The idea of beautifying an outdoor space seems straightforward enough – flowers and sculptures and whatnot – but Polish street artist NeSpoon turns that idea into something so beautifully different that it transforms the ordinary into the spectacular.

Working in paint, crochet, and carving, NeSpoon gives dingy and uncared-for urban surfaces new life by adorning them with what she calls “public jewelry.” Her pieces are inspired by lace, often taking on the shapes of enormous doilies painted on the sides of exterior walls.

Other lace-inspired pieces are crocheted into or onto various rough objects to create an extreme visual dichotomy. Some pieces are carved into wood or clay, the intricate patterns looking like entire universes. And then there are the truly random pieces painted onto pieces of concrete or the sides of moored boats.

For many of the pieces, NeSpoon has permission to apply her particular type of artwork on buildings or other public spaces. But some are true urban interventions, appearing in unexpected spaces to provide onlookers with a little bit of beauty and whimsy to brighten their day.

Five distinct styles come together in a duo of massive geometric murals with ‘Recycles,’ a collaboration created for the street art curation project Urban Forms. Artists Tone, Proembrion, Sepe, Chazme and Cekas (photos by Marek Szymanski) all lent their own particular approaches to the diptych on a pair of apartment buildings in Lodz, Poland in nearly-identical compositions that create a mirrored effect when seen from afar.

Stylized human figures are seen against a backdrop of both geometric and organic forms, which look like architecture and trees at first glance, but are actually more abstract. One mural shows the figures walking toward the viewers, and the other shows them walking away.

According to one of the artists, the process of bringing such disparate styles together for such a large project wasn’t easy. Tone tells Brooklyn Street Art that getting a harmonious effect that represented each of them equally presented a challenge, but they ultimately found a synergy that allowed each of them to shine.

Having worked together in the past helped, says Tone. “We have never had a chance to work together in such a configuration, but our knowledge about each others styles helped us separate our separate roles. We began with a very rough concept for the general idea; make the composition somehow integrated with the landscape of Lodz suburbs.”

Urban sidewalks, sewer grates and dingy underpasses aren’t exactly the most likely places to find beautiful large-scale ornamental lace, but for artist NeSpoon Polska, that’s exactly where it belongs. The Polish artist creates both spray-painted street art and crocheted installations for interactive displays in all sorts of public spaces, from street lamps to abandoned houses.

Calling it ‘illegal city decor’ and ‘public jewelry,’ Polska wanders around Warsaw, swiftly painting parking meters, utility boxes, blank signs and other blank (and often ugly) urban surfaces. Some, like a giant mural taking up almost the entire side of a three-story building, are created with permission.

“Jewelry makes people look pretty, my public jewelry has the same goal, make public places look better. I would like people who discover, here and there, my small applications, to smile and just simply feel better,” says the artist.

Tagging is typically considered an urban art. At the very least you need walls to write on, right? Not necessarily – some clever artists have started to stretch cellophane between any available supports, making paint-ready surfaces out of thin air.

Suddenly, rural settings (sans buildings) are fair game – mountains and forests can become backdrops for spray-painted expression. The translucent nature of the plastic ‘canvas’ employed adds a fascinating layer of visual complexity for artists like Ches working in the cold winters around Moscow, Russia (above).

None of which is to say that city contexts will not work for this alternative approach. In fact, the temporary, light and portable nature of the surface material makes it an easy sell for would-be critics who might not approve of tagging on concrete, brick or other more permanent walls.

Sites like Cellograff feature stretched-plastic installations in impressively central places, including major urban parks, museums and monument sites in and around Paris, France. These two short time-lapse films show how the process works from start to finish.

Graffiti takes time whether you’re an amateur or a seasoned expert. This crazy robot lets you sit back with a cold beer while it goes at the work of tagging an entire wall with your choice of spray paint. The drawback, of course, is that it’s a completely random process involving a wildly waving spray paint arm and a bunch of shapeless scribbles. But hey, at least you’ll avoid that miserable sore finger that comes from holding down the paint can button for too long!

The Senseless Drawing Bot was invented by So Kanno and Takahiro Yamaguchi for the singular purpose of scribbling random lines and swirls of paint on your chosen surface. The bot wheels itself back and forth in a straight line, swinging its metal arm and creating one-of-a-kind works of robot art.

We hear you out there asking “What’s the point?” But like so many other creative works out there, there’s no real answer to that. The Senseless Drawing Bot seems to exist solely to be weird, funny and different than most of the other graffiti projects out there.