The eighth annual Nipponbashi Street Festa stamped Osaka March 20, 2012 (Nipponbashi is Osaka’s geek district – much like Akihabara is for Tokyo). Cosplayers turned up in colourful outfits, dressing as characters from their favourite manga, anime, and video games. The street was closed to cars, and otaku flooded the streets, snapping pics, cosplaying, and hanging out.

Hindu holy man, or sadhu, applies paint to his forehead at his ashram on the premises of Pashupatinath Temple in Kathmandu February 15, 2015. Hindu holy men from Nepal and India come to this temple to take part in the Maha Shivaratri festival. Celebrated by Hindu devotees all over the world, Shivaratri is dedicated to Lord Shiva, and holy men mark the occasion by praying, smoking marijuana or smearing their bodies with ashes. (Photo by Navesh Chitrakar/Reuters)

Attendees engage in cosplay and wearing costumes during WonderCon 2016 Day 2 at Los Angeles Convention Center on March 25, 2016 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images)

Cosplay fans attend the Animation Comic Games (ACG) Culture Festival in Xi'an, capital of northwest China's Shaanxi Province, May 28, 2017. The festival kicked off on Saturday, attracting lots of cosplay fans. (Photo by Liu Xiao/Xinhua)

Hunter Chiaki Kodama guts a deer in a shed in Oi, Fukui Prefecture, Japan, November 17, 2016. A small but growing number of Japanese women enter the male-dominated world of hunting, where it was once taboo for men to even speak to a woman before going on a hunt. (Photo by Thomas Peter/Reuters)

Both men and women dressed as singer Kate Bush from her 1978 video to her song “Wuthering Heights” dance in a brief rehearsal before seeking to create a new world's record for the most people dancing in costume to the song at once at Tempelhofer Feld park on July 16, 2016 in Berlin, Germany. While a precise account was unavailable just after the event, a calculated estimate put the number of dancers at between 400 and 500, well above the previous record set in 2013 in Brighton, UK of 300. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

A cosplayer poses for a photograph during the Comic Market 90 (Comiket) event in Tokyo Big Sight on August 12, 2016, Tokyo, Japan. Many manga and anime fans wearing cosplay lined up in the sun for the first day of Comiket. Comiket was established in 1975 and focuses on manga, anime, gaming and cosplay. Organizers expect more than 500,000 visitors to attend this year's summer event which runs for three days until August 14. (Photo by Aflo/Splash News)

The artist Samantha French reveals the magnificent series of paintings: portraits of men and women under water. Very realistic creations expressing the world under water. Every detail is present, sunlight on water, air bubbles in the water, the color tone underwater, aquatic atmosphere. Absolutely amazing to discover in the rest of the article works.