Awesome Art & Design

Pastry artist Amaury Guichon never ceases to amaze us with his edible artworks. His latest creation is a larger-than-life box of matches made from yummy things like vanilla sable, chocolate caramel ganache, milk chocolate, and caramelized marshmallow. You need matches to light a campfire, so it only goes to reason these taste like S’mores.

Burls Art is back with another creative guitar build. This time, he made a unique electric guitar with a 3D depth illusion with the same technique used to make some wooden cutting boards. Blake and his friend started by cutting maple and walnut boards into strips of varying thicknesses, then stacked, glued, and cut them into wedges to create the pattern.

Mangazi Music has an awesome way of showing off his guitar-playing skills: the neck of his electric guitar shows lyrics and animations in sync with his performance. It appears that he uses a green screen and motion tracking to superimpose perfectly timed graphics onto the guitar, and the results are impressive.

The slimline Good + Evil Omen wristwatch was designed by “recovering architect” Christo Logan. We love the clean, but bold choices like the offset, asymmetrical design, flush-mounted crown, and 3-dimensional face reminiscent of the seats in a theater-in-the-round. Its D-shaped case is made from sandblasted stainless steel in either grey or black.

Photographers Dustin Snipes and Mason Mashon teamed up to capture amazing images of the 2024 solar eclipse with the help of Red Bull aerobatic pilots Kevin Coleman and Pete McCleod. It took weeks of planning and precise calculations to pull off the perfect shot, and the pilots had to fly at a low altitude and just four feet apart as the eclipse reached totality.

This 5.5-foot-tall glass clock from Urwerk and Nixie expert Dalibor Farny contains eight large Nixie tubes and a total of 1445 parts. In addition to displaying the time and date, it can show how many kilometers the Earth has revolved around the Sun on a given day or year-to-date. Just 33 clocks will be produced, with a retail price of 55,000 CHF (~ USD 60,700).

We’ve seen some unusual shoes thanks largely to the art collective MSCHF. But artist Canyaon has them beat in terms of variety and creativity. His Instagram page is packed with weird, wild, and impractical shoe designs, including ride-on off-road sneakers, steel welder’s boots, BBQ shoes that hold hot dogs and spatulas, and cocktail-dispensing winter boots.

Spring has sprung for Field Notes’ colorful Spring 2024 Quarterly Edition. Three original abstract designs by Chicago artist Emmy Star Brown grace the covers of this limited-edition 3-pack. Printed on high-quality cover stock, the artwork pops with contrasting glossy and dull varnishes. Inside are three page styles: ruled, dot graph, and plain.

This might look like abstract art, but it’s based entirely on data from Wikipedia. Developer adumb wrote code to graph the relationships between content on the crowdsourced encyclopedia. The image maps over 6.3 million Wikipedia articles and 195 million links between them. adumb explains some interesting things he observed along the way.

Bentley’s latest masterpiece is a unique Bentayga Hybrid hand-painted by Stephen Wiltshire, MBE, an autistic savant architectural artist who can sketch detailed cityscapes after a single viewing. Titled “Belonging Bentayga,” the $200K+ Alpine Green car features 29 people and landmarks to embody the unity and diversity of our world while celebrating neurodivergence and craftsmanship.

It’s been over 50 years since Pink Floyd released Dark Side of the Moon. To celebrate the occasion, drummer Nick Mason asked fans to create their own animated music videos for each song on the classic prog rock album. This playlist is gradually revealing all ten winners plus behind-the-scenes interviews with the artists.

We love IFL Watches’ custom colored G-Shock watches. Good thing they expanded the collection using the thin and sporty 43mm GMA-S2100 as their base. The playful rainbow accents on the dial and bezels contrast nicely with the all black case, but there are also see through and other colorways in the CasiOak Mini Collection.

Samsung made a little brother for the Frame TV. Behind the Music Frame’s 8″ x 10″ photo holder is a surprisingly punchy Dolby Atmos speaker. It has two tweeters, two mid-range drivers, and two subwoofers. It can stream music from most services including Spotify and Chromecast, as well as via Bluetooth.

Filmmaker Thomas Blanchard was inspired to make this short film after seeing the nuclear reaction effects in the movie Oppenheimer. The images you see here weren’t created with CGI, but with alcohol inks, gold powder, magic candles, an electric screwdriver, paper clips, and a laboratory shaker. Most of the sequences were filmed in his kitchen, other than the fire.

A beautiful modern pocket knife from Craighill and design studio Chen Chen & Kai Williams. The Sidewinder’s unique folding mechanism features a duo of wavy handle sections which move in concert to reveal its blade. Its design was inspired by a parallel ruler that Kai played with when he was a kid, combined with the way a snake moves through sand.

The Instagram page for keta_valve has a strange assortment of industrial equipment and DIY animations of pandas. This video falls into the latter category, showing off a clever animation technique that uses an iPhone moving through a sequence of paper cutouts to create motion. Watching how it was made was just as entertaining as the finished animation.

Artist Herschel Shapiro makes amazing geometric wall art. He starts by 3D printing petal-like shapes from sustainably sourced bioplastic, then sands and paints each piece to produce color gradients before attaching them. The sculptures are available for purchase on the artist’s Etsy shop in various patterns and colors. His limited-edition Maelstrom is our fave.

This LED accent lamp features color-changing facets you control with your phone. The GLORB is 9.8″ across, or about as big as a basketball, and includes a tabletop stand and a ceiling hook. It’s got a USB-C port, so it can run on a wall charger or a battery pack, can react to music, and can sync multiple units together.

This cool, single-purpose device connects to your phone and displays album art. Instead of a standard screen, it uses a grid of 4096 individual RGB LEDs to create artful, pixelated images. It works with iOS and Android devices and is compatible with Spotify, Apple Music, Sonos, and last.fm.

North of the Border and Studson Studios both like to make weird, creepy, and nerdy sculptures. For fun, they recorded voiceovers for each other, with Adam reporting on Studson’s literal Mario Kart build and Studson voicing Adam’s wonderfully demented McDonaldland official Mayor McCheese. Those thin layers of clay really do look like Velveeta.

Do you like music and math? Then you’ll dig polyrhythms. JLChnToZ (Vistanz) created this captivating video that displays a representation of these complex and often hypnotic sounds in concentric circles. For maximum effect, put the video on full screen, dim the lights, and crank up the volume.

Damascus steel is made by pressing layers of forged metal together. HANS shows how he made a gorgeous dagger using thousands of steel bearing balls. The resulting metal pattern is something he calls Dragon Skin. After making the blade, he fabricated a brass crossguard and a wooden handle. It’s based on a design by Neels Van Den Berg of Black Dragon Forge.

Science expert Joe Myheck shows how he made a unique crown fit for a mermaid queen by pouring a crucible filled with molten metal into a vat of water-absorbing Orbeez gel beads. The metal he used is called Nordic gold – a colorful alloy composed of copper, aluminum, zinc, and tin.