Awesome Art & Design

Eclectic Asylum Art spent a total of 50 hours making this realistic portrait of Santa Claus on Microsoft Paint. It’s not as jaw dropping as Kyle Lambert’s iPad finger painting, but come on. It’s freaking Microsoft Paint.

Another beautifully-synchronized combination of dance and projected light by Japanese performance troupe Enra, directed by Nobuyuki Hanabusa, performed and choreographed by Saya Watatani and Maki Yokoyama.

Artist Li Hongbo creates sculptures which look like ordinary plaster busts, but they’re actually made from thousands of layers of paper glued together to form accordion-like structures. That skull is totally trippy. (Thanks Brooks!)

Print All Over Me (PAOM) lets you upload an apparel design, preview it on the canvas of your choice – a t-shirt, a sweater, a cap etc. – and order it straight away. You can even make money if you share your designs.

As is evidenced by its price tag, carbon fiber isn’t exactly an inexpensive material to work with. However, if you do buy Sly Kly’s badass playing cards, you’ll be treated to a deck that will probably outlast all of us. Choose matte or gloss.

Artist Yuken Teruya is a master at cutting intricate paper shapes. For his latest exhibition Notice – Forest Teruya cut tree shapes out of cheap paper bags and then assembled the trees inside of the bags to a dramatic effect.

Supermarché’s profile on John Baldessari, a prolific conceptual artist known for remixing photos to create narratives, using text as visual art and his awareness of the precarious value of high art. Narrated by Tom Waits.

Designed by Benjamin Vermeulen, MAGfurniture are flat-packed furniture pieces made of steel and wood. The wooden parts have strong magnets inside them, making it easy to assemble, disassemble and repair the furniture.

A wonderful series by comic book artist Mike Holmes (Bravest Warriors) in which he draws himself and his cat Ella in the style of different artists, cartoons and video games. He’s going to release a compilation soon.

The most bizarre gardening tool we’ve ever seen. Designed by Studio Total, Flowershells are 12-gauge shotgun shells that are loaded with flower seeds instead of deadly metal pellets. Perfect for rounding out your arsenal. This is my bloomstick!

Brian Lai drew a couple of sketches of Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine, but with a neat twist. Lai drew color negative sketches, which means his “actual” drawing will only be seen on an inverted photo of the sketch.

An easy to transport prefabricated home with a cement wood board exterior. The 290sq.ft. home has a bedroom, a living room/kitchen area and a bathroom, and comes with the necessary wiring and plumbing. Video here.

Inspired by the work of Nikola Tesla, designer Florian Dussopt’s EM table produces a low-current electromagnetic field, allowing fluorescent bulbs placed on or near its surface to wirelessly illuminate.

Artist Karl Gude proves the true value of a sharp pencil and a good eraser as he morphs a single sketch into 30 different faces on the same spot. We’re impressed that he didn’t wear through the paper. His drumming, on the other hand…

Artist Dan Shearn has a love of 1980s pop culture and a love of LEGO, so he combined these two into a series of illustrations, envisioning the decade’s iconic characters as minifigs. The Warriors is from 1979, but we’ll forgive him.

Ok, so you can’t actually climb to or from your parking spot at this garage in Utrecht, but the structure becomes much less of an eyesore with its two attached climbing walls. It also features a nice bike shelter and public transit connection.

These screw-on plastic frames are designed for mounting vinyl LP jackets. They let you display your collection while still allowing easy access to the records inside the jackets. Available in black and white. You can also order them here.

A proof of concept for a flexible coffee table that can transform into small laptop desks. Made by Carlo Ratti Assocati and Cassina, this table is part of a series of furniture built using modern technology and with modern users in mind.

This smart-alec set of durable placemats provides diagrams showing how to assemble four childhood favorites, including PB&J sammies, S’mores, banana splits and our favorite, “ants on a log.” Each measures 11″ x 17″. (Thanks Sam!)

Phillip K. Smith III turned a 70-year old dilapidated cabin into a light-based installation that embodies the word reflection in more ways than one. By day it mirrors the desert, by night it shines with LEDs. More here.

Animator Timor Barshtman pays tribute to director Quentin Tarantino by illustrating the connections between his films through the transformation of the actors who played a multiplicity of roles in them.

While we’d like it even better if it had three howling wolves on it, we’d still be happy to put Haoshi Design’s wolf and moon clock on our wall. Gently glows at when the lights go down. Made from resin, it measures ~9.84″ W x 2.36″ D.

French architect Jean Prouvé designed prefab homes back in the 1930s & 40s. To prove how amazing these homes were, art dealer Patrick Sequin disassembled one of his homes, packed it up, and had it reassembled it at Design Miami.