We’ve already seen murals and graffiti turned into a moving image with a simple, stop-motion animation. From Blu’s elaborate 7-minute video “Muto” (Silent) to INSA’s captivating graphic based “gif-ffiti” series, featured here on our blog, the idea of bringing life to walls has been a challenging one that street artists have enjoyed for years. What we haven’t seen yet is a photo-realistic mural turning into animation, and Croatian artist Lonac did just that as an early Valentine’s day treat. The artist recently spent a couple of days at an unknown building location in his hometown of Zagreb, working on an impressive piece showing a beating human heart. Known for creating realistically rendered murals, his piece titled “Heartbeats” has been lauded as one of the first “animated murals” done in this style with a level of excruciating detail and anatomical accuracy, where each frame of his animation shows the heart “pumping” blood. Utilizing the actual piping found in the building, Lonac created this unique effect by painting the blood to appear to rush from one image to another. Showing all the little veins, shading, and smooth movement of this important organ, his piece is also the first one of an upcoming series of similar works planned by Lonac for this year.
Swedish painter Alessandro Battisti, better known as 
Only a few days before opening her October 30 solo show at 
The Louvre's famous giant glass pyramid, designed by Chinese-American architect I.M. Pei, became a landmark of the city of Paris in 1989- until it was made invisible by