The built environment becomes the backdrop from all kinds of imaginative (if improbable) scenes when this London photographer adds a single layer to each of his images: a black piece of cut paper.

Rich McCor, also known as “paperboyo,” transforms landmark architecture and urban design elements, sometimes turning them into other structures (like roller coasters) or something else entirely (the fire under a rocket ship).

These interventions often transform the scale of their subjects, reducing them for human use as, say, a stand for a telescope or a prop for a gymnast.

In each frame, the hand also adds another dimension, for a net effect of three different scales — the background, cutout and photographer.

More broadly, these images suggest work our own imagination can do while traveling — patterns that can be revealed by squinting our eyes and thinking just a bit outside the box about familiar structures.

Fans can follow McCor’s adventures in Around the World in Cut-Outs.

Candid captures require patience, particularly when a photographer like Stefan Draschan decides to wait for a perfect aesthetic coincidence between a work of art and one of its passing observers.

He traveled around Europe to assemble this series of People Matching Artworks, finding strange instances when colors, shapes, patterns and sizes align to snap a great shot. Famous paintings may last, but these moments are fleeting.

In some cases, it’s the gallery-goer’s body that makes a match. In others: a colorful hat, or pattern in the cut of a top. In rare instances, a pair of people may even match two different artworks in the same (photographic) frame.

This is not Draschan’s only such series, either. Clearly more as fascinated with humans as the art they choose to peruse, he has also assembled sets like People Touching Artworks and People Sleeping in Museums, the titles of which speak for themselves. Check out the photographer’s website for more in these series.

The times are always changing, but few things bring it home quite so elegantly (and quickly) as an extended look at the front pages of a classic publication, compressing over 150 years of history (and 60,000 pages) into a single minute.

Data artist Josh Begley takes viewers on a whirlwind tour of New York Times cover images. His time(s)-lapse video spans from early days when they were entirely text to the advent of black-and-white then color images.

While so much has changed, detailed maps and wood engravings appearing to liven up the pages as the years pass in seconds, much remains the same.

The effects captured reflect both continuity and evolution, encapsulating not only a publication-specific shift but also the broader history of modern print publishing.

Meanwhile, for fans of history, typography and the Times (via Colossal): “Typesetter Carl Schlesinger and filmmaker David Loeb Weiss documented the last day of hot metal typesetting” in the film above. “This amazing behind-the-scenes view not only captures the laborious effort to create a single page of printed type, but also the the emotions and thoughts of several New York Times employees as they candidly discuss their feelings about transitioning to a new technology. One man decides he’s not ready for the digital age and plans to retire on the spot after 49 years, while others seem to transition smoothly into the new methods of production.”

A new pen aims to take art to the next level, letting users scan colors from their surroundings and deploy them, all via a single gadget. The Cronzy can be employed to scan plants, walls, cloth, and other surfaces; a connected app can then save, collect and use these colors on the go.

The scan-and-draw concept has been around for years, but getting this versatility and complexity into a single small and portable device has been a challenge. Some tools on the market can deploy present mixes and others can scan natural and built environments. This one taps your smartphone’s computing power to speed up and scanning and combines it with a cartridge-enabled drawing device.

The scanned colors, tints and shades are converted into CYMK (matching the swappable cartridges) or RGB formats so they can be deconstructed, remixed or adjusted according to an artist’s whim on a connected device. The gadgets comes with a portable case and charger and works with Android, IOS and Windows phones.

Naturally, they can be shared with other users as well this way, allowing people to create and distribute custom palettes for further use. For now, the device is in crowdfunding, but its makers aim to have a consumer model on the market by early 2017. If the prototypes are any indicator, this could be the best one-stop digital-plus-physical drawing tool to date.

A powerful tool for artists, designers and researchers, Terrapattern lets users seek out similar-looking locations from an aerial perspective, finding connections and patterns between disparate landscapes and built environments.

The premise is simple: start with a single place, be it a park or street, stadium or shipyard, then let the tool work its magic. The results are uncanny: colors, textures and shapes tied together by computer vision and clever algorithms. The broader use cases are infinite, but specific ones are possible too, like: a user could look for abandoned ships floating around the island of Manhattan.

The system works by looking at its subjects in layers, looking for identifying features like curves, edges and shadows that indicate height. In a way, its task is similar than some pattern recognition software since it is not called upon to identify the subject, just match it.

“For our purposes,” explain the creators, “‘interesting’ features are anthropogenic or natural phenomena that are not only socially or scientifically meaningful, but also visually distinctive—thus lending themselves ideally to machine recognition. Examples could include things like animal herds, methane blowholes, factories, destroyed homes, or logging roads. Many other patterns await discovery.”

The system draws on data from OpenStreetMap, combing through hundreds of thousands of images looking for something like whatever you submitted. Researchers can use tools like this to monitor natural habitats or make archaeological finds, but ordinary people can employ this tool to create art or make inquiries about the cities they live in. Even a quick tour around the engine reveals emergent macro-patterns from individual tiles, some worthy of wall art treatment.

Terrapattern’s creators are indeed excited for more non-standard and unexpected uses: “Terrapattern is ideal for discovering, locating and labeling typologies that aren’t customarily indicated on maps. These might include ephemeral or temporally-contingent features (such as vehicles or construction sites), or the sorts of banal infrastructure (like fracking wells or smokestacks) that only appear on specialist blueprints, if they appear at all.”