Awesome Art & Design

Animator Jan Elsner’s short film ÖBST envisions how nature’s sweet treats might move around if they were more like animals. The CG animation was achieved without keyframing, and instead relied on physics simulations and procedural noise functions.

Lawless Bikes makes kids’ wooden balance bicycles designed to look like cafe racers. There are two designs, one inspired by BMW bikes and one inspired by Triumph bikes. Unfortunately, they are made to order only for clients in South Africa as of this writing.

Students from the University of Washington created a technique that can create 3D animation out of a single photo. Called Photo Wake-Up, it also lets the user change the pose of the person. Viewing the effect in virtual or augmented reality is also possible.

Designer Porky Hefer makes large chairs with whimsical animal designs. His latest collection features endangered species such as the polar bear, a blue whale and a great white shark, and are made of eco-friendly or recycled materials.

Artist Oscar López Rocha aka LOROCROM created this amazing short film which combines live-action backgrounds with CGI elements. The way the virtual light bulbs and tubes illuminate the natural surroundings is amazing. The track is Serotonin Diode by BLÆRG.

Take a look at the video, and you’ll swear that these balls are spinning in a circular orbit. But look more closely, and you’ll see that each ball is moving along a perfectly straight path. The mechanical model is based on a design by 16th century Italian poymath Girolamo Cardano.

This resin-based 3D printer builds up layers of liquid polymer for super smooth models. What makes it truly special is its 13.3″ LCD panel, which allows for builds as large as 29.2 x 16.5 x 40 cm (11.5 x 6.5 x 15.75″). It’s also available with dual 5.5″ panels for printing two models at once.

“Good design is as little design as possible.” The revised edition of legendary product designer Dieter Rams’ previously sold out book. In Less But Better, Rams talks about his “ideas, criteria and methods”, and how he came up with his now famous principles for good design.

Royal Enfield commissioned Bandit9 to make a bike based on the former’s Continental GT. The result is the Arthur, a graceful sci-fi creation. It features a custom frame, tank, rear cowl, handlebar, exhaust, swingarm and more. Limited to 9 units.

Jackman Works walks us through the complex process of making wooden coasters with a cool diamond pattern. He starts out with sticks of old pallet wood, stacks and laminates them with glue, cuts them on the diagonal, then slices, CNC carves circles, and finishes each one.

Bevin Bells makes trip gongs that look and work just like the ones used in boxing arenas, mines, and stock exchanges. They’re mechanical so they don’t need electricity to work. They’re available as brass or as steel with a black powder coat.

Like larger mosaics, micromosaics are images made up of numerous small colored pieces. But these are made using tweezers to lay in tiny pieces of glass. They look like paintings from any distance. The Victoria and Albert Museum shares footage of the painstaking process.

Based on the same concept as the Pyro Board, The Blazing Beats is a two-axis version of a Rubens’ Tube, a device which emits variable heights of flame based on sound waves traveling through it. The result is a gas fireplace that dances to the beat of your music.

The My Cinema Lightbox not only looks like a marquee, it’s also fit for any occasion thanks to its RGB LED backlights. You can make it flash in a variety of colors or stick to one, including white. It comes in three sizes and can be powered via USB or battery.

How to Make Everything decided to how many U.S. one cent coins it would take to make a copper sword. He first had to separate older and newer pennies to get the ones that are mostly copper, then set about the task. We’d love to see the blade patina over time.

Researchers from NVIDIA demonstrate “A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks,” which is a fancy way of describing artificial intelligence that’s capable of creating human face variants and other objects that never actually existed in real life.

GoodHangups let you hang posters, cards, and other light items on a variety of surfaces, neatly and without frames. It consists of a set of small magnets and magnetic stickers, which are easy to remove and are reusable. Sold packs from 8 to 100 pieces.

During his journey on the International Space Station, astronaut Alexander Gerst captured thousands of images to create time-lapse footage of sunrises, auroras, cloud movements, and other amazing sights that can only be seen from space.  See more of Alex’s images here.

Chisel & Mouse makes handmade plaster cityscapes that are ready to be mounted on walls or displayed flat on a surface. Each cityscape – or mountainscape – is made from a 3D printed mold created from satellite data, then plaster cast by hand.

Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs is loaded with wonderfully-inventive stop-motion animation. Among the many scenes is one where a pair of hands artfully create a meal of sushi. Now, go inside that scene, created by Andy Biddle and Tony Farquhar-Smith over the course of 32 days.

After wowing us with his amazing folding structures a few years back, designer Erik Åberg decided to put them into production. The Ghostkubes comes with reconfigurable plastic cubes which can move and collapse to create mindbending interactive 3D sculptures.

ft Robotics shows off a nifty Arduino Mega and Fischertechnik based plotter. Unlike other drawing machines which are driven by cartesian coordinates, this one uses polar coordinates. It draws by moving a pen along one axis, while a turntable rotates beneath its retractable pen.

Thomas Romain is an animator in Japan. He loves to use his spare time turning his two sons’ character sketches into detailed drawings. His children’s imaginations are top notch. They’ve released an art book that contains some of their collaborations.