Awesome Art & Design

You’ll never forget where you put your phone, wallet, and keys if you drop them inside a human skull. Suck UK’s polyresin skull has lost its mind, so there’s plenty of space for holding your everyday accessories. It doubles as a sunglass and headphone holder and comes in bone white, goth black, or flashy gold.

It’s easy to find LED grids that can be programmed to display animations. So this build by Dr. Tõnis Gadgets that uses fiber optics to direct light into a smaller matrix seems unnecessarily complicated. It still looks cool, like something out of the engineering lab in a science fiction movie. The display was inspired by Elliotmade’s fiber optic display from Instructables.

Author Brian Barrett looks back at the history of the LEGO Minifigure and how it has evolved from a simple yellow figure into a pop culture icon. The 144-page hardcover book examines the evolution of the Minifig, along with interviews, essays, photos, infographics, and archival visuals celebrating these beloved plastic people.

Maker Ali Spagnola teamed up with the L.A. Department of Public Health to help promote sexual health. Her project? Inflate thousands of condoms for an art exhibit inspired by Andy Warhol’s Silver Clouds. It took three days to blow them all up. After filling some by mouth (and trombone), Ali and her pals sped things up with compressed air.

Drone pilot and photographer Joshua Turner visited Shanghai, China, where he managed to fly his Iflight quadcopter alongside the nation’s tallest skyscraper. Currently, the third-tallest building in the world, the sleek 2,073-foot-tall Shanghai Tower looks incredible through the lens of Joshua’s GoPro11 Mini camera. He also flew around a few other tall structures.

This charming animated short by 16-year-old CG artist John Torres looks at a day in the life of a robotic farmer as it patiently waits to harvest vegetables to put into a pot of homemade soup. John says his film “highlights the virtues of perseverance, mindfulness, and the joy that can be found in the simplest of tasks.” Created with Blender.

A while back, we saw a bass guitar made from LEGO bricks. Musician BERNTH built a LEGO acoustic guitar. Other than the neck, strings, and bridge, his guitar is pure LEGO goodness. Rather than focusing on the build process, his video showcases his new song, Memories. We’re impressed he was able to such a rich sound from its plastic body.

3D-printed plastic objects don’t get very shiny. HEN3DRIK shows us how he electroplated a 3D model of Iron Man’s helmet to make it look like the ones in the movies. The process involves preparing the plastic and applying conductive copper paint before electroplating it with copper, gold, and palladium. The red was added using transparent red acrylic paint.

The Chiefs might have walked away from this year’s Super Bowl with the Vince Lombardi trophy, but that award has nothing on this handmade trophy by artist Blake McFarland. He crafted this beautiful scrap wood football sculpture for his pals who beat him at fantasy football. While he’s an expert at carving, Blake used the project to learn how to turn wood on a lathe.

The wallet-friendly Komi Sketch Ruler helps you draw perfectly spaced lines, circles, angles, and more. It works in mm, inch, 150 / 300 dpi px, and pica scales and has conversion formulas on its face. It also doubles as a straight edge for cutting and a paper clip. It’s made from FR-4, the same sturdy material used in printed circuit boards.

There are a number of LED light curtains on the market, but Twinkly’s is the most densely packed with RGB lights we’ve seen. The result – more detailed patterns and animations. It uses a mobile app to display custom images and can also mirror a Windows PC screen. Available in 3.3 x 3.3-foot and 1.6 x 7.9-foot versions.

An ordinary spray paint can only produce a single color. Ukrainian street artist Vitaly Tesh invented a spray can that can output numerous colors. After an earlier effort to build the system, his updated Graffiti Color Mixer 2.0 produces smooth transitions between four source colors. His custom-built remote control lets him switch colors on the fly.

Mathematician Henry Segerman is back with another fascinating mechanism – a six-axis rack. It’s built with a dozen gears and sticks that look like long, green crinkle fries. The combination of parts locks the structure together, and moving any stick makes all of the others move. Like Henry’s other designs, you can download the 3D printer files Printables.

We recently checked out a supersized LEGO minifig that a maker created with a 3D printer. Not to be outdone, pastry artist Amaury Guichon has gone even bigger – only his giant minifig is made out of chocolate, making it substantially more edible. Amaury’s 4-foot-tall mini-chef showpiece sits alongside a huge chocolate LEGO brick.

We’re lovestruck by Patator’s animated music video for French trip-hop group Chinese Man’s poetic track Too Late. The stop-motion clip drops us into a magical world where horses breakdance and scratch records and storied lives play out on a human-sized hamster wheel.

We know that the Las Vegas Sphere is covered with millions of LEDs outside and has an immersive screen that surrounds its audience. Illustrator Jared Owen takes us much deeper inside the 18,600-seat entertainment venue to look at its architecture, construction, and technology.

Plasma is created by adding energy to a gas. It’s why stars glow in the sky. On a smaller scale, man-made plasma can be created with high-voltage electricity. The Plasma Channel applied this knowledge to one of the sweetest knives ever, a dual-blade weapon with plasma arcing through its center. He hopes to eventually replicate Halo’s plasma sword.

The artists of Martin Gerdin Glass create incredible glass sculptures inspired by nature. Much of what their studio produces are blown glass fish. In this clip, we get a brief look at the finishing touches going onto a glossy, great white shark. Check out their Instagram channel for more footage of their production process.

There are two things we know about Campbell’s chicken noodle soup: It’s great when you’re sick, and Andy Warhol turned it into an iconic piece of pop art. Now this soup can keeps your valuables safe. Big Mouth sells this decoy version of the red-and-white-labeled can with a removable bottom for hiding cash, jewelry, and other small items.

Donny Chen, aka SleepyCow, is a master at making seemingly impossible LEGO creations. We’ve been wowed by his LEGO bicycle and LEGO Ideas grand piano. Donny’s latest creation is a mind-blowing golden dragon covered with 1300 scales and assembled from more than 6500 pieces. LEGO fan Ben Cossy takes a look at this artful dragon and explains how it was built.

Hey, Ya! Playing card company, Theory11 teamed up with beloved duo Outkast to create this fantastic deck. The cards come packed in a red velvet box with gold foil artwork, and their backs are decorated with woodcuts of speakers, UFOs, and Cadillacs. The card fronts are illustrated with custom artwork of André 3000, Big Boi, and references to their music.

Keep all of your art supplies organized and ready to use in Xiem’s versatile tool bag. It features a metal frame wrapped in durable canvas and a wooden handle. Inside, you’ll find two large compartments, 16 holsters, and 17 pockets in a variety of sizes. It’s ideal for carrying ceramic tools, paintbrushes, pens/pencils, and more.

If there’s one thing we know about LEGO minifigures, it’s that they’re mini. It’s right there in the name. Maker Fabien Pohl wanted a bigger minifig, so he supersized the little dude using his Creality K1 Max 3D printer. After printing and sanding all the parts, he spray-painted them to a shiny gloss finish. He also made a dapper banana outfit for his minifig.