No object is too ordinary or random to end up being used as a stand-in for a full-scale building, boat, landscape or prop in art director and photographer Tatsuya Tanaka’s imaginative miniature landscapes, released each and every day on an online calendar. There’s a donut island, a record player as a lake, a literal sushi train, tiny European houses made of clips and dice, disposable razor ski lifts, brush bristle fields and even a cracked iPhone standing in for a hole in an icy lake.

With thousands of these brilliant photographs under his belt, Tanaka has amassed a following of no less than one million on Instagram. His work is so consistently clever and surprising, you might find yourself opening the app first thing in the morning wondering what in the world he possibly could have thought up this time. The little scenes will make you look at everyday objects in a whole new way.

“Everyone must have had thoughts like these before: broccoli and parsley may sometimeslook like a forest of trees, and tree leaves floating on the surface of water may sometimes look like little boats. Everyday occurrences seen from a miniature perspective can bring us lots of fun thoughts. I wanted to take this way of thinking and express it through photographs, so I started to put together a ‘MINIATURE CALENDAR,’” says Tanaka.

“These photographs primarily depict diorama-style figures surrounded by daily necessities. Just like a standard daily calendar, the photos are updated daily on my website and SNS page, earning it the name of ‘MINIATURE CALENDAR.’ It would be great if you could use it to add a little enjoyment to your everyday life.”

A pencil is usually a tool, but what happens when artists subvert its common usage, transforming it into a medium for sculpting instead? Extraordinary sculpting skills paired with a steady hand and a magnifying glass make it possible to carve amazingly tiny figures out of the pencil’s lead. Some artists see flowers or portraits in cast-off pencil shavings, or glue masses of the writing instruments together to sculpt and sand them into new forms punctuated by the graphite or colored pigments inside each pencil’s core.

Pencil Lead Carvings by Salavat Fidai

HBO Asia recently commissioned an incredible set of Game of Thrones-themed pencil lead carvings from Russian artist Salavat Fidai, including the sigils of each House, a White Walker, the dragons and the Iron Throne. It takes Fidai about 6 to 12 hours to sculpt each one using a craft knife, a magnifying glass and a microscope. The artist says the most challenging piece in the collection was the throne, which took over three weeks to perfect. Of course, the Game of Thrones pieces are just the latest works from Fidai, who has also carved tiny architecture, superheroes and other fictional characters, and much more.

Vases Made of Pencils by Studio Markunpoika

Hundreds of pencils are glued together into a solid mass and then carved on a machine lathe to create vases and other decorative objects, revealing the insides of the pencils. Studio Markunpoika describes their process: “‘Amalgamated’ is a collection which explores the relationship of a mass produced ‘tool’ and its individual purpose. The beauty of the pencil as an object seems to go unnoticed if utilized only for their primary purpose. ‘Amalgamated’ is a visual and tactile investigation using pencils as a raw material. This holistic principle has been the fundament for creating this set of vases; let the pencils become a thing themselves.”

Pencil Lead Carvings by Dalton Ghetti

The most impressive works by Dalton Ghetti are undoubtedly those which turn single pencil leads into chains. You can’t help but stare at each one for a while, wondering how he managed to pull them off. The fact that the artist has been refining his process since childhood might tell you a thing or two about how he’s able to pull pieces like these off – or that some of his pieces can take months or even years to complete. He also carves his tiny sculptures without the aid of a microscope or magnifying glass, using sewing needles and razor blades.

Pencil Sculptures by Jennifer Maestre

The colorful bristling creatures of Jennifer Maestre seem to have come from the depths of the sea, their appendages recalling the natural shapes of urchins, anemones, coral, octopi and jellyfish. The artist uses colored pencils as a medium for her unusual sculptures. “The spines of the urchin, so dangerous yet beautiful, serve as an explicit warning against contact. The alluring texture of the spines draws the touch in spite of the possible consequences. The tension unveiled, we feel push and pull, desire and repulsion. The sections of pencils present aspects of sharp and smooth for two very different textural and aesthetic experiences. Paradox and surprise are integral in my choice of materials.”

Pencil Lead Carvings by Cindy Chinn

Cindy Chinn takes advantage of the length of graphite contained within a pencil, tunnel-like inside the wood, and translates it into lines of marching elephants or trains. Her ‘Elephant Walk’ series was commissioned by the California-based Epiphany Elephant Museum. Of the train piece, Chinn says “This piece was designed using straight lead pieces for the rails, with the tiny carved train placed and securely glued on top of the rails. The train engine is only 3/16” of an inch tall. The pencil is 5-5/8” long and mounted in a wood shadowbox frame as shown in the photos.”

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Pencil Art 50 Sculptures Explore The Hidden Beauty Of This Utilitarian Object

These photos may seem to depict a $160,000 luxury automobile zooming through sand, snow, sea foam and salt flats, but the objects on your screen are smaller than they appear. The lack of a person sitting in the driver’s seat is not an indication that the car is self-driving: it’s because the car itself stands only a few inches tall. This version of it, anyway. Photographer Felix Hernandez bought a $40 scale model of the Audi R8 sports car on the internet and created the sets in his studio, with astonishingly realistic results.

The automaker commissioned Hernandez to create the series as a promotion for the high-end car. As behind-the-scenes photo of his studio setup reveal, most of the work is done with miniatures and special effects rendered mostly in ordinary edible household products. Careful lighting, staging and camera angles make the models appear full-sized, so minimal Photoshopping is needed for the final effect.

“I love photo manipulation and digital art, but what’s really cool is doing as much as you can in-camera,” says Hernandez in a piece he wrote for PetaPixel. “For snow scenes, I use wheat flour. For desert scenes, I use corn flour. For atmosphere, I add smoke. For rain, I spray water. For droplets, I add corn syrup. In some photos, I add images into my background. I also use Photoshop for adding effects that are difficult or impossible to do in-camera – things like adding a sense of motion, color grading, etc.”

Previous photosets have included a series in which the artist took photos of a young boy and a miniature boat and blended them together in Photoshop, as well as Stormtrooper figurines hand-painted to make them appear more rugged and worn. See them all on Behance.

You’ll never hear the phrase ‘all thumbs’ the same way again after looking at this real life Lego man complete with eyebrows, wrinkles and the biggest, weirdest thumb nails you’ve ever seen. Dubbed ‘Creepyfig,’ this disturbingly fleshy cosplay project brings Lego mini figures into human scale and parades him around San Diego Comic-Con, where there are so many crazy things to look at, he barely gets a second glance from most adults before reaching the official Lego exhibit.

Artist Frank Ippolito created the mask and hands and donned the costume himself, getting a spirited reaction from kids who poked his head curiously and placed Lego bricks in his clumsily large hands. The head – complete with its characteristic peg – is made of 14 pounds of silicone and includes realistic details like dark eye circles and frown lines. In the video, Ippolito remarks that the eyes are difficult to see out of, but he completed the project in just a week, leaving no time for refinement. By the end of the day, sweat is literally pouring out of the silicone costume components.

Created in collaboration with Adam Savage’s Tested, the Creepyfig set started out as a giant lump of hand-sculpted clay. Ippolito specializes in makeup for film and television, giving him the skills to nail those details (no pun intended.) See the whole process from start to finish in a second video, courtesy of Tested.

Now, if only someone would make appropriately sized Lego bricks and accessories so we can see this project take a sharp left turn deeper into Uncanny Valley.

A vendor at a market in Paris handed artist Talwst an antique ring box and said, ‘I want to see you do something with this.’ From that chance encounter has sprung an entire collection of tiny miniature scenes that fit inside these compact little containers, with minuscule figurines and painted backdrops replacing the expected jewels when you open the lids.

The Toronto-based artist depicts everything from surreal scenes, like a couple and a snake on the moon in ‘Space Family Rothschild,’ to historic current events like the death of Michael Brown, in which a group of police officers shoot off their guns with cotton smoke.

The humorous ‘Banksy Is Your Gran’ (top image) reveals the true identity of England’s most famous anonymous street artist, while ‘Errrbody loves McDonalds’ shows a horse and cart in the foreground with an incongruous fast food sign visible within the trees.

“I like to capture memories and fleeting moments,” says Tawlst. “They feel all the more moving because of their fugitive nature. I want the viewer to open the box and feel they have been transported to another world.”