Well now you can thanks to artist Noel Cruz, who has been busy transforming boring off-the-shelf dolls into a range of celebrities. Among those you can get your hands on are Angelina Jolie, Princess Diana, Johnny Depp and
And the results are quite astounding.
Noel’s handiwork, which sells for up to £3,300 a time, can take up to three days to create as he painstakingly paints the intricate faces of each model by hand – sometimes working for eight hours straight.
He removes all the paint to make a blank canvas, before repainting the face with tiny brushes, applying acrylic like makeup to each of the dolls.
The Californian artist even cuts, styles and puts mini rollers in their hair to create the exact copies of the music and movie stars.
He then sells his work on eBay.
Detailed: A doll of Johnny Depp as Jack Sparrow
Noel, who lives in Tustin in California, USA, said: “I became interested in this by accident as my wife has been a collector of dolls for years.
“It’s painstaking work on such a small canvas so delicately done – it can be longer than an eight-hour shift.”
While looking around the internet for dolls for his wife Emma, he noticed some of the dolls available had extremely lifelike faces.
In 2001 he decided to paint his first doll – before becoming confident enough to take on some of the planet’s biggest celebs.
Hypnotising: Plastic Maleficient doll looks so real she might breathe fire
The artist, 53, usually paints big Hollywood names such as characters from Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and, more recently, The Hunger Games.
In the future, Noel, who started out as a portrait artist, hopes to work on characters from hits like Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones.
But his favourite characters to create are classic Hollywood stars such as Marilyn Monroe and Bette Davis.
He added: “I gravitate towards celebrities because there are so many pictures of them available it’s more of a challenge.”
It’s been more than five years since J.K. Rowling’s final Harry Potter book was released. But it doesn’t mean the wizarding world has come to a halt. 2014 brought columns from Rita Skeeter, social media riddles from Rowling and revelations that Hogwarts was as warm and welcoming a place to diversity as Potter fans would have wanted. Though some critics argue Rowling needs to cool it with the new content, Potter fanatics feel otherwise. Here’s everything we learned about the wizarding world in 2014.
Rowling hit the heart of nostalgia in July when she published a gossip column from Rita Skeeter about Harry and Company’s reunion at the Quidditch World Cup. The infamous wizards, “no longer the fresh-faced teenagers they were in their heyday,” are now in their thirties. Harry, a 34-year-old with “threads of silver” in his hair, was sporting a new scar, a “nasty cut over his right cheekbone,” which Skeeter speculated was from an argument with his wife Ginny Potter, now a reporter for the Daily Prophet.
Hermione Granger, the feminist fatale, naturally did not change her last name as Ginny did. Granger unsurprisingly rose to be Deputy Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement. Ron Weasley, however, is beginning to bald and left the Ministry of Magic after only two years to co-manage Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes with his brother George. Percy Weasley, meanwhile, is Head of the Department of Magical Transportation.
PHOTOS: See the Harry Potter Theme Park Gringotts-Themed Ride
Universal Orlando
Neville Longbottom is now an Herbology teacher at Hogwarts and is married to Hannah Abbot, a Hufflepuff. Luna Lovegood is married to Rolf Scamander (grandson of Newt Scamander, more on that below). Teddy Lupin, son of the deceased Remus Lupin and Nymphadora Tonks, is now 16 and seems to be addicted to snogging Victoire, who is Bill Weasley and Fleur de la Coeur’s daughter.
Dolores Umbridge was inspired by one of Rowling’s own teachers
Rowling released a 1,700-word story on Halloween, noting that Umbridge was based on a former teacher who she despised. “Umbridge is not only one of the most malicious Potter characters—she is the only person other than Lord Voldemort to leave a permanent physical scar on Harry,” Rowling wrote and “one of the characters for whom [she felt] the purest dislike.” Her affinity for kittens was also inspired by a woman Rowling once shared an office with, who “had covered the wall space behind her desk with pictures of fluffy kitties.” Umbridge’s backstory was revealed in the piece, including the fact that her mother was a Muggle, her father a wizard and her brother a Squib. “Nasty things tended to happen” to those who inquired about her family. And even to those who didn’t, we always knew.
Gilderoy Lockhart tried to make a line of hair products
The famous wizard was always looking for new ways to stay famous. Lockhart discovered Occamy eggs—Occamys are serpentine-like creatures with wings who are very protective of their silver eggs. The creatures’ aggressiveness made the shampoos too expensive and too dangerous to produce.
Celestina Warbeck was quite the dramatic rockstar
“An early marriage to a backing dancer lasted only a year; Celestina then married her manager, with whom she had a son, only to leave him for the composer Irving Warble ten years later,” Rowling wrote. Rowling posted the story about one of Molly Weasley’s favorites on Pottermore in August, along with a jazz-like song called “You Stole My Cauldron But You Can’t Have My Heart.”
Rowling is very excited about the Harry Potter spinoff
Fans thought Rowling was hinting at a new Potter book when she posted an anagram to Twitter asking fans to solve it. But a winner revealed it was simply a hint at Rowling’s latest project: The screenplay for Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, a Potter movie spinoff. The screenplay is based on a book that once only existed in the wizarding world and served as a textbook at Hogwarts.
There is room for everyone at Hogwarts (almost)
Rowling responded to a fan who tweeted that his wife had teasingly told him there were no Jews at Hogwarts, meaning that she was the only one qualified to be “magical” in the family.
She confirmed in a later Tweet that the only people she never imagined at Hogwarts are Wiccans. All sexual orientations are welcome as well, she confirmed when a fan asked about an LGBT club at Hogwarts.
There’s a reason Draco Malfoy is so mean
“Draco was raised in an atmosphere of regret that the Dark Lord had not succeeded in taking command of the wizarding community,” Rowling wrote, revealing that before meeting Harry on the Hogwarts Express, Draco, his family and other ex-Death Eaters thought Harry could be “another, and better, Voldemort.” Draco married Astoria Greengrass, who may have helped shape the bitter Slytherin into a better man. “As Astoria refused to raise their grandson Scorpius in the belief that Muggles were scum, family gatherings were fraught with tension,” Rowling wrote.
Snape is not a vampire, but there was almost a vampire in the series
Rowling toyed with the idea of a vampire professor at Hogwarts called Trocar, named for a “sharply pointed shaft inserted into arteries or cavities to extract bodily fluids.” Though Trocar was edited out early on in the Potter process, fans speculated that Snape was a vampire. “While it is true that he has an unhealthy pallor, and is sometimes described as looking like a large bat in his long black coat, he never actually turns into a bat,” Rowling wrote. “We meet him outside in the castle by daylight, and no corpses with puncture marks in their necks ever turn up at Hogwarts.”
The Inferi were not zombies
Inferi were somewhat inspired by zombies, but Rowling purposely didn’t call them that because of Michael Jackson. “I’m part of the ‘Thriller’ generation,” she wrote. “To me, a zombie will always mean Michael Jackson in a bright red bomber jacket.”
The Hufflepuff Horcrux was almost a cauldron
“But there was something slightly comical and incongruous about having such a large and heavy horcrux,” Rowling wrote.
The Leaky Cauldron was almost ruined by muggles
The oldest pub in London survived when Muggles built Charing Cross Road that “ought to have flattened it completely.” The bar also serves a beer that a former landlord created to honor a former Minister of Magic, but it’s “so disgusting that nobody has ever been known to finish a pint.”
Rowling has some regrets The author regretted killing off Florean Fortescue, the owner of the Diagon Alley ice cream parlor. “I seemed to have him kidnapped and killed for no good reason,” she wrote. “He is not the first wizard whom Voldemort murdered because he knew too much (or too little), but he is the only one I feel guilty about, because it was all my fault.”
FLINT, MI — Movie star Daniel Radcliffe was spotted in Flint just before New Years Eve.
Radcliffe, known as the star of the hit “Harry Potter” film franchise based on the series of novels by author J.K. Rowling, was in Flint on a visit with his reported girlfriend, actress and University of Michigan-Flint alum Erin Darke, for the holidays.
The two were spotted at several area businesses: Flint City T-Shirts downtown, Bob Evans restaurant on Hill Road in Grand Blanc, and Don Pablo’s restaurant on Miller Road. An employee of Bob Evans took a photo with Radcliffe that has been making its rounds online.
People immediately began taking to social media to share enthusiasm about his visit. Here’s a look at some of the conversations happening online.
The recent Christmas Day PlayStation Network and Xbox Live network outages caused headaches for people hoping to connect and play games. But one Florida teenager thought the downtime was enough of a problem to call 911 to see if authorities could do anything about it.
WPTV reports that a teenager from Palm Beach County called 911 dispatch, asking about the outages: “I was wondering, do you guys know anything about that?”
The dispatcher told the caller to check in with platforms holders instead. Authorities went on to tell the young man, “Last time I checked, that wasn’t an emergency. Try going outside or read a book.”
The Lizard Squad, a band of young hooligans that recently became Internet famous for launching crippling distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against the largest online gaming networks, is now advertising its own Lizard-branded DDoS-for-hire service. Read on for a decidedly different take on this offering than what’s being portrayed in the mainstream media.
The new service, lizardstresser[dot]su, seems a natural evolution for a group of misguided youngsters that has sought to profit from its attention-seeking activities. The Lizard kids only ceased their attack against Sony’s Playstation and Microsoft’s Xbox Live networks last week after MegaUpload founder Kim Dotcomoffered the group $300,000 worth of vouchers for his service in exchange for ending the assault. And in a development probably that shocks no one, the gang’s members cynically told Dailydot that both attacks were just elaborate commercials for and a run-up to this DDoS-for-hire offering.
The group is advertising the new “booter service” via its Twitter account, which has some 132,000+ followers. Subscriptions range from $5.99 per month for the ability to knock a target offline for 100 seconds at a time, to $129.99 monthly for DDoS attacks lasting more than eight hours.
In any case, I’m not terribly interested in turning this post into a commercial for the Lizard kids; rather, it’s a brain dump of related information I’ve gathered from various sources in the past 24 hours about the individuals and infrastructure that support the site.
In a show of just how little this group knows about actual hacking and coding, the source code for the service appears to have been lifted in its entirety from titaniumstresser, another, more established DDoS-for-hire booter service. In fact, these Lizard geniuses are so inexperienced at coding that they inadvertently exposed information about all of their 1,700+ registered users (more on this in a moment).
These two services, like most booters, are hidden behind CloudFlare, a content distribution service that lets sites obscure their true Internet address. In case anyone cares, Lizardstresser’s real Internet address currently is 217.71.50.57, at a hosting facility in Bosnia.
In any database of leaked forum or service usernames, it is usually safe to say that the usernames which show up first in the list are the administrators and/or creators of the site. The usernames exposed by the coding and authentication weaknesses in LizardStresser show that the first few registered users are “anti” and “antichrist.” As far as I can tell, these two users are the same guy: A ne’er-do-well who has previously sold access to his personal DDoS-for-hire service on Darkode — a notorious English-language cybercrime forum that I have profiled extensively on this blog.
As detailed in a recent, highly entertaining post on the blog Malwaretech, LizardSquad and Darkode are practically synonymous and indistinguishable now. Anyone curious about why the Lizard kids have picked on Yours Truly can probably find the answer in that Malwaretech story. As that post notes, the main online chat room for the Lizard kids (at lizardpatrol[dot]com) also is hidden behind CloudFlare, but careful research shows that it is actually hosted at the same Internet address as Darkode (5,38,89,132).
In a show of just how desperate these kids are for attention, consider that the login page for LizardStresser currently says “Hosted somewhere on Brian Krebs’ forehead: Donate to the forehead reduction foundation, simply send money to krebsonsecurity@gmail.com on PayPal.” Many of you have done that in the past couple of days, although I doubt as a result of visiting the Lizard kids’ silly site. Anyway, for those generous donors, a hearty “thank you.”
It’s worth noting that the individual who registered LizardStresser is an interesting and angry teenager who appears to hail from Australia and uses the nickname “abdilo.” You can find his possibly not-safe-for-work rants on Twitter at this page. A reverse WHOIS lookup (ordered from Domaintools.com) on the email address used to register LizardStresser (9ajjs[at]zmail[dot]ru) shows this email has been used to register a number of domains tied to cybercrime operations, including sites selling stolen credit card data and access to hacked PCs.
A more nuanced lookup at Domaintools.com using some of this information turns up additional domains tied to Abdilo, including bkcn[dot]ru and abdilo[dot]ru (please do not attempt to visit these sites unless you know what you’re doing). Another domain that abdilo registered (in my name, no less) — http://x6b-x72-x65-x62-x73-x6f-x6e-x73-x65-x63-x75-x72-x69-x74-x79-x0[dot]com — is hexadecimal encoding for “krebsonsecurity.”
Last, but certainly not least, it appears that Vinnie Omari — the young man I identified earlier this week as being a self-proclaimed member of of the Lizard kids — has apparently just been arrested by the police in the United Kingdom (see screen shot below). Sources tell KrebsOnSecurity that Vinnie is one of many individuals associated with this sad little club who are being rounded up and questioned. My guess is most, if not all, of these kids will turn on one another. Time to go get some popcorn.
I was browsing Telltale Games’ website this morning (scavenging for deals on Game of Thrones and Tales from the Borderlands), and discovered this:
Well, that’s… definitely not what I expected.
Having recently played The Wolf Among Us, and eagerly starting The Walking Dead: Season Two, I was pretty much psyched to hear about their new project. I don’t know what to think now. This actually feels like a way far gone version of the Tales from the Borderlands’ announcement, where a lot of people, myself included went “Wuh? Does that series need an adventure game”
It’s very strange… and I love it. This pairing oddly enough reminds me of this year’s The Lego Movie. High quality artists working on a super large brand. Could it turn out that well? Maybe. Maybe I’ll eat poop. But you know, I don’t really like to eat poop, so I might not eat it. Poop.
There’s also a nifty little announcement game you can play (that plays Telltale style). Check it out under “Learn More”.
I think this is a sign of what’s to come. There’s a Minecraft movie in development. That paired with this announcement are tell tale (tee hee) signs of where Microsoft intends to take this franchise. They’re going big. Real big.
I hope it’s a gritty retelling of the game. I love gritty retellings!
