Seeming to rise up off the canvass, a viewer would be impressed to discover these swaths of paint to be two-dimensional in nature, but then further shocked to realize the material isn’t paint at all but pencil.

Australian artist Cj Hendry has an eye for hyper-realism, but in this series: instead of using it to draft convincing landscapes or portraits has turned to emulating oil paint.

Layers of carefully applied pencil slowly add depth and dimension to the flat surface, capturing the lush appearance of semi-liquid paints. The effect is so convincing the artist often includes a hand and pencil in photographs of the work to highlight the fact that what is being seen is both two-dimensional and drawn with pencils.

It is a dramatic shift from previous work by Hendry done in black and white. And going to color didn’t mean just picking one per piece, either — each of these colorful works employs a number of different colors, which is not at all obvious at a glance.

Pencils require sharpening, run out of eraser and turn into unusable stubs as they near the end of their lifespan, but this clever gadget aims to change all of that, solving all three issues at once.

Even in today’s digital world, artists, designers, writers and musicians still fall back on this traditional tool. The Pencil+ helps on multiple fronts, but functions first as a pencil holder, enabling the user to tuck various lengths of pencil into a central void.

What keeps the pencil from slipping too far in? An adjustable eraser serves as a backstop, letting you move the pencil portion backward to fit and forward as the pencil gets shorter. Meanwhile, the back of the holder (normally where one would find an eraser) doubles as a sharpener, keeping it always on hand for reworking broken or worn tips.

“Worry no more because with pencil+,” say its creators, “you can now have a sharpener, extender, eraser holder and transporter for your favorite tool” which is available in Teak, Ebony, Wild Olive, African Padauk and Indonesian Redwood”

A few potential critiques come to mind: first, someone employing this device will have to deal with an additional step to access an eraser. Second, the holder is necessarily wider than a pencil, so it will require some getting used to in terms of grip and function. Third, the eraser length is a function of pencil length, so storing a lot of extra eraser could be an issue (though easily longer than a normal one). Still, one can be sure, at least, never to lose track of one’s sharpener, and also that a single pencil will last a lot longer.

Eagle feathers, the folds on Yoda’s robe and individual bricks on iconic buildings are among the impossibly tiny details captured in pencil lead by miniaturist Salivat Fidai. The Russian artist uses an X-acto knife to carefully scrape away minuscule shavings of graphite, revealing everything from realistic dinosaur heads to the Eiffel Tower.

Sped-up videos on Fidai’s Instagram give us a look at the process, which starts with scraping away an inch or two of wood to reveal the graphite core. The artist creates the basic shape of each sculpture and then makes the refinements. This technique requires not just an eye for detail but a very light hand as well, to avoid putting too much pressure on the lead and snapping it.

They’re all cool, but perhaps most impressive are the ones featuring little pieces that have been carefully separated from the main graphite core, like this lock. Many originals are up for sale at the artist’s Etsy shop.

Another artist creating similar works is Dalton Ghetti, a carpenter by trade who uses sewing needles and razor blades to carve entire chains of graphite as well as other sculptures, all without the benefit of a magnifying glass.

Made for those who like to color outside lines and jot outside boxes, each page of this bound pad provides a unique source of inspiration and different framework for drawing, sketching and writing out ideas.

Available from tmsprl, the minimalist brown-bound notebooks show traditional lines on the front and back but playing on and warping the horizontal blue-on-white (with red verticals) convention within.

Some pages sport twisting topographic lines while others thin, thicken, curl, loop, twist and spiral, encouraging the user to put pencil or pen to paper in different ways throughout.

The deeper you delve the more surprises you find, starting with upward-swooping lines and culminating in crazy abstract patterns and strangely whimsical shapes.

A few notes from its creator: “If you’re in search of inspiration, this notepad might help. Second edition. 48 pages, dimensions 165 x 210 mm, softcover. Printed on sustainable paper in Belgium.”

Street art uses roads, sidewalks, walls and infrastructure as canvasses, but one of the brightest and blankest slates of all may be the spaces in between.

Thomas Lamadieu, a French artist, looks up and sees subject, not void, in blue and clouded city skies, then uses his imagination to fill in the picture, playing on notions of figure and ground.

His Sky Art series shows a given and take between shapes being worked with and what he puts in, often working with minimalist lines and splashes of color.

In the process, he turns tapering alleys into uncomfortable figures, sinuous spaces into leaning ladies, and cramped courtyards into crouching pranksters, all the while challenging us to see back and forth between positive and negative space (and selectively breaking the boundaries in between).