Moving a point source light in front of a camera set to shoot long exposures can produce some cool visuals. The guys at COOPH show off a few other ways that low-budget lighting sources can be used to shoot unique and creative photographs.

Hong Kong-based artist Alfred Cheng creates incredible black and white portraits using sewing thread and a circle of nails. What makes them even more amazing is that he uses a single strand of thread to create each image. Art Insider explains his painstaking process.

As we’ve learned before, everything is a remix. In this particular case, digital artist Hayati Evren remixed pieces of classical works and transformed them into a popular meme. The finished image will be part of the Evren’s “Clash of Time” NFT collection on OpenSea.

Performing artist Amy Inspiral shows off some sweet hula hoop moves, enhanced by a hypnotic light show courtesy of her Moodhoops FutureHoop Pro. The high-tech hula hoop has embedded RGB LEDs and can display animated patterns animations using a persistence-of-vision effect.

The paint on classic cars isn’t always in good shape and needs to be restored. If you really want to do the job right, you need to start with a clean canvas. Cars Insider shows us how 3S Chemicals takes vintage car bodies and dips them in a series of baths to remove all the old paint, sealers, primer, and rust.

Shane from Stuff Made Here had a big wall in his workshop that he needed to paint. But rather than get out the rollers himself, he spent more than a month engineering and fabricating a robot to do the work for him. But this thing doesn’t just paint a flat color; it outputs multi-color images like a giant inkjet printer.

We just got done repainting some walls at home and it took like 30 minutes to get each of them coated. But this talented painter shows how he covers a whole wall in under a minute after masking and prep of outlets. We’re amazed that the roller held so much paint.

Diamond painting kits offer a fresh take on paint-by-numbers. They let you recreate works of art by placing tiny rhinestones to create shiny, pixelated versions of pieces like Van Gogh’s Starry Night. In addition to the sets we found on Amazon, the guys at Pretty Neat Creative can make custom kits based on your own images.

Spray-painted art is usually pretty imprecise. But the unnamed artist in this clip shows off an impressive amount of control as they painted a portrait by modulating the spatter from a thin line of spray paint, much like the lines produced by a dot-matrix printer. The technique is amazing, but that face is a little creepy.

Revisit the early days of desktop computer graphics with BeyondLoom’s browser-based drawing tool. Like the original MacPaint, DitherPaint has just two colors – black and white. It includes a variety of brushes, and a number of patterns to add flair to your 1-bit masterpieces. It also has a handful of animated patterns.

Artist Phil Vance paints portraits of famous people using their own words to create their images. In this time-lapse video, he builds up an image of author Hunter S. Thompson, layer by layer. His image of Dave Chappelle made from the words of his 8:46 special is equally incredible.

UK-based Sphere Designs makes this useful workstation for assembling and painting models and miniatures. It comes with a removable A4-size cutting mat and ceramic tile insert, brush holders, and with a rack customized to fit your preferred brand of paints. They also make standalone paint racks and brush racks.

Constantine Bard presents a sweeping medieval-style cover version of The Rolling Stones’ 1966 hit song Paint It, Black. While we love how the original adds so much depth with Brian Jones’ sitar playing, this version feels even more epic in its scope.

Scientists from Russia’s ITMO University have developed a technique that uses lasers to create different colors on a sheet of metal. The laser is used to create oxide layers on a sheet of titanium, producing a variety of colors. The method can even be used to change or erase images multiple times. Read more in Optica.

Adam of Empire of Joy thought it might be interesting to animate a scenes from other movies in a handpainted style similar to A Scanner Darkly. For his first effort, he painstakingly painted over frames from Avengers: Endgame and used them as keyframes for his animation. (Thanks Joe!)

Artist ZXY698 is an expert at painting wall murals. In fact, he’s so good at it that he painted a 3-dimensional facsimile of his girlfriend sitting on a park bench so he can visit with her even when she’s not around. Hopefully, she won’t fade away any time soon.

Builder Tom Stanton attached a long vertical LED light bar to his drone, and managed to fly it horizontally to capture some cool long-exposure images. His design is based on Ivan Miranda’s light bar, but you might be able to pull off something similar with a Pixelstick.

A father and daughter playing with finger paints isn’t an uncommon sight. But as you watch this video play out, you’ll quickly realize there’s a bit more talent at work here than your typical home arts and crafts project has to offer.

It took CG Geek almost a month of work, but he managed to create a digital 3D environment inspired by the style of artist Bob Ross. Instead of paint, he photo-scanned real-world nature imagery to create textures for his happy little trees. We love how he makes it sound so easy.

Inspired by this image, LEGO builders Grant Davis, Eli Willsea, and Micah Biedeman collaborated on this impressive diorama, which features an pyramid of buildings at its back, flanked by structures on either side. When viewed from the proper angle, a minifig can be seen sitting on a girder, drinking in the majesty of his world.

You could hang a hunter’s trophy on your wall, or perhaps choose something a little more friendly to animals with this colorful, abstract image of a powerful stag. Created by artist Koby Feldmos, this original 67″x 34″ painting has an almost sculptural feel to it thanks to its thick layers of oil paint.

Artist Thomas Trum is known for making paintings with unusual tools and techniques. Among the weapons in his creative arsenal is this paint gun designed for road line marking, which he uses to spray a gradient rainbow of colors as he moves it along a canvas.

Hone your artistic skills with this series of six online courses that include drawing and painting in various different medium, along with lots of tips and techniques. You’ll learn about composition, color, shading, as well as working with oils, acrylics, and watercolors.