Awesome Art & Design

This wireless keypad is the perfect add-on for iPad artists who use Procreate. It provides quick access to 23 shortcuts so you can focus on drawing instead of fumbling through menus. It has buttons for switching brushes, changing pen tip sizes, sampling and selecting colors, changing layers, undo/redo, and more.

Celebrate your love for music and print art with Taschen’s compact (6.5″ x 8.8″) but densely-packed 512-page compendium of album art. The book features classic images from more than 750 albums, along with a fact sheet listing the key artists involved in its creation.

Ross the Random is back with another cool transformation video. This time, he took an ordinary steel spoon and turned it into a beautiful work of art. First, he carefully cut out a dragon pattern using a jeweler’s saw. Then, he used a grinder and file to turn its handle into a tiny sword. We love the blue finish he added with the torch.

Does comic collecting get your Spidey senses tingling? Chronicle Books boxed 100 postcards of the greatest Spider-Man comic book covers by such artists as Steve Ditko, John Romita Sr. and Jr., and Todd McFarlane. The whole Marvel-ous gang is here, from Peter Parker to Gwen Stacy, and villains Venom, Green Goblin and Doc Ock.

While his eyes always gave us the creeps, Thomas the Tank Engine is a pretty charming character. But in the hands of Adam from North of the Border, he’s is anything but pleasant. To turn Thomas evil, Adam sculpted a clay version of the anthropomorphic train with a blood red body, pointy teeth, and spider legs.

Standing 20 stories tall, The Wood Hotel is the world’s tallest hotel mainly made from wood. Located at the birthplace of cross-country skiing, Skellefteå in Swedish Lapland, the 205-room property was built from locally harvested spruce and pine which smells awesome and absorbs more CO2 than it uses.

Bonsai trees are typically living plants that require an immense amount of care and precision pruning. These talented artists show us how they make bonsais that require no watering – using thousands of strands of stiff metal wire to create their intricate designs. We wonder how long the process takes to do in real time.

Rapidly spinning objects can result in some cool, Spirograph-like patterns. LEGO mechanical builder Yoshihito Isogawa shows how different arrangements of LEGO Technic gears create different geometric patterns when spun in front of a camera’s lens. It would be interesting to see some larger and more complicated designs.

Multimedia artist Kelly Heaton makes these unique synthesizer circuits in the shape of birds. Not only do they look like our fine feathered friends, but the sounds they make are reminiscent of birdsong. Check out Kelly’s Instagram for more of her wonderful electronic projects.

We’ve never seen a slingshot that looks quite like this one. Wood Art TG made this unique and elegant weapon from scratch. It has an elongated body, an elastic launching mechanism, and a finger trigger and can dish out some seriously destructive power.

CustomBigCartel makes wooden sofa tables that look like giant sneaker boxes. Their lids open up to reveal a large, illuminated storage area that’s perfect for holding shoes but also works for other items. They all come with Nike or Air Jordan logos and are available in 6-pair and 12-pair sizes.

Miguel Ortega and Tran Ma’s animated short is one of the most artful things we’ve seen rendered in Unreal Engine 5, and its production design and storytelling are top-notch. It chronicles two sisters, and the evil one of them unleashes when jealousy takes over. Their behind-the-scenes series delves deep into the filmmaking process.

Filmmaker Scott Portingale and composer Gorkem Sen created this engrossing short film using macro and time-lapse photography to explore how fluids move, and chemicals react and change states. Each of its vignettes feels like a journey to a strange new world. Gorkem’s yaybahar perfectly complements the footage.

AI image generation technology continues to improve – though it’s still not great at dealing with things like text and logos. While the results of ThomasDotCodes’ breakfast cereal experiment are questionable, we enjoyed watching the weird stuff styleGAN2 came up with when trained with 700 images of cereal boxes.

VFX artists have been making actors look younger or older for a while, but the effect is costly and labor-intensive. Researchers from Disney, ETH Zurich, and UW-Madison are showing off an AI tech called Face Re-aging Network (FRAN), which can perform the feat in five seconds per frame. It seems better at aging than de-aging, though.

Washi tape is a paper tape that’s ideal for wrapping gifts and embellishing journals or notes. Cognitive Surplus makes a fun series of washi tapes in patterns inspired by biology, botany, astronomy, chemistry, math, engineering, and more. Our favorites include the microbiology, Mars rovers, heartbeat, and skeleton designs.