Have you ever seen currency notes so beautiful that you’d actually hesitate to spend them? Well, they’re called ‘artisanal currency’, and they’re all the rage in several parts of the world, including London, Amsterdam, and New York. The concept is quite similar to artisanal coffee, cheese, or chocolate that is handmade, not mass produced.

According to The New York Times, “these are small-batch currencies designed by locals and lovingly handled by millennials, who came of age during the rise of the Internet.” Interestingly, this local currency is not meant to be a collectible, but is legally accepted at cash-only community businesses so that the money stays within the town or district.

London’s Brixton district, for example, has its own artisanal currency designed by award-winning artist Jeremy Deller. His £5 notes feature a “fuzzy, psychedelic image of an androgynous face surrounded by rainbow clouds and swirling etchings.” Deller said that he wanted to create “something old-fashioned looking, something almost pre-currency.” And the people of Brixton are quite pleased with their own special pound notes. “I’d be more inclined to save money if it all looked like that,” said Ewan Graham, a 31-year-old architect.

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There are plenty of artists out there who use welding as a part of their creative process, but none that I can think of actually make the welds their artworks.

That’s what makes Scott Raabe so special. The Texas-based industrial welder is so good at what he does that his welding works are pieces of art in their own right. I’m not an expert, but I’m pretty sure pipe welding isn’t supposed to be this visually appealing. However, there’s something about the seemingly perfect way Scott weaves the welding beads between two pieces of metal that makes you want to stare at his works for hours on end.

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They say age is just a number, and Agnes Kasparkova, a grandmother from the Czech village of Louka, in South Moravia, is a perfect example. At age 87, the adorable artist still spends most of her free time doing what she likes most – hand-painting her neighbors’ houses with traditional motifs.

Agnes Kasparkova retired from her work in agriculture 30 years ago, and has been painting houses ever since. Despite her frail hands, she manages to brighten up every building she works on with intricate ultramarine designs. “I’m just doing what I like,” she says, humbly. “I try to help decorate the world a bit.”

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Benjamin Shine is a British artist who specialises in using the folds of fabric to create detailed human figures and faces. We’ve featured some of his incredible celebrity fabric portraits in the past, but his latest series of artworks is even more impressive.

Called The Dance, Shine’s latest exhibit is on display at the Canberra Centre in Australia. It consists of two realistic human faces – one male and one female – constructed from over 2,000 meters of tulle. Surrounding the two faces are a series of dancing figures, silhouetted within the flowing fabric.

At first glance, the tulle sheets in Shine’s work seem haphazardly suspended, but he actually spent two-and-a-half months painstakingly folding, pleating, ironing and hand-sewing the netted fabric. He kept at it until each lifelike feature emerged out of the clouds of pink, purple, and blue. He later created contrasts using backlight, to highlight intricate details.

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Thanks to Hungarian artist Bence Agoston, drug-induced hallucinations can now be an everyday experience. His 3D-printed sunglasses can simulate a visual replica of an LSD trip!

You don’t need a prescription to get these special glasses, only an appetite for the bizarre. Aptly named ‘Mood’, the glasses are made from 3D-printed frames fitted with six different patterned lenses that can be layered in different ways. Each lens has a unique Moiré pattern that filters red, green, or blue light. You’ve got to rotate them – kind of like an optometry device – in order to create different patterns.

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These highly realistic three-dimensional paintings are the handiwork of Italian artist Luca Luce. He’s a makeup artist by profession, but he uses his extensive knowledge of colors and shading to create surreal optical illusions on his own palm.

Luca is an ace at clever shadow placement and photorealistic drawing. He brings these two aspects into every artwork in his unique palm painting series, creating astonishing images that will make you to a double take. For example, he painted a jigsaw piece taken out of his palm, with a gaping hole left underneath. The whole image is so realistic, it really does look like a piece of his palm has been lifted and placed aside.

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Icelandic artist Snorri Asmundsson recently made news headlines for a very bizarre request – he’s asking dying people to donate their corpses for his latest art project. He apparently plans to use corpses in a dance video, promising to return them to their families once he’s done.

Snorri first came up with the idea in 2008 – he received media attention back then for putting up a Facebook ad asking for people on their deathbeds to get in touch with him. “Looking for dead bodies in the name of art,” his ad read. “I need a few corpses for a video installation. If you are dying I would like to borrow your remains after you die. The bodies will be returned to the undertaker in the same condition.”

Understandably, the ad caused quite the controversy in the Nordic island. “It was in all the media in Iceland and I had strange articles written about me,” Snorri said. “Some people contacted vicars asking their opinion. People had decided that I was going to do something really unethical with those corpses. It’s nothing like that.” Read More »

When artist and musician Genesis P-Orridge met his future wife for the first time, in 1993, she dressed him up in her clothes, makeup, and a wig, transforming him into her lookalike. That, in essence, was his first step towards self-transformation, two decades in the making. To this day, even though his wife Jaye has passed on, Genesis continues their love affair by trying to become her.

Genesis, who was born Neil Megson, was already a controversial musician, artist, and a pioneer of modern body transformation in the ’70s and ’80s, long before he met his wife. His 1976 art collective COUM Transmissions, staged an exhibition called ‘Prostitution’, which featured pornographic photographs, sculptures made of used tampons, and transvestite security guards. He had his genitals pierced in the early ’80s, making it to the front page of many British publications.

But his highly unconventional life got even more bizarre after his first meeting with Jacqueline Breyer, a.k.a Lady Jaye. Genesis fell hard for the tall, blond registered nurse, who shared his passion for body modification.  “She told me she saw me as a mirror image of her, and that we were meant to be two halves of one,” Genesis recalls of that first meeting. Since then the two became inseparable.

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California-based Russell Powell is without a doubt one of the most talented and original artists we have ever featured on Oddity Central. The young artist is able to paint incredibly detailed portraits on the palm of his left hand, before stamping it on a paper canvas to create a permanent imprint of the artwork.

Powell calls the process ‘hand-stamping’; it’s a tricky technique because not only does he use the irregular surface of his palm to create detailed works of art, he also needs to work fast to complete the portrait before the paint dries, for a clear imprint. The end result, however, is nothing short of breathtaking.

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Edible pancake art is nothing new, but we have yet to see anything as detailed as the masterpieces of Tiger Tomato, a father son duo who shot to fame on the internet after posting their colored batter creations on YouTube.

Looking at their awe-inspiring pancakes, it’s hard to believe Tiger Tomato have only been at it for three months. It all started with a simplistic yet wonderfully colored rainbow pancake, which got over 150,000 views on YouTube. Inspired by the overwhelmingly positive response, the father-son duo from Melbourne, Australia, quickly stepped up their game and came up with elaborate-yet-edible renditions of popular cartoon characters like Elsa and Olaf from the Disney hit “Frozen”, Homer Simpson or Garfield.

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Some artists rely on a pint of ice cold lager for a bit of inspiration, but Chicago-based illustrator Kyle Bice actually uses amber brew to create his signature beer portraits.

Kyle Bice graduated from the American Academy of Art with a degree in traditional oil painting, but since he didn’t really believe there was much of a career for him as a painter, the young artist turned to illustration. After making a name for himself in advertising and the world of comic books, Kyle met with Fred Bueltman from New Holland Brewing, who had seen his work and asked him to redo a bunch of labels for the company. It was during this time that he discovered his passion for craft beer.

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Nylon stockings can be sexy, but in the hands of artist Rosa Verloop, they take a turn toward the grotesque.

The Dutch artist is famous for using nylon stockings to create distorted sculptures of the human form. She collects thousands of used stockings in nude shades which she then molds, tucks, and sews together until they take on recognizable human shapes. Verloop layers and clumps the material, sometimes holding it up with pushpins, to produce wrinkled and distorted facial features.

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Chinese artist Ren Ri successfully combines his love of beekeeping and art to create accurate honeycomb maps of various countries and continents.

Ren works closely with honeybees; in fact, he considers himself more of a beekeeper than a professional artist. He started beekeeping in 2007, and within a year, he mastered the basics. As he got more proficient, he began to think of ways in which he could manipulate the bees’ movements, by controlling the queen bee. Over time, he started creating meaningful beeswax patterns, and he eventually managed to produce a world map.

To create the map, Ren placed a map of the world inside the beehive. He then manipulated the queen bee to move in different directions and angles, so that the bees would build the hive at the locations he desired. “The bees continued to mould the beehive, and this moulding affected the original shape I had given the piece, through a process of addition and subtraction,” he said. Once the world map was ready, Ren created individual maps of several countries as well. He called the series Yuan Su I: The Origin of Geometry.

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After experimenting with candy and toothpaste paintings, Mexican artist Cristiam Ramos is now working with preserved butterflies. He spends several hours pouring over each wing, painstakingly decorating them with detailed replicas of classical paintings.

Butterfly wings don’t naturally make for good canvases – they’re small, and the texture isn’t altogether right for painting. They’re each about 12 cm in length, so Ramos has to use a magnifying glass to get the intricacy and details right. He spends a good 56 hours painting each wing, meticulously applying one brushstroke at a time.

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70-year-old master craftsman Fangze Yu can bring mythical creatures to life using nothing but straw. His most recent piece of work is an impressive dragon that he hand-crafted out of 83,600 pieces of rice straw!

Mr. Yu and his daughter spent four months working on the dragon at his workshop in China’s Jiangxi province. He started by creating a bamboo frame to support the structure. He then painstakingly assembled individual pieces of straw, using 10 different knitting and weaving techniques, to complete the 28-m, 35-kg masterpiece.

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