Awesome Art & Design

In Coffee We Trust. The talented Shaun Hughes walks us through the painstaking process of transforming an old 1959 US penny into a wonderful coin engraved with an image of Cuphead’s eponymous character.

“The place where Christmas was invented now feels like a city under siege, and in serious need of some festive cheer.” This hour-long documentary is about how Banksy and director Danny Boyle created a satirical nativity play at Banksy’s hotel at the West Bank Barrier.

Whether or not you loved The Last Jedi, you’ve got to hand it to the effects departments for their work on the film. While we assumed the Vulptex (aka “crystal foxes”) were CGI, it turns out they built an amazing animatronic puppet for close-ups, then scanned it for digital use.

From writer and artist Ed Piskor comes a three-part comic book miniseries that retells the story of the X-Men so far. Similar to what he did in Hip-Hop Family Tree, Piskor summed up over 50 years of X-Men stories in a retro and verbose style. More here and here.

Artist and goofball Bobby Duke laminates together a few hunk of bass wood and carves them into the shape of a mug. But his craft project doesn’t end there, as he eventually transforms his creation into an awesome sculpture with the help of some colored pencils.

MZPA’s geodesic dome chair offers a private place for work, study, and relaxation. It’s open on the front for conversations, but its sides, roof, and padded interior provide a peaceful, personal space. Made from 51 triangular plywood panels connected to four metal legs.

Designed by Spain’s Woodendot, this desktop organizer will help you keep pens, business cards, paper clips and other office supplies in order. Each of its three diamond-shaped trays is handmade from solid pine wood, and can be arranged into a variety of patterns.

Outline Montreal’s foam masks have LEDs and a small controller that makes the lights automatically pulse in time with nearby sound. These new designs feature an improved controller that reacts better to sound that’s loud or from a nearby source.

“No chaos dammit.” The Art Assignment made this great overview of Jackson Pollock and his divisive drip paintings. He wasn’t the first to do it, nor will he be the last. But the timing and coverage of his short-lived peak marked a new level for abstract expressionism.

Woodworker Kyle Toth walks us through the process of crafting a massive 32″ diameter bowl by slicing, gluing, layering, and turning concentric rings of mahogany and curly maple wood. If you’ve got a cool $2100 to spend, you can buy the finished piece here.

(PG-13: Lyrics) The first thing you’ll notice about MGMT’s music video is that it stars Alex Karpovsky, best known for his role as Ray on Girls. But that’s not the only highlight of the clip. It’s the trippy “style transfer” VFX, which have been empowered by machine learning tech.

Before the characters we know and love first emerged on movie screens, there were other conceptual incarnations created by George Lucas and artist Ralph McQuarrie. The DAVE School envisions what the first movie might have looked like had those early ideas stuck.

Funnyman Matt Shirley is famous on Instagram for making hilarious charts and graphs on a whiteboard. He recently started an online shop where you can grab some of his graphical jokes as 8″x 10″ prints on cardstock. The Cycle of Adulthood needs to be taught in science class.

Artist Leontine van vliet will quickly captivate you as she sketches out a little pastel drawing inside of a circle traced from a tape roll. The original YouTube video gives away the surprise too early, hence the sped-up gfycat version.

We’ve seen knives being made using classic blacksmithing techniques, but Gough Custom, shows off how they make their Resolute MkIII knives using modern materials and CNC technology. Machines or not, there’s still a ton of labor and craftsmanship in each knife.

(PG-13: Language) Complex’s new show Jobs Unlisted is about uncommon professions. In its first episode, host Speedy Morman visited Pensole Footwear Design Academy to learn about designing sneakers. Eustace stayed up all night for you Speedy. Show some gratitude.

Korean barista Kangbin Lee creates beautiful, but temporary artworks in latte foam, painting detailed and colorful illustrations using food coloring and syrups as his media. His portfolio of drinkable art is as diverse as it is tasty.

Thomas Blanchard creates eye-popping visuals by spilling acrylic inks into a large vat, then capturing their movements in slow motion. In MYST, he introduces geometric and letter forms for the colorful inks to flow over with stunning results. Check out more of his work on Vimeo.

UK-based interior decor shop BespOak handmakes beautiful and unusual wall-mounted bookshelves designed to look like the branch structure of trees. Each one is inspired by the shape of a specific type of tree. Also available as standalone branches without trunks.

A neat demonstration designed to show off the precision and programmability of Intelligent Actuator’s technology, in which a grid comprised of dozens of mechanical actuators move up and down to guide four soccer balls along their appropriate paths.

Knives are typically made from tool steel. But the guys at Ollari’s show us how with the proper cutting blades and an angle grinder, a block of granite can be transformed into a sharp-edged cutting tool as well. We’re betting Primitive Technology would do the same with only a rock.

What starts out as a nondescript blob of clay provides the foundation for an impressively detailed recreation of Chewbacca’s head as artist Steven Richter creates a mold, then painstakingly places and trims hair to replicate the wookiee’s distinctive good looks.

A few years back, we saw breathtaking images of The Kelpies, a pair of 98-foot-tall horse sculptures in Falkirk, Scotland. Now you can see how they came together in this wonderful time-lapse by Walid Salhab, who captured over 120,000 individual images to complete the film.