Most light photographers focus on making a shape in the foreground in a matter of seconds, then setting it against a dark static backdrop – this artist often animates every inch of the frame.

Finnish artist Janne Parviainen of Helsinki takes these all-encompassing, long-exposure shots over many minutes (even hours at times), each line representing mere seconds along the way.

As surreal as they look, there is no post-production involved. Aside from props and plans, even their creator cannot really see what he is making them until they are completed.

Parviainen was an oil painter previously, but pivoted when an accidental long-duration photo of streetlights, clicked on a nighttime walk, triggered a fascination with lighting. Now using light as paint, he employs a new series palettes and brushes. Glowsticks, light strings, strobes and flashlights help him animate everything from human figures to abandoned cars.

He begins tracing what is there and then adds his own haunting portraits and inventive twists to the scenes he sets. The results are so saturated with light that it is sometimes hard to tell what is really behind them and what he created from scratch along the way – what is foreground, background or sheer imagination.

You seem to see them at every garage sale: a chipped and battered, faux-ornate, gold-colored frame containing a bland and boring landscape that only holds meaning for the original painter and perhaps its first owner. Others, however, see the same thing as a blank canvas of artistic opportunity, like Steven Leduc‘s contribution of a giant kraken to the calm tides of a sea scene found on the side of a street.

Or take Chris McMahon, who finds the most pastoral pastels and mundane scenes he can …then adds monsters to their midst, breathing new life into landscapes otherwise destined to gather dust or be discarded entirely.

Driscoll Reid of Portland, Oregon, in another form of more-abstract monster mashup, turns a large canyon small with disturbingly friendly-yet-dark giants. They step ominously through a tacky old forest and straddle the dull waterway in which they are reflected.

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True artists don’t need anything fancy to make awe inspiring works. These ballpoint pen artists can come out with something that’s photo realistic and vibrant in color (or equally vibrant in contrast).

(Images via crookedbrains, oneplusinfinity)

These works look like heavily-filtered photographs, but they’re actually drawn by hand using simple ballpoint pens. Spanish artist Juan Francisco Casas (pictured above with one of his works) has mastered the art of creating epic and realistic murals with one of the simplest materials. You can find more of his work here (some nsfw).

(Images via eatsleepdraw, helablog, huffingtonpost)

Amanda Ortiz has some truly epic artwork on her site, including this great ape showing his angry face. Portugal based attorney Samuel Silva creates gorgeous and colorful ballpoint pen artwork as a hobby. These two animals are based on photographs, and look almost too real to be true (but I promise, they are).

(Images via inspix, lifeartworks)

Artist Mark Powell uses nothing but a ballpoint pen and an envelope to do his art, and the choice of medium works incredibly well at giving it a transitive feel. Vanessa Prager’s “Love You Too” series is full of colorful pen pieces that illustrate a slightly abstract emotional landscape.

(Images via boingboing, crookedbrains)

Juan Francisco Casas was mentioned earlier in this post, but his work deserves further exploration. The camera man likely much prefers this portrait over the one he took with his camera, and Juan has done an amazing job at capturing every shade and wrinkle of these two girls.

(Images via jazjaz, steelturman, designfolio)

Arguably Samuel Silva’s most stunning work, this piece is based on the photograph of a fiery redhead and does her real justice. Dave Archambault created this piece of a young girl wearing a shawl and does a fantastic job at recreating the threads and folds of her headwear. Finishing up is an action shot by Juan Francisco Casas.

As humans, we are programmed to anthropomorphize our surroundings. So what would happen if the letters on pages conveyed meanings others than the words they represented … say, actual (versus just typographic) faces?

In this Type Faces Project, Tiago Pinto takes familiar fonts, breaks them down into serif, sans-serif and miscellaneous, then assembles them to form caricatures based on inferred character traits.

Futura becomes a kind of excited science geek – forward-thinking optimist, perhaps. Times New Roman is, predictably, that stodgy old bottom-liner. And Baskerville is, well, quite the hound dog.

It should come as no surprise that WingDings (upper left above) is one weird-looking dude, or that Comic Sans (upper right above) is a hopelessly confused-looking loser.

Great art is not only beautiful, but deeply meaningful to both the artist and the viewer. Artist Scott Blake has made a name for himself creating art with bar codes: those simple black-and-white stripey codes you find on nearly everything you buy. Now he is experimenting with the bar code’s younger, hipper cousin, the QR code.

(all images via: Walyou)

The QR code (short for quick response) is popping up in the most unusual places these days. It is typically used in advertisements to provide additional information about the product being promoted. Unlike bar codes, no special equipment is needed to extract information from a QR code; they can be read by most smart phones.

Blake’s QR code portrait depicts Amy Goodman, a journalist and host of the independent news program Democracy Now! The portrait features a staggering 2,304 QR codes, all arranged perfectly according to their balance of light and dark to create a surprisingly detailed portrait of Goodman’s face.

The codes take viewers to Democracy Now! videos that span nine years – an impressive collection of art in its own right. The portrait portrays not only the likeness of the person featured, but her life’s work as well.