Awesome Art & Design

Among their various creative pursuits, Melbourne, Australia’s Yell Design makes see-through jigsaw puzzles. This one is particularly outstanding. The Accident is made up of 215 individual pieces, each cut to look like a piece of shattered glass. Their laser-polished edges should mean no sliced fingers either.

If you enjoyed Maths Town’s hypnotic fractal zoom video, here’s another one with a very different aesthetic. Rather than filling our eyeballs with vibrant colors, this one is filled with soothing mathematical structures dipped in shiny gold.

This unique LED light bulb eliminates the need for expensive lighting fixtures. Instead, it’s got an integrated lampshade that distributes a bright, warm area light from its sides. It fits into standard E26 bulb sockets, so you can just pick up a cheap hanging pendant and you’re all set for under 25 bucks.

Woodworker Lignum has made some pretty cool furniture over the years, and this build is among his most intriguing. He created this table by laminating together blocks of wood then scorching it with a torch to give it the look that a fire burnt its insides out. We imagine it smells like a campfire too.

Artist Dave Stencil of CuttingBoredom makes these sweet wood inlaid cutting boards in the shape of of electric guitars. They can be made in cherry, mahogany, or walnut wood, along with contrasting details. Choose from Les Paul, Stratocaster, or acoustic designs.

Carving figures from wood takes time, patience, and skill. But S-Carving went one better, turning a sculpture of a horse into a stop-motion animation, inspired by the work of Eadweard Muybridge. To pull off the simultaneous refinement of the carving and the horse’s gallop must have taken tons of work and planning.

Photographers, just because you’re stuck at home doesn’t mean there aren’t ways to practice your craft. COOPH presents an inspiring series of fun and creative techniques you can use to shoot everyday objects and make them far more visually interesting.

(PG-13) After a moth burrows into a businessman’s ear, he starts to have visions which take hold and set him off on a new course through life. Hue&Cry’s short film is a beautifully animated and expressive tale of self-discovery and transformation.

Photography expert Mathieu Stern loves to work with unusual camera lenses. After being stuck at home sickened by COVID-19, he decided to build a lens using stuff he had lying around the house. He enlisted the help of his wife to design this LEGO camera lens, while he focused on the optics. We love the brick-shaped bokeh.

Motion artist Henning M. Lederer is back with another cool animated clip. This time, he didn’t just use book covers, but he included some eye-catching designs from vintage record sleeves as well. The electronic music track by Tilman Grundig fits the structured, geometric imagery perfectly.

Artist Blake McFarland shows off a pair of sculptures he built for the 2019 Cotton Bowl. He created versions of Penn State’s Nittany Lion and the University of Memphis Tiger out of Goodyear tires, wrapped around a foam and fiberglass structure. The sculptures weigh about 200 lb each, and used pieces from 400 tires combined.

Fabricator Brian Oltrogge walks us thorough a truly modern process for casting a custom hammer. He used a 3D printer to generate patterns, hand-sanded and smoothed the parts, then used them to make sand molds for its aluminum handle and lead head.

Inner Art World sells shoes and accessories covered with vibrant and hypnotic patterns which really stand out from the crowd. Their sneaker collection offers a variety of bold designs, including mandalas, stained glass, paisleys, and our favorite, a steampunk pattern.

You’d think going to a park during the pandemic would be safe, but people don’t always obey social distancing rules. To solve this, Austrian design firm Studio Precht has created “Park de la Distance,” a concept urban park where each path allows just one person at a time, and hedges keep people over 6 feet apart.

Clearly inspired by the old Atari Video Music, Critter & Guitari’s EYESY creates abstract visuals to go with your sounds. Its dials and buttons let you tweak its images to your heart’s content. It accepts audio via a 1/2″ jack, and outputs its real-time art via HDMI or composite video for a retro look. It can also be controlled via MIDI.

Easter eggs are usually made from, uh, eggs… or maybe chocolate. But metalsmith shurap likes his eggs really, really hard-boiled. So to celebrate Easter 2020, he made himself an egg out of steel cable. We love the intricate damascus patterns that emerged in the finished piece.

With people wearing all kinds of improvised protective gear these days, an outing to the grocery store can be a strange and surreal experience. But Pouff’s trippy grocery shopping video was created back in 2015, using neural network technology which attempted to identify animal faces in places where they didn’t actually exist.

Butcher block maker Brother in Wood shows off his computer controlled mill carving out an intricate pattern of famed Samurai Hattori Hanzō. He then used the machine to cut an inverse pattern in a contrasting wood, glued it in place, then milled off the top layer for an inlay effect. The finished cutting board is a work of art.

(PG-13) Wes Anderson has always had a very precise and fastidious aesthetic. But after making Fantastic Mr. Fox, his style changed in ways that made his subsequent movies even more magical. The Discarded Image and Beyond The Frame teamed up to explore how his stop-motion learnings affected even Anderson’s live-action films.

Artist Andrew DeGraff’s cinematic atlas is filled with intricate isometric maps which guide us through the locations in popular movies. The hardcover book features 11″ x 14″ reproductions of his hand-painted maps from 35 movies including King Kong, Fargo, The Princess Bride, The Shining, and many more.

Among other things, Sideserf Cake Studio is really good at baking cakes that look like other food items. Here’s a compilation of some of their favorites, including cakes that look like a lemon, an onion, a head of lettuce, and even a McDonald’s Filet O’ Fish sandwich. If you don’t believe these are real, check this out.

That Works take on a video game weapon that dates back all the way to 1986. But rather than the pixelated flail found in the 8-bit Castlevania, they built a replica of the one Trevor Belmont finds in the 21st century animated series. It’s a painstaking process to build such a complex weapon using blacksmithing techniques.

This jigsaw puzzle is the perfect time-killer for LEGO fans. The 1000-piece puzzle features a vibrant image of buckets filled with LEGO bricks, neatly separated by color. The color sections should mean it’s not too difficult, but the varying block shapes still provide a bit of a challenge.