Awesome Art & Design

This unique furniture piece from Axes and Hose Co. is a great gift for a firefighter or anyone who appreciates our selfless first-responders. Each bench is handmade from wood, wrapped in recycled fire hoses woven to form its seat. We particularly appreciate the Thin Red Line design. Measures 40.5″ L x 20.5″ W x 20″ H.

Sometimes, the best kind of lock is the kind that doesn’t look like a lock at all. B-Star Crafts shows off a simple, but effective method that keeps doors or drawers locked using hidden neodymium magnets. It’s a trick that’s frequently found in puzzle boxes but can be easily applied to furniture and cabinets as well.

(PG-13) Academy Award-winner Alejandro G. Iñárritu (Babel, Birdman, The Revenant) is the mind behind this epic film about a Mexican journalist and documentarian whose return to his country triggers memories and fears from his past. The film’s surrealist visual approach is sure to wow some and bewilder others.

Field Notes teamed up with Nashville’s Hatch Show Print to create a series of limited-edition, memo books cut from custom-printed posters. The 3-packs of notebooks feature letterpressed type in vibrant colors. Field Notes’ Aaron Draplin takes us inside the famed print shop in the short film Rubbing Elbows with Ghosts.

One thing you have to get used to if you’re a pastry artist is that your work will eventually be eaten. In the case of Amaury Guichon’s chocolate piñata, this work of art is about to be demolished with a baseball bat. It took him five days to make it and seconds to smash it to pieces. We hope he shared some with the camera crew.

Pokémon will recognize this character as the Blastoise – a big turtle with powerful water cannons under its shell. 3D Sanago crafted this statue of the turtle and rigged it to shoot steam from its cannons instead of water. He used a stone to provide a curved template for drawing the body with a 3D printing pen. Turn subtitles on.

Artists often like to paint what they’re looking at, but this one takes things to another level. Döuyin contributor tcmss1.0 looked out beyond their tiny, tilted canvas and painted precisely what they saw – preserving the perspective and making the painting gradually disappear into the background.

If you’re looking for tips and techniques for shooting great photos, look no further than COOPH. Their YouTube channel is packed with great tutorials like this one which shows how to shoot a photo of a miniature Ford Mustang launched off a ramp. This shot required multiple exposures to layer in the sparks, smoke, and dust.

Lena from aboxfullofstuff shows off Azure, an intricate dragon puppet she created with beautiful blue scales, horns, and details like moving eyeballs and smoke that comes out of its nostrils. We love how her costume has a fake left arm to conceal that her real arm is inside of the puppet.

Brad from Fix This Build That shows how he fabricated a coffee table that’s great parties. He built the table from cedar and MDF, and it packs a beer cooler, Bluetooth speakers, and recessed LED lights that animate to the beat of the music. He had a few challenges along the way, but the end result looks great.

We’ve seen lots of things made out of popsicle sticks, but they’re typically larger structures. In this video from 3JWings, they show us how they made a 1:300-scale replica of a Gulfstream G560 jet airplane by stacking, gluing, and carving the wooden sticks.

These wooden notebooks from Etsy seller Eugenie2 make a great gift. They’re made from 1/8″ baltic birch wood, which has been stained and sealed, then laser engraved to reveal the natural color. They can be personalized with the recipient’s name and interests, and come with 60 sheets of blank or ruled ivory linen paper.

Calligrapher Tohgutakumi previously showed us how to draw an alphabet that looked like dogs. This time, he kicks things off with a bird. Watch and learn how each of these ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs maps to a letter in the English alphabet.

Filmmaker Thomas Blanchard is back with another experimental film of fluids interacting. He created the hypnotic scenes by mixing paint, oil, and liquid soap, swirled together in a circular motion. The crisp and colorful macro footage is accompanied by a smooth an ethereal soundtrack by Alexis Dehimi.

Nerdforge has impressed us with their amazing PC case builds and bookbinding. In this video, Martina ponders how to determine the optimal time to spend on a project by painting the same scene over three different periods. Is there a point of diminishing returns, or do things just keep getting better?

A while back, LEGO expert Akiyuki showed off a series of mechanisms called mangle racks. Now they’re back with a much more complicated build based on the same principles. This fascinating clock uses a mangle rack to gradually spin its hands around the dial. A time-lapse at the end shows how remarkably accurate it is.