If your creativity is wild, no medium is a limitation. This fact is exceptionally true with Anastassia Elias, a french artist who collects toilet rolls and turns them into great works of unbelievable art. You read it right, toilet roll. And not only is the choice of medium odd, the way they are worked into incredible depictions of life is freakier.

(Image Source: Anastassia Elias)

Let’s take a short stroll through a small version of this artist’s art gallery with these 12 sculptures that show how creative the roll can go. You’ll never look at your empty toilet paper roll the same way again.

Swing. I bet you didn’t expect to find a child swinning from a tree in a toilet roll. The shapes are simple, but they are more than enough to convey life.

Boxing. What’s the secret that makes the world inside the roll look so lively? Answer – the backlit!

Horse Racing. Anastassia Elias is not limited to the limited space inside a roll; in fact she even turns it into an advantage with half-depicted figures. Also I like the sense of motion expressed here.

Cowboys. Well, howdy cowboys. Silhouette shapes actually leave their details for the viewers to fantasize about. What story did you come up with, when you see these cowboy silhouettes?

Circus Jugglers. The act of juggling is made precise with the right shapes and positioning in this particular sculpture.

Amusement Park. A whole amusement park comes alive here! The lesson of th day: think out of the roll.

Rain. Perhaps it is too much to ask for rain but those peopel really look like they are trying to get out of the rain. The two in the background sharing the same umbrella is oh-so lifelike.

Miners. They really look like they are mining this toilet roll for what it’s worth, with their feet embedded in the rubble.

Holiday Night. On a lighter note, the paper trees are formed using tweezers, and concentrated patience. The outcome is natural and relaxing.

Zoo. It’s a zoo in here. Visitors are kept outside of the enclosure with a thin bar but you can see how excited they are to see the giraffes.

Aquarium. It’s not just the ground, you can build any world inside the roll. Also this incredible version makes the fish fly in mid-air.

Mill. And here lies the secret of how she does it. Anastassia uses paper of same color to blend the paper figure into the roll seamlessly. Everything else that makes the sculpture come alive is based on her ingenuity and attention to detail.

That’s all? Of course not. Browse through all her work in Anastassia Elias’ website!

We’d all like to have a place to call our own, a spot in the world where we can say, "I am king of this spot". But space – or the lack of it – is fast becoming an issue, particularly in major cities. If you don’t intend to have the traditional home design, the kind you fill up with creative or futuristic furniture, and fantasy-themed bedrooms, then perhaps these unconventional home designs may give you new ideas.

Ingenius architects and pretty talented interior designers have turned spaces, apartments & lofts as small as 240 square feet into compact yet cozy homes. Most of them utilize ‘airspace’ or create multiple, moveable sections to transform an otherwise small living space into a full range (somewhat) multi-room home. These creations are sure to make you rethink home modeling.

Recommended Reading: 25 Creative Bookshelf Designs You Have Got To See

Living Cube. The Living Cube looks like a modern twist to a bunk bed only instead of another bed, it has a nice clean storage compartment to house your TV, DVD or book collection and your clothes.

29 Square Meters Project. This entire apartment is only 29 square meters or roughly 312 square feet. The living room, kitchen and dining area are combined into one room while a huge bed area is built on an upper level 4.5ft high.

Suspended Bedroom. Rather than use an uncomfortable sofa bed in this small flat, the owner decided to suspend his bed, allowing full use of the floor space. The stairway to the bed can also lead you out to the large skylight atop the rooftop garden.

Wooden Box Home. This is just the bedroom of a modern house with a bed and workdesk placed on top of ample storage shelves, a closet and the sink!

Bed Under Stairs. Harry Potter wouldn’t mind this bed under the stairs. Instead of storing random junk under it, these designers put a queen sized bed in the cozy corner, complete with a reading light.

Tim Seggerman Loft. This Nakashima- (legendary woodworker and architect) inspired design was used to overhaul a single-room apartment in New York. Time Seggerman placed the sleeping area above the kitchen to fully utilize this 240 square foot apartment.

Small Box House. It’s a tall house with strategically placed windows to make full use of natural light. The roof is upstairs while the kitchen and dining area is downstairs.

Warehouse Loft. The long warehouse design allows for this loft to have a separated upper floor that was turned into a large bedroom and shower. Below, you’ll find an office with a living area and kitchen.

San Diego Cadres. Architect Nathan Lee Colkitt reworked this 750 square foot space to house a living space and his firm’s office. He sleeps upstairs and work downstairs.

Slope House. This house was built on a steep mountain slope in the outskirts of Černín, Czech Republic. Top floor is a bedroom/library; at the bottom bunk beds and storage space. Both sandwich the living room and entrance to the home.

Maxim Zhukov Loft. Russian designer Maxim Zhukov turned this 3-room loft space into an open-space home for both work and rest.

The Cube Project. This place is literally a box, with an area of 3m x 4m and height of 3m. However, you will find in here a kitchen, fully functioning toilet, 2 seater sofa with coffee table and a bed for 2. It also features solar panels on the roof to power the entire cube.

Protohaus. This house is only 125 square feet, and is actually a trailer. The bed is suspended near the roof, making room for other home essentials below.

Puzzle Loft. The designer’s love for puzzles has given birth to the bedroom above the kitchen design, giving new meaning to breakfast in bed and sleeping in the kitchen.

Zimmerman Garden Pavillion. The Zimmerman family turned architects and added a top floor for extra living space. All glass windows above glass doors provided ample light for the new floor.

Videos For your Inspiration

Some creations are better depicted through video.

LifeEdited Apartment. It’s amazing how this tiny place can accommodate a dinner party of 12, 2 overnight guests in their own guest rooms, a home office and a mini home theater system. Makes you rethink what you can do with 420 square feet of space.

LEGO-Style Apartment. Most of the appliances and furniture in this apartment is hidden from sight to create a minimal look. The bed, fridge, sink, oven and storage are placed behind wooden doors and in their own individual sections.

Origami Apartment. The designers of this 400 square foot apartment had the idea of overlapping the different areas (bedroom, living room, kitchen) you would find in a typical home, hence the name Origami. The bed folds out of a big cabinet, while the cabinet doors act as a divider for the living room and as an office table.

DIY Micro Apartment. This engineer’s game is all about efficiency in small spaces. Using this 182 square feet space, he was able to create 8 different spaces including a kitchen, dining area, cafe/lounge, a sleeping area and a guest bed above the bathroom.

24 Room Shoebox Apartment. This architect turned his 344 square feet apartment to incorporate 24 different ‘rooms’ with sliding dividers and hidden storage. Walls move about to reveal kitchen appliances that are stored away when not in use. There’s even a guest bed (somewhere) in there too.

As you may already know, CSS3 introduced a set of new selectors that allow us to select elements in the document with less HTML class addition. But, the new CSS selectors rely on the browser’s capability, making them not applicable in some cases. jQuery has a set of selectors, which could be an alternative way.

There are two reasons to use jQuery selectors instead of CSS. First, jQuery has covered the compatibility for older browsers that do not support particular type of CSS selectors. Second, when building an interactive feature, we may want to select elements upon user actions such as on a mouse click or on hover.

And using jQuery selectors is the felicitous way to do the job.

Recommended Reading: How to Create a Mobile Panel with jQuery Mobile

Index Selectors

Index selectors match elements based on its sequence. In CSS3 we have first-child() and last-child() selectors, which select the first and last elements. In jQuery, there are :eq(), :lt(), :gt(), :even(), and :odd().

Let’s say we have the following unordered list.

 <ul> <li>List 1</li> <li>List 2</li> <li>List 3</li> <li>List 4</li> <li>List 5</li> </ul> 

And we want to select the third <li> and add an HTML class. Using jQuery you can use :eq(). Remember that since JavaScript index starts at 0, the third <li> is actually the second at the index, giving you:

 $('td:eq(2)').addClass('selected'); 

Visibility Selectors

Visiblity selectors match the elements based on its visibility. So, we are able to select elements when they are visible or invisible. CSS3, at the moment does not have this kind of selectors.

In the following example, we have a <div> element that is hidden by assigning display: none;.

 <div style="display:none;"> This is hidden </div> 

To select the <div>, you can do it this way using :hidden selector.

 $('div:hidden').removeAttr('style'); 

The :hidden selector, however, does not work for elements that are hidden using visibility: hidden. It works when the element display mode is set to none like what we have shown above, or when the element width and height is set to 0.

To select visible elements, you can use :visible.

Element-Containing Selectors

Using jQuery we can also select elements when they are containing the specified element. Let’s say we have two <section>. One contains a heading, while the other does not contain anything. Using the :has selector we can select the <section> that contains the heading, as follows.

 $('section:has(h2)'').addClass('selected'); 

CSS3, at the moment, does not have a similar selector.

Text Containing Selectors

We can also select an element that contains specified text. Let’s say we have three paragraphs and we want to select only one that contains “Hello“, for example.

 <p>Hello</p> <p>World</p> 

Using :contains() we can doing so this way.

 $('div:contains('World')'').addClass('world'); 

This will select the first and second paragraph. And note that the text value is case sensitive, meaning that “World” does not equal to “world”. So the text specified in the selector has to match the one at the selected element.

Animated Selector

Lastly, jQuery allows us to select element that is in the progress of an animation. jQuery provides a set of methods to animate element, for example .slideToggle(), .slideUp(), .slideDown(), .show() and .hide(). And we can use :animated selector to select the element that is animated with those method, like so.

 $('li:animated').addClass('animation'); 

Conclusion

CSS3 is indeed more advanced than CSS2 with some introduction of new selectors. But in particular cases, you may need to use jQuery selector instead of CSS, so if this is the case for you, I hope that this post could be helpful for your reference.