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Breaking Vlad: Street Art Takes On Vladimir Putin

15 Jan

[ By Steve in Art & Street Art & Graffiti. ]

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Vladimir Putin of Russia is a polarizing figure to say the least, as these examples of street art, graffiti and stencils from all over the world illustrate.

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Considering his position at the zenith of Russian politics for most of the 21st century, it’s really no surprise Vladimir Putin has topped Forbes list of The World’s Most Powerful People the last four years running. Such global influence hasn’t gone unrecognized by the world’s artistic community either, though their acknowledgment isn’t always complimentary.

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One place where you WILL find pro-Putin street art is in Crimea, the Ukrainian territory annexed by Russia in March of 2014. Are these flattering public portraits really the work of independent street artists? That’s the authorities’ story and they’re sticking to it.

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Social media users aren’t sure what to think of the tributes and as one might think, critiques are a delicate matter – Big Brother really is watching. Even so, some anonymous protesters have made their feelings felt, in some cases so effusively the compromised “artwork” has had to be painted over.

The Worm Turns

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In other parts of the Ukraine, Putin is, er, not so highly regarded. The above graffiti from Ternopol, western Ukraine, implies Putin has acted in an insidious, duplicitous, “wormlike” manner. The German stahlhelm is meant to evoke a previous threat to Ukrainian lives and livelihoods.

Ukraine Not Weak, Very Tasty

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Being the powerful leader of a nation practicing an aggressive foreign policy is a two-edged sword: that leader becomes the focus of resentment, resistance and remonstrance by the aggressees. This graffiti of Putin acting power-hungry was painted in Odessa in April of 2014 by artist Sviatoslav Lavrusenko. “I think, Putin will get indigestion, if he does not stop,” states Lavrusenko on his Facebook page.

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“The character ‘HACKERMAN’ from the 2015 film Kung Fury… is used in jokes regarding a person’s inflated sense of self-esteem when they solve a simple technical issue,” according to Know Your Meme. Russia’s alleged hacking of the DNC during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, however, was (a) no joke and (b) doubtlessly did little to boost Vladimir Putin’s healthy sense of self-esteem. This cleverly painted corrugated metal garage door can be found in Melbourne, Australia.

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Breaking Vlad Street Art Takes On Vladimir Putin

[ By Steve in Art & Street Art & Graffiti. ]

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Abandoned Montage: VFX Film Technique Adapted to Eerie Art Series

14 Jan

[ By SA Rogers in Art & Drawing & Digital. ]

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Photographs of abandoned houses and dreary, overgrown landscapes are layered with hand-painted elements on glass panels in a technique called ‘matte painting’, one of the original VFX techniques used in filmmaking. Disparate imagery comes together in a way that doesn’t quite make sense, placing entire forests inside the darkened parlor of a deteriorating mansion or pairing wallpaper-like landscape scenes with real greenery inside a partially collapsed room.

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Artist Suzanne Moxhay, based in London, utilizes this early 20th century filmmaking technique – which was also used in more recent motion pictures like Star Wars, Mary Poppins, Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Birds – as the basis for each of her unsettling scenes. On live-action sets, paintings on glass would be integrated with the camera to become part of the scene.

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Instead of creating hers in situ, Moxhay draws from an archive of collected images and her own photography, building up the images in her studio using cutout fragments of the source material, which she makes into tiny stage sets on glass panels. Then, she takes a photo of the result, finally manipulating them digitally to remove them even further from their original context and make them into something entirely new.

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“In my recent work I have been exploring concepts of spatial containment in montages built from fragments of photographed and painted interiors,” says Moxhay. “Architectures are disrupted by analogous elements – contradictory light sources, faulty perspective, paradoxes of scale. Light casts shadows in the wrong direction, walls fail to meet in corners, an area of the image can be seen either as an enclosing wall or dark overcast sky.”

[ By SA Rogers in Art & Drawing & Digital. ]

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Inverted Roofs: Bowl-Shaped Rain Collectors Naturally Cool Desert Homes

13 Jan

[ By WebUrbanist in Architecture & Public & Institutional. ]

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Iranian architects have developed a Concave Roof system to collect rainwater in arid climates with low precipitation, helping cool buildings in hot and dry regions of the world. The water can in turn be filtered for drinking or integrated into interior graywater systems.

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These systems help reduce reliance on artificial air conditioning (or work were it is unavailable). They could ultimately help keep people in their home regions who might otherwise have to move due to climactic changes.

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BMDesign Studios’s addresses rapid evaporation with the bowl-shaped roof additions, designed to channel even the smallest amounts of accumulated rain, coalescing them into drops big enough to harvest before they evaporate.

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These inverted shells also provide shade while allowing air to pass between upper and lower roofs, acting as a cooling system in the process.

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Reservoirs tied into the system are situated between building walls to take advantage of the thermal capacity of the water to regular interior temperatures.

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The courtyard and circulation spaces are also sunken to further cool the complex. Temperatures are higher and precipitation in parts of Iran is as much as 2/3 lower compared to global averages, so every drop counts.

[ By WebUrbanist in Architecture & Public & Institutional. ]

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Mobility Vision: Hyundai Concept Connects Smart Home to Driverless Car

12 Jan

[ By SA Rogers in Technology & Vehicles & Mods. ]

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Who needs a garage when your autonomous vehicle could simply pull up into a port inside your home and seamlessly integrate itself with the interior? Hyundai wants to give us all another reason to spend hours inside our cars by effectively turning them into furniture when they’re not in use. Its ‘Mobility Vision’ concept, unveiled at this year’s CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in Las Vegas, blurs the lines between architecture and automobiles more than ever.

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The driverless car essentially plugs into the house when you’re done with a trip, and then the driver’s seat, which is mounted on a pivoting arm, can slide right into the living space for use as a chair. The idea is never having to stop what you’re doing and metaphorically shift gears between travel time and home time; stuff you leave in the car is easily accessible, babies can continue sleeping in their carseats, and there’s no fumbling for keys.

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A single door, almost the height and width of the entire car, opens upward to delineate the space between the car’s interior and the living room. You can even run the car’s heat or air conditioning to adjust the temperature of your house, and use the car stereo to play music at home. Perhaps the most important detail: the car is powered by a hydrogen fuel cell, so it’s quiet, and there’s no danger of breathing unhealthy fumes.

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It’s just a concept, and not likely to become a reality anytime soon – but could it be a glimpse into what mobility will look like in the not-so-distant future? It seems entirely possible, but it’s not clear how many people want to just sit around in their cars for no reason when there’s probably a perfectly good couch just a few feet away.

[ By SA Rogers in Technology & Vehicles & Mods. ]

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Not Your Grandma’s Kitchen: 17 Modern Designs for the Discerning Cook

12 Jan

[ By SA Rogers in Design & Fixtures & Interiors. ]

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If these designs are any indication, the kitchen of the future is modular, minimalist, mobile and so unobtrusive that it can practically blend into the furniture in your living room. Whether you love a more rustic handcrafted aesthetic or want your house to look like the interior of a spaceship, these modern kitchen designs radically depart from contemporary interiors for the sake of both looks and functionality.

Invisible Kitchen by i29 Architects

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When it’s not needed, the kitchen in this historic Parisian apartment disappears altogether, blending into the wall. The top surface of the center island measures just about an inch thick to add to the sense of lightness, making the room’s classic woodwork its focal point. Dutch firm i29 Architects developed the ‘Invisible Kitchen’ system to be adaptable, so the front facade always mimics another wall in the room.

Aquarium Kitchen Island by Robert Kolenik

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The ‘Ocean’ kitchen island by Robert Kolenik not only places an island countertop on an oversized aquarium, but also includes a mechanism that lifts the top vertically to provide access to the tank for feeding and maintenance.

Transparent Cookspace by Tokujin Yoshioka

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Cooking implements, tableware and other small objects are partially visible yet still obscured in a translucent cook space by Tokujin Yoshioka, developed for Toyo Kitchen Style.

Sculptural ICE Kitchen by Tom Dixon

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Departing radically from the look of a typical contemporary kitchen, ICE by Tom Dixon consists of monolithic triangular prisms in various shapes and sizes that form the base of a luxurious kitchen made of ‘caesarstone’ premium quartz surfaces.

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Not Your Grandmas Kitchen 17 Modern Designs For The Discerning Cook

[ By SA Rogers in Design & Fixtures & Interiors. ]

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Electroads: Wireless Vehicle-Charging Roads Rolling Out in Tel Aviv

11 Jan

[ By WebUrbanist in Conceptual & Futuristic & Technology. ]

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A series of roads and public buses in Israel are being retrofitted to test an electromagnetic induction system designed to recharge vehicles on the go, eliminating the cost, time, emissions and waste associated with conventional fuel and refueling stops.

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Electroad, an Israeli startup, boasts a relatively straightforward and fast-deploying system compared to competitors. Their copper and rubber chargers can be rolled out at a rate of a close to a half a mile per day into shallow trenches just a few inches deep. The ease of retrofitting is one of the striking advantages of the system — more involved variants can require ripping up substantial sections of pavement, taking longer and costing more to implement.

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Their technology has already been tested in controlled settings (small sections of test track outside Electroad’s lab) but will now be demonstrated at scale under real-world conditions along public transit routes. Like other induction technologies, no connection is needed between the vehicle and the road — a radiation-shielded coil simply picks up energy from the lines below, tied into the grid at intervals along the way.

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To deploy the system, an asphalt scraper digs a trench while a second vehicle unrolls the the rubber-and-plastic strips. Electric buses following the revamped route will be able to store a charge for any jumps off the invisible grid. That may not sound like much, but the reduced storage capacity means the bus can travel lighter, using less energy and requiring a cheaper battery. Ultimately, the cost and power saved upfront will help pay back for the system installation more rapidly.

[ By WebUrbanist in Conceptual & Futuristic & Technology. ]

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Street Light Art: Traffic Signals Emit Surreal Rainbow Streams in Hazy City

10 Jan

[ By SA Rogers in Art & Photography & Video. ]

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It’s almost a cliche at this point to highlight the beauty that can be found in everyday items, like that scene in the movie ‘American Beauty’ where Wes Bentley and Thora Birch stare at a plastic bag waving around on a sidewalk like it’s the Mona Lisa. But sometimes, it just can’t be helped. Have you ever gazed at a traffic light and marveled at the accidental art it was producing? You’re about to.

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Being such a humble and unremarkable object, installed at countless intersections in countless cities, the traffic signal is an unlikely subject of the internet’s flighty attentions, but the magic here is really in photographer Lucas Zimmermann’s vision – and in the fog that clings to the town of Weimar, Germany.

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Zimmermann first captured his ‘Traffic Lights’ series on a particularly hazy night, noting that the light streaming from the red, yellow and green lamps was stretching out into rainbows. He wondered how the effect would be enhanced by long-exposure photography, and the results show the streams of light almost seeming to take physical form.

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“I have been waiting for two long years to finally go out again and progress on my traffic lights series,” says Zimmermann. “It was worth the wait.”

The new addition to the series is just as striking as the first, supporting Zimmerman’s belief that photography can show us things we might otherwise overlook, “such as a simple traffic light on the street.”

[ By SA Rogers in Art & Photography & Video. ]

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Glow in the Dark Outdoor Art: 15 Designs That Come Alive At Night

09 Jan

[ By SA Rogers in Art & Installation & Sound. ]

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Phosphorescent paints, pigments and pebbles that charge via sunlight by day and glow after dark transform the nighttime urban landscape, illuminating murals, bike paths, skate parks, rivers and even live snails. It’s like taking the glow-in-the-dark stickers you plastered all over everything as a kid out into the real world and achieving similar effects on a satisfyingly large scale, hiding secrets all over the city that will be revealed when the sun goes down.

3 Glow-in-the-Dark Street Art Murals by Reskate

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When the sun goes down, hand puppets, knives and space helmets appear within a rabbit, a planet and a loaf of bread. Spanish creative studio Reskate used glow-in-the-dark paint to hide these unexpected figures within their silhouetted murals.

Glow in the Dark Bike Path in the Netherlands

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This bike path is safer after dark thanks to small particles of phosphor called ‘luminosphores’ that charge up during the day and release light at night. Urban planners in Lidzbark Warminski, Poland took inspiration from a similar project by Studio Roosegaarde in the Netherlands, but wanted to use a zero-energy light source instead of solar-powered LEDs.

Phosphorescent Mural by SpY, Paris

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Blending into the pale brick on the side of a Paris building by day, this mural by SpY reveals its secrets at night, blaring ‘I AM NOT A REAL ARTIST.’

Snail Swarm Enhanced with LED Lights & UV Paint

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Researching snails can be kind of dry, so a group of researchers from the Ecology department at the University of Exeter found a more fun – and visually dazzling – way to go about it. The team tagged hundreds of live snails with LED lights and UV paint, and then tracked their patterns of movement at night. The experiment is an effort to track how snails spread lungworm to dogs.

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Glow In The Dark Outdoor Art 15 Designs That Come Alive At Night

[ By SA Rogers in Art & Installation & Sound. ]

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Out Of Limits: 15 Retro-Futuristic Soviet Town Welcome Signs

08 Jan

[ By Steve in Design & Graphics & Branding. ]

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In Soviet Russia, town welcome you… with retro-futuristic city limits signs that promised more than the blustery, blustering Cold War-era USSR could deliver.

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The welcome is, er, radiant in Pripyat, the now-abandoned city established in 1970 to house support staff and workers at the nearby Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. Pripyat’s population grew to almost 50,000 by 1986, plummeting to zero when the town was evacuated the day after the plant’s No.4 reactor exploded. Flickr user jesper karstensen snapped our lead image of Pripyat’s forward-looking sign on August 12th of 2013. Flickr user Stanislav (LieErr) captured a view of the sign from a disturbingly different angle five days later on August 17th.

Brave Nuked World

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The city of Chernobyl is often confused with Pripyat though the former’s history dates back to the year 1193. Situated just 9 miles from the nuclear power plant whose name it shares, the city was home to about 14,000 people before its evacuation in 1986 – only 704 live there today. The city’s sign was erected in the Soviet era and originally featured a prominent hammer-and-sickle logo as seen in the guide book image at top. Sometime after the fall of the USSR, the logo was covered by a roundel displaying the symbol of the MHC – the Ukrainian Ministry of Emergency Situations.

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Photographs taken after 2010-11 show a modified radioactivity symbol fitted in place of the MHC roundel, as seen in Flickr user Steve Messerer‘s images above. Several years later, perhaps due to the current Russia-Ukraine conflict, the radioactivity logo was removed revealing the original embossed soviet logo. The more things change, the more they stay the same, eh comrades?

Welcome to Exclusion Zone

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The so-called Chernobyl Disaster spewed radioactive fallout over a wide swath of central Europe and led to the establishment of an Exclusion Zone that spread across the Ukraine’s northern border into neighboring Belarus. Flickr user Ilya Kuzniatsou (belarusian) snapped the above photo of a city sign welcoming visitors to an evacuated town. Call it passive-aggression, post-Soviet style.

You Are My Density

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“Asbest is my town and destiny”, proclaims the ominously prophetic welcome sign for the mining town of Asbest, founded in 1885. If you haven’t guessed yet, they extract asbestos there from a mine half the size of Manhattan and 1,000 feet deep – how about that, Todd Hoffman? Asbest‘s population has dropped from over 84,000 in 1989 to about 69,000 in 2010… we’re not sure why *cough*.

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Out Of Limits 15 Retro Futuristic Soviet Town Welcome Signs

[ By Steve in Design & Graphics & Branding. ]

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Timelapse Tour: Watch How Cities Grow Between 1984 to 2016

07 Jan

[ By SA Rogers in Culture & History & Travel. ]

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Human civilization has grown and expanded at an amazing rate – or alarming, depending on who you ask – and you can watch the last 32 years of it unfold via satellite imagery thanks to Google’s Timelapse feature. Originally released in 2013, Timelapse has been updated to add four more years of data and tons of new imagery data from two new satellites, offering clearer views with more detail than ever before. Choose any location in the world to see how it has changed – from cities to the shrinking ice caps.

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Some of the most dramatic changes have occurred in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Dubai and Chongqing, China, but you can also watch the Aral Sea dry up and the Shirase Glacier of Antarctica melt into the sea.

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Miami, Florida

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Look for the location of your choice and create your own annual time lapse at Google’s Time Engine Tour Editor.

360Photography

Archive for the ‘Creativity’ Category

Breaking Vlad: Street Art Takes On Vladimir Putin

The Worm Turns

Ukraine Not Weak, Very Tasty

Next Page – Click Below to Read More:
Breaking Vlad Street Art Takes On Vladimir Putin

Abandoned Montage: VFX Film Technique Adapted to Eerie Art Series

Inverted Roofs: Bowl-Shaped Rain Collectors Naturally Cool Desert Homes

Mobility Vision: Hyundai Concept Connects Smart Home to Driverless Car

Not Your Grandma’s Kitchen: 17 Modern Designs for the Discerning Cook

Invisible Kitchen by i29 Architects

Aquarium Kitchen Island by Robert Kolenik

Transparent Cookspace by Tokujin Yoshioka

Sculptural ICE Kitchen by Tom Dixon

Next Page – Click Below to Read More:
Not Your Grandmas Kitchen 17 Modern Designs For The Discerning Cook

Electroads: Wireless Vehicle-Charging Roads Rolling Out in Tel Aviv

Street Light Art: Traffic Signals Emit Surreal Rainbow Streams in Hazy City

Glow in the Dark Outdoor Art: 15 Designs That Come Alive At Night

3 Glow-in-the-Dark Street Art Murals by Reskate

Glow in the Dark Bike Path in the Netherlands

Phosphorescent Mural by SpY, Paris

Snail Swarm Enhanced with LED Lights & UV Paint

Next Page – Click Below to Read More:
Glow In The Dark Outdoor Art 15 Designs That Come Alive At Night

Out Of Limits: 15 Retro-Futuristic Soviet Town Welcome Signs

Welcome to Exclusion Zone

You Are My Density

Next Page – Click Below to Read More:
Out Of Limits 15 Retro Futuristic Soviet Town Welcome Signs

Timelapse Tour: Watch How Cities Grow Between 1984 to 2016

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Archive for the ‘Creativity’ Category

The Worm Turns

Ukraine Not Weak, Very Tasty

Next Page – Click Below to Read More: Breaking Vlad Street Art Takes On Vladimir Putin

Invisible Kitchen by i29 Architects

Aquarium Kitchen Island by Robert Kolenik

Transparent Cookspace by Tokujin Yoshioka

Sculptural ICE Kitchen by Tom Dixon

Next Page – Click Below to Read More: Not Your Grandmas Kitchen 17 Modern Designs For The Discerning Cook

3 Glow-in-the-Dark Street Art Murals by Reskate

Glow in the Dark Bike Path in the Netherlands

Phosphorescent Mural by SpY, Paris

Snail Swarm Enhanced with LED Lights & UV Paint

Next Page – Click Below to Read More: Glow In The Dark Outdoor Art 15 Designs That Come Alive At Night

Welcome to Exclusion Zone

You Are My Density

Next Page – Click Below to Read More: Out Of Limits 15 Retro Futuristic Soviet Town Welcome Signs

Next Page – Click Below to Read More:
Breaking Vlad Street Art Takes On Vladimir Putin

Next Page – Click Below to Read More:
Not Your Grandmas Kitchen 17 Modern Designs For The Discerning Cook

Next Page – Click Below to Read More:
Glow In The Dark Outdoor Art 15 Designs That Come Alive At Night

Next Page – Click Below to Read More:
Out Of Limits 15 Retro Futuristic Soviet Town Welcome Signs