Awesome Art & Design

Scott Sloan builds 1:6-scale digital pinball machines that are fully playable. The 3D-printed systems can play many games using Visual Pinball X and are powered by a GMK 5105 mini-computer. They have a 7″ playfield and a 5″ backglass display. Want one? Contact Scott on Facebook. Glen’s Retro Show has a demo video here. Images courtesy of Scott Sloan.

Mike from Modustrial Maker got his hands on some Mexican Logwood stumps and decided to use them to make a coffee table. After cutting the wood into even lengths, he set them into an epoxy bath. A cross-section of each tree can be seen through the tabletop while the stumps provide support. It took a lot of effort, but the end result is worth it.

We recently saw a 3D-printed Apple Macintosh that looks exactly like the original. Scott Yu-Jan created something with a similar aesthetic but with his own unique design. His Macintosh Studio is a custom dock for an iPad Mini that sits atop a Mac Studio. The finished unit looks like one of Hartmut Esslinger’s 1980s Apple computer designs.

Animals come in all shapes and sizes. In this video from Posit Pixel, they use pixel art to describe some of the extremes of the animal kingdom, from diminutive parasitic wasps to a 42-foot-long snake. Along the way, you’ll learn about a fingernail-sized frog and Quetzalcoatlus, an extinct flying animal with a wingspan as big as a single-engine airplane.

These beautiful playing cards from Neversleep Co feature imagery of cats dressed in samurai armor. Each face card illustrates a different feline warrior, equipped with swords and other accessories surrounded by flourishes. The number cards have unique geometric patterns. Add-ons include poker chips, enamel pins, and a red deck as a stretch goal.

You know we love a good flashlight around here. While we’ve seen lots of really slick production models, we have to hand it to Maciej Nowak who built a custom flashlight by machining billet aluminum, then outfitted it with a super-bright 30W LED and three lithium-ion batteries. He even etched his own circuit board.

You don’t need to be Ranni’s lackey and trek all over The Lands Between to get your hands on this bad boy. Though you may need to farm for its cost and the shipping fee. Panda Studio’s officially licensed life-sized resin replica of the Dark Moon Greatsword from Elden Ring is a crazy 59″ long. Limited to 88 units.

Accented Cinema neatly sums up the fundamental difference between Godzilla films: “American Godzilla is about Godzilla; Japanese Godzilla is about Life.” Giant monsters beating the crap out of each other can indeed make for a fun movie. But Japan’s Godzilla films show that the kaiju’s ultimate power is helping people reflect on real-world catastrophes.

Adam from North of the Border likes to make tiny, nerdy things. He forgot to mention the word “creepy.” His take on tough, but adorable Powerpuff Girls is just plain wrong. Instead of sugar, spice, and everything nice, his cursed versions of Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup are made from clay and wire and clearly didn’t get enough Chemical X.

A Möbius strip is a twisted object that loops back onto itself, so it has only a single side. Brandon from Inheritance Machining shows us how he made a similarly perplexing object out of a single block of steel. Like the strip, his Möbius cube has one continuous side, but it was far more complicated to engineer and craft than its source of inspiration.

It’s easy to find an original Apple Macintosh on eBay, but it’ll look used. Kevin Noki built a new replica of Apple’s 1984 computer from scratch. He started by measuring the case from a Macintosh Plus, modeling its parts, then outputting them on a 3D printer. Inside, it runs a Linux thin client running a modified version of the Mini vMac emulator.

Jonny Builds shows off another impressive piece of furniture – a record cabinet with a segmented wood door. He started by assembling grain-matched panels for the top, bottom, and dividers. To make the door, he took an 8-foot-long black walnut slab, cut it into boards, sliced it into 109 strips, glued them to canvas, and CNC milled the awesomely wavy shapes.

As part of the SKYGLOW project, filmmaker Gavin Heffernan captured this time-lapse footage in and around California’s Joshua Tree National Park. As the sun set over the desert, clouds rolled in, and the stars peeped out, creating an awe-inspiring light show during the recent Wolf Moon.

This fast-paced arcade game asks players to control a flower and a wasp to fight off various enemies in their otherworldly ecosystem. Caleb Wood, one of the concept artists behind the exceptional sci-fi series Scavenger’s Reign, created the game. It’s out now on Steam for Windows and supports single-player and local co-op modes.

For his latest 3D challenge, Clinton Jones, aka Pwnisher, asked CG artists to create scenes based on a template of a character climbing a curved staircase. After receiving 2800 entries from around the world, here are the top 100 renders edited together to create a seemingly endless climb, set to music by Feverkin. It’s hard to choose a favorite interpretation.

Beautify any mechanical keyboard with these lovely real metal keycaps from Awekeys. They’re made from recycled aluminum with copper plating. The keycaps produce an extra-clicky sound and are cool to the touch. They fit a variety of MX key switches and come in a base 116-key set, with add-ons like etched eagle-themed keys by artist Daniel Mitchell.

Felix from BerlinLapse captured this wild 360º hyperlapse video of the Fernsehturm, one of Europe’s tallest free-standing structures. To shoot the footage, he mapped out a walking route around the tower and snapped photos along the way. He then color-graded the photos in Lightroom and used After Effects to track the tower’s position, size, and rotation.

Tech journalist and print historian Glenn Fleischman teamed up with other experts to create How Comics Were Made: A Visual History from the Drawing Board to the Printed Page. The book takes readers through 130 years of newspaper cartoons with the help of high-resolution original art, newspaper reproductions, and interviews with cartoonists.

Are skins or DIY paint jobs not good enough for your already pricey Apple Pencil? Well, the madmen at ColorWare would be all too happy to take your money. Their take on the obvious color scheme for the second-generation iPad stylus is, as expected, completely overkill in terms of both quality and price.

For over 40 years, legendary music producer Rick Rubin has been helping a diverse array of artists create their seminal and most significant works. The Creative Act: A Way of Being sees Rubin share his observations on creativity and how being creative isn’t about what you make but how you see the world.

Handmade wood bowls are typically created by turning a block of wood on a lathe. But in this video from Taku Woodcraft, he shows how a miter saw can cut a perfectly smooth bowl shape. Working with a loose piece of wood under a power saw is dangerous, but it appears he had a short dowel under the board to keep it centered. Still, don’t try this at home.

Resident Alien is one of our current must-watch TV series. The science fiction comedy features wonderful performances, lots of laughs, and some great visual effects. This behind-the-scenes footage from season three gives us a look at the costumes, makeup, props, and digital VFX that help bring the show to life.

Andymation is known for his creative flipbook animations. He once created a flipbook smaller than a penny, but that wasn’t good enough for Andy, so he made an even smaller one. It took some work to get the camera and lens setup right; then, he got to work drawing each tiny frame with a sharp pencil. After that came the challenge of stacking them.