Awesome Art & Design

Ever wonder why statues and other geeky collectibles cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars? Watch artist Chie Izuma in action, and you’ll understand. Watch her meticulously paint the $700 Sideshow Collectibles Batgirl statue, eyeballing it all the way. Remember, she does this for each statue, and this is just one step in the whole process.

Old Things Never Die picked up a rare and rusty U.S.A.F. GEMINI X-5 toy spaceship on eBay. After disassembling all of its parts, he got to work sandblasting away the rust, polishing the plastics, and then painstakingly reapplying paint to make it look as good as new. He also had to replace its motor and rebuild its driving mechanism.

Woodworker Neil Paskin recently made a bunch of beautiful patterned wood veneers. After making a small box that incorporated them, he ramped up the challenge by building a tabletop covered with the patterns. Neil estimates that the pattern has 55,000 individual slivers of wood in it. It looks like a laborious process, but the finished table looks fantastic.

Craving coffee at your desk? It’s easy enough to pick up a Keurig that brews on demand. But that wasn’t good enough for Martina from Nerdforge. Her idea? Make a PC with a built-in coffee maker. What she fabricated was a working gaming PC that grinds beans and brews a single cup off coffee. She built it into the enormous Corsair Obsidian 1000D tower case.

This unique LEGO Art set uses more than 3000 pieces to create an eye-catching piece of wall art inspired by our galactic home, The Milky Way. Rather than using flat studs like some LEGO Art kits, this one has dimensionality, thanks to its clever use of bricks like flowers, hearts, grilles, slopes, and more. The finished artwork measures 26″ W x 16″ H x 2″ D.

A number of makers participated in The Viking Challenge. Among them is DiesInEveryFilm, who avoided the more popular bladed weapons and went with a war hammer. He built it using a hollow steel tube, thick steel plates, and a wood handle with brass and leather accents. Check out all of the Viking Challenge videos, then cast your vote for your fave.

Director and animator Elizabeth Fijalkowski created this wonderfully off-kilter short film about an elderly entomologist who becomes obsessed with collecting an unusual moth that has eluded him for years. The creepy soundtrack by Daniel Carpenter and Foley work by Orb Community Arts help set the tone.

Arist and filmmaker Max Kolomatsky has been using his talent to be a sneaky Good Samaritan to his fellow New Yorkers. He makes better versions of flyers and signs posted by individuals or small businesses around the city, replacing the original ones free of charge and without telling the people who posted them.

Artist Scott Sloan previously wowed us with his 1:6-scale mini pinball machines. Now, he’s showing off a miniature vending machine that actually dispenses tiny soda cans. It’s based on a classic 1970s Dixie Narco soda machine and works just like the real thing, complete with a coin mechanism. We love the funny Q*Bert sounds it makes.

YouTuber Not from Concentrate was so disappointed with the “slim” PS5 that he painstakingly showed Sony what a truly compact version of the console should be. The result is a box with almost half the size and nearly 40% of the volume of the PS5 Slim. It even has a removable magnetic charging dock for the controllers and an external disc drive.

We’ve seen how they make disco balls in the last American mirror ball factory; now see how they do it in Japan. Nissho Co., Ltd. makes shiny spheres by bending sheet metal into domes, screwing them together, hand-cutting and gluing hundred of round mirror tiles then filling the gaps with grout. Note that the tiles are different sizes depending on their placement.

These recently released Sharpie markers have a brush tip and an opaque, water-based ink that goes on like paint. They can mark all kinds of surfaces, from paper to metal to glass to wood, and won’t bleed through paper. Unlike some paint markers, they don’t require priming to get the ink flowing. The price shown is for the 12-color variety packs.

Given its softness, copper is not a great material for weaponry or tools – but it sure looks awesome. In this video from Mini Katana, they teamed up with a metalsmith to turn thousands of pennies into a unique sword. But hunting down enough vintage copper pennies was only the start of their problems.

This unique clock by Bulduper displays the time on a hexagonal grid filled with 127 RGB LED hex-shaped pixels. It can also display colorful animations. Want one for your own wall? He posted a detailed build guide on Instructables, including the 3D models for its parts. The code repository is up on GitHub.

Turn your living room, man cave, or any room into a game room with these fun retro rugs from Dreaming Alien. They come in vibrant geometric patterns that look like they came out of a 1980s video arcade – minus the cigarette burns. Our faves are the Galactic March and Earth Bound styles. They’re available in sizes from 24″ x 36″ to 96″ x 120″.

Abandoned Films imagines what a Super Mario Bros. movie might have looked like as a movie shot in Super Panavision 70 back in the 1950s. The surreal take on Nintendo’s iconic plumbers is made extra trippy courtesy of generative AI tech. The images are by Midjourney, video by Runway, voices by ElevenLabs, and the script by ChatGPT.

If you attach different-weight objects to a string and hang them over a bar, the lighter object can prevent the heavier one from hitting the ground when dropped. As this happens, the rope spirals around the bar. Science teacher Bruce Yeany attached LEDs to the objects and captured long-exposure photos of this fascinating looping pendulum action.

Maram’s Platform legs are compatible with most standing desks. But they don’t just give your modern furniture a unique and more traditional look. By raising the legs and adding more rigidity, they also reduce wobble. You can choose from Victorian ash, American oak, or walnut wood, as well as four wax and oil finishes.

This incredible short film, directed and animated by Duncan Hatch, takes us on a surreal journey that travels from outer space to a cubicle farm to a colorful forest populated with weird creatures. Noah Kowalski’s sound design and Tom Ippolito’s music deliver a sense of immersion that is truly headphone-worthy.

Luma AI’s mobile app makes it easy to capture spatial 3D models of objects and even landscapes using your smartphone. You can share or embed the scan as a 3D video or export it as a 3D object. It’s fairly low-fidelity at the moment, but it’s enough to be useful. You can check out user-created 3D videos on Luma AI’s website.

This way-too-short film from Yeti Pictures and director Tony Zagoraios features a series of miniature vignettes inspired by classic movie scenes, including The Exorcist, King Kong, Jurassic Park, and more. The animation and modeling team did a great job making it look like it was filmed with models and action figures, but it’s all CGI.

This beautifully customized wristwatch from IFL Watches started as a stock Citizen Tsuyosa Automatic with a stainless steel case and link band. What makes it special is the enamel dotting its face, evoking tiny stars and planets. The watch has a 40mm, 21-jewel movement, and a 40-hour power reserve. Just 100 of these hand-painted pieces will be made.

A faction of the computer graphic Demoscene prides itself on creating visuals with the least code possible. Programmer Alcatraz turned up at the Revision 2024 demo party with this surreal scene – a post-apocalyptic black-and-white city created with just 256 bytes of Gopher code running on DOS. Revision posted some competing 256-byte demos here.