Earlier this year, Belgian film-maker and artist Vincent Bal stumbled upon an uncanny resemblance to an elephant in the shadow of his tea cup. This gave him the idea for Shadowology, a series of doodles that interact with the shadows of simple, everyday objects: a banknote, some ice cubes and a flower, for example, can turn into a church, a woman and a hippy. “I draw a few lines and I get my image. It’s really the shadows that inspire me”, Bal says. Here: “Stonedog”. (Photo by Vincent Bal/The Guardian)

A life-size sculpture of a pianist, made of approximately 210,000 matches and weighs around 100 kilograms, is seen in Tomislav Horvat's studio in Podturen, Croatia, October 27, 2016. For the last ten years, Horvat has built sculptures made from matches. This is his biggest sculpture to date that took him some 30 months to build. (Photo by Antonio Bronic/Reuters)