Awesome Art & Design

Toymaker Cracked Hatchet is making an extremely limited run (just 8 pieces) of hand-painted figures inspired by Childish Gambino’s video for This Is America. Each one is being auctioned off for charity, though Donald Glover apparently snagged the first one.

Taiwanese artist Hank Cheng makes incredibly realistic dioramas and scale models. Whether he’s making vehicles, store exteriors or bedroom interiors, the finished work will make your jaw drop. Check out more of his work on his Instagram and Facebook pages.

HomeMadeModern combined an expensive material – walnut – with an affordable base material – concrete – to make a beautiful and relatively easy to create table. He cast the space on the concrete where the walnut panels would be using acrylic sheets.

Developed by students from the University of Tokyo, the DRAGON is a snake-like drone with jointed modules. This allows it to change its shape in mid-air, passing through small passages and even theoretically interacting with or manipulating objects.

Ella Merriman was inspired by her old books to create the Dog-eared Shelf. It’s a simple yet funny and practical twist on shelves. One corner of the aluminum shelf is curled like the pages of an old book, allowing you to use it as a hook or a coat rack.

David Bowen’s unique art installation captures data from a plant stalk blowing the wind, then echoes its movements onto 126 individual stalks placed indoors. Each indoor stalk moves in concert with its outdoor inspiration thanks to accelerometer tracking and servo motors.

Quantify your lighting with Firebox’s officially licensed Scrabble Tile Lights. Each set comes with seven light up tiles that connect to an oversized Scrabble tray. You also get 60 reusable stickers so you can customize the tiles.

Motion designer Peter Tomaszewicz’s animated short film messes with our expectations, transforming what should be solid surfaces into sand, fluids, fabrics, gas, and bendy materials using CGI physics simulations.

Cat Explorer is an educational and unintentionally horrifying and funny virtual reality demo app for the Leap Motion controller. It lets you intuitively explore the muscles, skeleton and organs of a cat with simple gestures.

StudioKnob’s Click Light features LED lights intertwined inside ropes with magnetic ends. The lights activate when a rope is connected to the base shelves, which have low voltage electricity running through metal surfaces underneath each shelf.

LEGO custom minifig creator Waller Customs built a LEGO version of Bruce Wayne’s mansion that sits on top of an equally detailed Batcave. The gigantic creation is fully lit. It stands over 6 feet tall and is made of around 100,000 LEGO pieces. More on The Brothers Brick.

Filmmaker Maria Constanza Ferreira explores the incredibly ethereal and colorful organic patterns that reveal themselves when viewing the microscopic structures of sugar crystals under polarized light.

A celebration of 70 years of Porsche sports cars. Based on the chassis of the 911 GT3, this open-top 911 features a shortened window frame, dual humps behind the seats, and a stripped down interior to save weight. Its flat-six engine makes 500+hp with a 9000 rpm redline.

Little Puffin shows how you can make a donut vending machine out of cardboard. It requires only a little soldering and no programming. But it still works like a proper vending machine, needing the right coin and all. Check out the video’s description for the materials.

Stephen Kelleher’s, Chris Guyot, and John Poon’s animated short film attempts to communicate the morals of several classic Greek myths in the most minimal way possible, using the interactions between simple objects to express their primary meaning.

Artist Benedetto Bufalino transformed a Ford Mondeo station wagon into a fully-functional wood-burning pizza oven. The interior features a brick cooking surface, making quick and crispy traditional Italian pizzas. We’re assuming he removed the gas tank too.

ASUS’ Project Precog is a laptop with two symmetrical touchscreens as its main output and input interfaces – no keyboards, no touchpads, no palm rests. It’s like the peak of a 2-in-1 laptop-tablet hybrid, though it remains to be seen how practical such a device can be.

Artist Wyatt Little presents a truly unique way to cultivate a houseplant. This handmade, rust-colored ceramic vessel looks like an old-school desktop computer and monitor. Measures 8″(l) x 7.5″(w) x 9″(h). We suppose you could attempt the same with an actual computer case.

Joysticks are one of the most popular and useful computer input devices. But they don’t work without something to hold their base in place. Yuichiro Katsumoto’s innovative joystick design uses servos to provide the same kinetic feedback but in mid-air.

A team of artists teamed up with engineers and scientists from NASA/JPL-Caltech to create a series of 14 awesome poster designs which envision a future filled with exotic trips to far-off worlds. Hi-res images are available to download, or as prints on Etsy. (Thanks Susan!)

3Doodler’s new Create+3D printing pen has a new dual drive system that leads to far fewer jams and smoother drawing than previous models. It not only works with PLA and ABS filaments but also with a new filament called Flexy, which lets you create flexible items.

Enjoy illustrations, quotes and more on your walls and windows with this cable-guided robot that draws with markers, and erases ink with heat. It can cover a 6.5ft x 6.5ft area. You can upload your own images or get them online. Works on plaster, whiteboards, and glass.

(PG-13: Language) Filmmakers Thibaut Duverneix and Mathieu Léger take us on a wild ride through the disjointed mind of rapper Tierra Whack, playing out as 15 one-minute mini movies, each shot on a different set. The scenes are loaded with style, humor, and attitude.