Awesome Art & Design

While visiting Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum to see the world’s largest collection of Van Gogh paintings, we exited through the gift shop, and found this: a coffee cup that’s missing a handle, much like Vincent was missing an ear. Two bandages mark the spot, capturing the artist’s most unmistakable feature.

A pirate ship meets its ultimate nemesis with these wooden bookends from MokuShop. They’re perfect for housing books about adventures on the open seas. Each one is laser-engraved with intricate details engraved on its surface, and has a non-slip cork bottom.

Harkening back to the shape of classic arcade machines, Harow’s compact sofa looks like a great place to chill out and play video games at home. It can be made with custom artwork, and custom sizes, and is made from recycled wood, steel and velvet-covered cushions.

Are you as excited for the Joker movie as much as we are? Artist Steven Richter celebrates Joaquin Phoenix’s critically-praised performance with yet another amazing sculpt. The finished mini-bust perfectly captures the actor’s demonic smile as he transforms from Arthur Fleck into The Clown Prince of Gotham.

Digital artist and designer Tobias Gremmler captured the movements of a kung fu practitioner, then transformed them into abstract shapes using CG animation techniques, resulting in a series of truly mesmerizing animations.

Morgan of Seed Animation Studio gives us all the finger… actually lots of them, in this strange and hypnotic short film which turns human digits into some really unusual mechanical contraptions. At a certain point, they all started looking like hot dogs to us.

Costumes, dinosaurs, engineering, and puppetry – Esmée Kramer combined these four passions into one awesome build. She spent months designing and making this amazing dinosaur rig using PVC pipes and foam panels. It really comes to life once she starts moving its head.

With enough shop skills and patience, you can turn ordinary sheets of plywood into beautiful patterned works of art. Woodworker Michael Alm takes us through his process as he transforms thin strips of ply into chevron, diamond, basketweave, and other patterns by cutting them at different angles and intervals.

Artist Jason Freeny is best known for his see-through anatomical figures of pop culture characters. These version of his LEGO-inspired Brickman figure let you assemble his innards yourself. Choose from a 16-piece, 5″ tall model, or a 12″ tall model with over 40 pieces.

We’ve seen footage of pencils being made before, but the guys at Faber-Castell want us to know that their process is the best. Watch as they make black leads from graphite and clay, and colorful ones from powders and wax, then sandwich them into wooden shells, and paint them to match.

The organic, kaleidoscopic imagery in animator Hideki Inaba Kanahebi’s music video is about as intricate as it gets. The colorful and repetitive images of nature and its interconnections serve as the perfect setting in which to enjoy Canigou’s smooth and relaxing ambient track.

Director León Fernández’s incredible stop-motion animated short film is what we long for in filmmaking – creativity on every level – from the character design to the unique story, about a tribe that struggles to survive in a barren world, and the unlikely odyssey of its weakest member.

We’re not quite sure why we find this CGI simulation of noodles being tossed about so satisfying, but we do. Somebody needs to turn this into a video game where the objective is to transfer all the noodles from the bowl to the glass using only that fork. We’d pay at least $1.99 for that game.

Artist DP Truong is capable of drawing portraits with all kinds of interesting techniques. For this image of Will Smith inspired by Gemini Man, he used the line-by-line approach that a dot-matrix or inkjet printer would use to create an image from top to bottom.

When you see an old painting hanging on the wall at a museum, it often has had restoration work to preserve its original majesty. In this video from The Museum of Modern Art, conservator Diana Hartman shows us the painstaking work required to repair the fraying canvas of artist Paula Modersohn-Becker’s 1907 self portrait.

Photographer Chris Bryan’s short film is comprised entirely of awe-inspiring footage of ocean waves, captured in slow motion using a Phantom Flex 4K camera with Leica Summilux lenses, and custom underwater housings. The level of detail, contrast, and vibrancy of the colors is truly something to behold.

Visual artist Kevin McGloughlin teamed up with with musician Max Cooper for this mindbending audio-visual collaboration. Reminiscent of the work of the great Philip Glass, Cooper’s repetitive and driving sounds are reflected in surreal scenes which were digitally copied, tweaked, and pasted to repeat endlessly.

Level up your style and mise en place skills with these sleek and sharp ceramic kitchen knives. The set includes a blue-handled 4″ paring knife, 5″ utility knife, 5″ serrated knife, 6″ chef knife, and 7″ large chef knife, along with a black geometric knife block, designed by Christian Bird. Save 58% in The Awesomer Shop.

If you ski or snowboard, there’s a good chance you’ve seen the work of artist James Niehues. You just didn’t know it. You see, James hand painted many of the maps we use to navigate the trails. Now you can own a collection of 200 of his intricate works in this beautiful coffee table book, a great gift for any winter sports fanatic.

Crafty Transformer takes the cardboard boxes he receives Amazon orders in and converts them into awesome weapons and machines inspired by video games. Among our favorites are the Gundam wrench mace, the Yu-Gi-Oh! duel disk, and the Monster Hunter bowgun.

This unique accent lamp shows off the physics of standing waves, persistence of vision, and stroboscopic effects. By spinning a string at varying speeds, and illuminating it with colorful LEDs, a variety of cool sine waves emerge, with preset effects like northern lights, volcano, eclipse, carnival, and more.

Artist Young-Sung Kim captured time-lapse footage over the course of ten months, as he painstakingly created a hyper-real oil painting of a fish. Everything looks so incredibly shiny, we just want to reach out and touch it. The painting is currently for sale from Saatchi Art.

Artist Felix Vorreiter’s unusual timepiece uses a single, long piece of string that feed through a series of pulleys. The rope is marked with dots which align to display the current time. The current clock only has 120 minutes of string, as it would take about 4000ft to cover a full day.