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Awesome Art & Design

Making Iron Man’s Self-Healing Armor

Making Iron Man’s Self-Healing Armor

Iron Man had armor that was able to fix itself after a fight. JLaservideo took a stab at making real-world armor pieces that heal themselves after being heated, thanks to Nitinol – a nickel-titanium alloy with the ability to return to a programmed shape after being bent. The material is expensive and hard to work with, but Tony Stark could afford it.

Outdoor Café Boxes

Outdoor Café Boxes

Kenta Gomazaki loves to spend his time outdoors. To enhance his experience, he outfits metal gear boxes with equipment for making coffee, cooking, and serving food. His Instagram channel is filled with his wonderful creations, each is packed with unique Japanese gear for enjoying outdoor living. Kenta’s setup videos are fun and inspiring, too.

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Making a Mood Ring Car

Making a Mood Ring Car

Ali Spagnola thought making her car change colors like a gigantic mood ring would be fun. So she sprayed it with thermochromic liquid crystal paint. This stuff doesn’t show if she’s happy or sad but instead reacts to changes in temperature. If you’re wondering what those discs are on her car, they’re the 9,000 PopSockets she attached in a previous video.

Building AI-Generated Furniture IRL

Building AI-Generated Furniture IRL

Builder John Malecki wanted a new media center for his office. Rather than designing the cabinetry himself, he turned to generative AI to come up with the concept. After playing with a few prompts, Midjourney came up with a design. Its organic shapes caused construction challenges, but John and his team did a great job bringing the real-world version to life.

Fixing the Marble Machine Clock

Fixing the Marble Machine Clock

A little while back, maker Ivan Miranda engineered a very cool clock that tells time using marbles. But his kinetic sculpture is too slow to tell the time accurately. He’s since made numerous refinements to the design of his clock, and it’s now faster and smoother, so it can properly update its digits once per minute. It’s totally awesome but ridiculously loud.

Making a Liquid-filled River Table

Making a Liquid-filled River Table

We’ve seen tables that use resin or glass to create the illusion of water. Woodworker Screaming Donkey built a coffee table with a real liquid-filled center. He started out with some olive wood burl which he de-barked, cut into pieces, bathed in resin, and gradually refined. After that, he filled it with water, mica, glycerin, and pigments, agitated by magnetic stirrers.

Shark Disco Ball

Shark Disco Ball
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AMCLUBShop proves anything can be a disco ball if you cover it with enough mirrored tiles. Among the many sparkly things in their Etsy shop is this ridiculously awesome disco ball in the shape of a shark. The 22″ long fish is the perfect excuse to have a dance party during Shark Week, and a great piece of decor for marine biologists and choreographers alike.

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BOOM

BOOM

This award-winning animated film from École des Nouvelles Images drops us onto an island where a volcanic eruption threatens a flock of birds. As the cloud of dust and lava bursts into the sky, two birds try their best to save their eggs from disaster. The short does a great job of ramping up the tension while remaining lighthearted in its approach.

Making Japanese Archery Bows

Making Japanese Archery Bows

Yokoyama Reimei has been making Japanese archery bows for more than a century. Their artisans use traditional woodworking techniques to craft 6.5-foot tall bows from burnt bamboo and a wax tree core. They shape each bow by hand (and foot) by bending the wood with rope and bamboo wedges. Process X provides a close-up look at their workshop.

100,000 Penny Cube

100,000 Penny Cube

There are obsessions, and then there’s this. Artist Robert Wechsler spent seven years making this sculpture entirely from pennies. He built the 540-pound tower of pennies by cutting four slots into 100,000 pennies, assembling them into strings, and then into sheets for stacking. He had to build a special rig to press the pennies together, a dozen at a time.

Scrimshaw Pocket Knife Kit

Scrimshaw Pocket Knife Kit
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Scrimshaw art dates back to the late 18th century as a product of the whaling industry. But you won’t have to catch Moby Dick to make your first piece of scrimshaw. This kit from Mollyjogger includes a bone-handled pocket knife, a steel scribe, India ink, a tracing tool, and a variety of designs so you can customize your knife. Choose from a Trapper or Lock-back style knife.

Wooden Zoetrope Bowl

Wooden Zoetrope Bowl

Greg Blanpied makes CNC-machined and laser-cut functional art fabricated using parametric math and geometry. Among his amazing pieces is this elegant bowl, which acts as a zoetrope when filmed or spun beneath a strobe light. He’s also created a zoetrope vase.

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Time-Slice Animations

Time-Slice Animations

Visual artist and musician Ellard Devane creates mindblowing animations out of clay. But these are no California raisins, nope. Ellard makes his works by arranging polymer clay into surreal faces and scenes that reveal themselves as he slices away at them, layer by layer, frame by frame. This video compiles highlights from the past couple of years.

Tentacle Kinetic Sculpture

Tentacle Kinetic Sculpture

Berlin-based artist Florian Goerlitz makes incredible mechanical artworks that have appeared in large installations and at festivals. This smaller piece is notable because it creates so much movement using just a single motor. Made almost entirely from wooden gears, it has three arms that move around its center, undulating like tentacles on an octopus.

Retro Analog Gauge Clock

Retro Analog Gauge Clock
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This unique tabletop clock from Iain Gellatly’s Retro Gear Laboratories displays the time on a pair of backlit analog gauges, accented with a bright Nixie tube pilot light. The Industrial version has a wood case and a steel front panel, while the Steampunk version has a vintage wine case with a brass face. It even automatically sets its time with a Wi-Fi connection.

ESC.

ESC.

This animated short film follows an overworked woman who’s falling apart at the seams under the stress of everyday life. Can she escape the chaos? Writer/Director Sam Southward and a talented team of artists and animators bring the story to life with brilliant character design and a clever use of space and motion.

Making Literal Pallet Wood Coasters

Making Literal Pallet Wood Coasters

Paul Jackman has made a lot of drink coasters out of recycled pallet wood. This time, he made a bunch of coasters that look exactly like real pallets. After designing a 1:10-scale model on his computer, he got to work fabricating 200 of the tiny replicas, complete with laser-engraved logos. You can grab a 2-pack on the ISOTunes website for $50.

Block Tower 4-Story Cabin

Block Tower 4-Story Cabin

This modern home is anything but a traditional cabin. Levi Kelly takes us on a tour of this unique rental property in Hocking Hills, Ohio, known as The Block Tower. Its stacked 4-story construction packs in five bedrooms, three bathrooms, cozy living spaces, a hot tub, and multiple decks that overlook the surrounding woods. Book a stay on Airbnb.

Making a Wood Minigun

Making a Wood Minigun

Despite only firing rubber bands, we would not want to be on the business end of this wooden minigun. Generic Woodworking shows off the incredible amount of blood, sweat, and tears it took to build this impressive toy weapon. It uses parts from a lawn trimmer and a belt sander to drive its mechanism, and makes an unnerving popping sound as it fires off rounds.

Papercut Geometric Animation

Papercut Geometric Animation

TraceLoops creates eye-catching mixed-media art and animation. Much of their recent work involves making sequences by layering precision-cut sheets of paper and layering them to create a stop-frame sequence. Their YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram pages are filled with more of these hypnotic animations.

Meta Mate Miniature Tool Set

Meta Mate Miniature Tool Set
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This set of miniature hand tools from Japanese outfit Meta Mate are what happens when your tools get mixed up with some Pym particles. The kit comes with 11 injection-molded mini metal tools, including scissors, nippers, pliers, a monkey wrench, caliper, bow saw, vise and more. Each tiny tool works just like the real deal.

Forging a Steel Darksaber

Forging a Steel Darksaber

The Mandalorian’s Darksaber is the most sword-like weapon in the Star Wars universe. So, it only makes sense that a blacksmith would build a real-world replica. Black Beard Projects forged his Darksaber’s blade from high-carbon and stainless steel, recreated its handle using 3D printing and sand casting, and machined its guard from steel.

How to Make a Checkerboard Lumberjack Cake

How to Make a Checkerboard Lumberjack Cake

Pastry artist Liz Marek of Sugar Geek Show created this awesome checkerboard-patterned cake that looks like a lumberjack’s flannel shirt on the inside and a tree stump on the outside. In this tutorial video, you’ll learn how to make this cake, and also get a glimpse at the edible chocolate axe Liz made to go with it.

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