human brain encased in acrylic.

The skull artist was allowed to set up the sturdy pieces of acrylic in a room of the Mutter, on a couple of big library tables. Over the course of two days, he arranged the brain slices, constantly going up and down a ladder, making sure he arranged every piece right.

In the end he used 375 brain slices and a few pieces of fabric, for his brain-made skull. Impressive job! Read More »

Zhou Mingdi – The Ultimate Calligraphy Artist

Writing just as pretty with both hands is rarely possible, but 63-year-old Zhou Mingdi, from China’s Hunan province can write just as good with different part of his body. The old calligraphy master is able to right just as beautifully whether he’s holding his brushes in his hands, feet, mouth, nose, or even strapped on his back.

What’s even more fascinating about Zhou Mingdi is that he’s able to write with up to eight calligraphy brushes at the same time, and still get better results than the average man.here are some photos of him showcasing his art in front of a public audience, back in 2005.

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Chinese Michelin Baby Startles Scientists

Ten-month-old Lei Lei, also known as the “Michelin baby“, has become somewhat of an Internet celebrity after photos of him were published on a Chinese government site.

The young boy had scientists scratching their heads, when he was brought to the hospital, earlier this month, on account of a fever. At just ten months, he weighs a whopping 20 kilograms, about the average weight of a normal six year-old. He is currently in a hospital, undergoing some tests that will hopefully reveal some hints about his abnormal size and weight.

Lel Lei’s parents say the boy has quite an appetite, and that he spends most of his days juts breast-feeding and sleeping. He also instinctively puts everything he touches into his mouth, and tries to munch on it.

The Michelin Baby is just the tip of the iceberg, as the obesity problem because more and more serious in China. As the country’s economy keeps growing, millions of people are becoming sedentary and developing weight problems. Over 60 million Chinese are obese, and over 200 million are overweight.

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