Nikolai Tolstyh takes photos of paper animal silhouettes in a natural setting. The combination is surprisingly perfect: the surroundings provide both color for the cutout and a scene to frame the animal.

Prints of R$ 50 Brazilian reais bills sit on a table for inspection at at the Casa da Moeda, the national mint, in the Santa Cruz suburb of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on Tuesday, March 5, 2013. Brazil is likely to keep its key interest rate at a record low for the third straight meeting, as policy makers are caught between a fragile economic recovery and faster-than-expected inflation. (Photo by Dado Galdieri/Bloomberg)

Illuminated Cut Paper Light Boxes by Hari & DeeptiDeepti Nair and Harikrishnan Panicker (known collectively as Hari & Deepti) are an artist couple who create paper cut light boxes. Each diorama is made from layers of cut watercolor paper placed inside a shadow box and is lit from behind with flexible LED light strips. The small visual narratives depicted in each work often play off aspects of light including stars, flames, fireflies, and planets.

Anastassia Elias spends hours painstakingly cutting out tiny shapes to make detailed models – and then fits them inside used toilet rolls. Elias, 37, uses paper the same color as the cardboard tubes to build up the intricate scenes from wildlife to construction sites. Photo: Toilet paper roll art of African wildlife. (Photo by Anastassia Elias/Caters News)

“Dubai is sometimes called the “City of Gold” because of its stunning growth from a sleepy Gulf port to a world-famous business crossroads in the space of a single generation. Its nickname has a literal meaning for traders in the precious metal. The city is building itself up as a center for the gold trade, between sources in Africa and consumers in the rising economies of China and India”. – Kamran Jebreili via Associated Press

Photo: A gold press operator collects 10 gram gold blanks to press them with the logo of the Emirates Gold company in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Gold prices remained relatively steady in 2012, close to $1,700 an ounce. (Photo by Kamran Jebreili/AP Photo)

San Francisco-based design professor Miguel Cardona is selling his custom-drawn “Sketchcups” at Café Sophie for US$20 a piece to benefit Project Night Night, a charity that donates baby blankets, books, and toys to children in homeless shelters. Cardona discusses the project in an interview with Coolhunting. If you'd like to purchase or commission one of Cadona's pieces for yourself, you can do so for US$30 at his Sketchcups Store.

Inspired by high school architecture class where he was assigned to create simple paper models using cut paper manilla folders, San Francisco-based designer Luca Iaconi-Stewart went home to begin construction on an extremely ambitious project: a 1:60 scale reproduction of a Boeing 777 using some of the techniques he learned in class. That was in 2008, when Iaconi-Stewart was just a junior in high school.

An artist has gone to incredible lengths to paint several iconic album covers on her own face. London-based artist Natalie Sharp wanted to celebrate Record Store Day in a unique way, and asked her Facebook friends for suggestions about which album covers to paint. She was overwhelmed with responses, and as a result painted 40 different album covers on her face, including Nirvana's “Nevermind”, King Crimson's “The Court of the Crimson King”, and “Melt” by Peter Gabriel. Here: King Crimson album. “In fact, I barely used by brushes for King Crimson; I would just keep smudging it with my fingers”. (Photo by Natalie Sharp/Caters News)