Art & Design

We’re not quite sure why we find this CGI simulation of noodles being tossed about so satisfying, but we do. Somebody needs to turn this into a video game where the objective is to transfer all the noodles from the bowl to the glass using only that fork. We’d pay at least $1.99 for that game.

Artist DP Truong is capable of drawing portraits with all kinds of interesting techniques. For this image of Will Smith inspired by Gemini Man, she used the line-by-line approach that a dot-matrix or inkjet printer would use to create an image from top to bottom.

When you see an old painting hanging on the wall at a museum, it often has had restoration work to preserve its original majesty. In this video from The Museum of Modern Art, conservator Diana Hartman shows us the painstaking work required to repair the fraying canvas of artist Paula Modersohn-Becker’s 1907 self portrait.

Photographer Chris Bryan’s short film is comprised entirely of awe-inspiring footage of ocean waves, captured in slow motion using a Phantom Flex 4K camera with Leica Summilux lenses, and custom underwater housings. The level of detail, contrast, and vibrancy of the colors is truly something to behold.

Visual artist Kevin McGloughlin teamed up with with musician Max Cooper for this mindbending audio-visual collaboration. Reminiscent of the work of the great Philip Glass, Cooper’s repetitive and driving sounds are reflected in surreal scenes which were digitally copied, tweaked, and pasted to repeat endlessly.

Level up your style and mise en place skills with these sleek and sharp ceramic kitchen knives. The set includes a blue-handled 4″ paring knife, 5″ utility knife, 5″ serrated knife, 6″ chef knife, and 7″ large chef knife, along with a black geometric knife block, designed by Christian Bird. Save 58% in The Awesomer Shop.

If you ski or snowboard, there’s a good chance you’ve seen the work of artist James Niehues. You just didn’t know it. You see, James hand painted many of the maps we use to navigate the trails. Now you can own a collection of 200 of his intricate works in this beautiful coffee table book, a great gift for any winter sports fanatic.

Crafty Transformer takes the cardboard boxes he receives Amazon orders in and converts them into awesome weapons and machines inspired by video games. Among our favorites are the Gundam wrench mace, the Yu-Gi-Oh! duel disk, and the Monster Hunter bowgun.

This unique accent lamp shows off the physics of standing waves, persistence of vision, and stroboscopic effects. By spinning a string at varying speeds, and illuminating it with colorful LEDs, a variety of cool sine waves emerge, with preset effects like northern lights, volcano, eclipse, carnival, and more.

Artist Young-Sung Kim captured time-lapse footage over the course of ten months, as he painstakingly created a hyper-real oil painting of a fish. Everything looks so incredibly shiny, we just want to reach out and touch it. The painting is currently for sale from Saatchi Art.

Artist Felix Vorreiter’s unusual timepiece uses a single, long piece of string that feed through a series of pulleys. The rope is marked with dots which align to display the current time. The current clock only has 120 minutes of string, as it would take about 4000ft to cover a full day.

Created by Carlo Ratti for Italian energy company ENI, this unique kiosk is designed to show how technology can enable sustainability. Its long, circular rail gradually releases oranges to be juiced, then dries and mills the discarded peels to create a bioplastic filament used by a 3D printer to make biodegradable cups.

Bcontact’s hybrid bamboo staircase is hinged and attaches to one wall, so it can fold up flat when not in use. They feature an aluminum handrail on one side that folds along with the stairs. Each one is custom-fitted for the specific installation. The video shows off a few other folding items from designer Zev Bianchi.

The Japanese craft of Kumiko requires the cutting and assembly of thousands of tiny, carefully cut sticks of wood, each individually placed to form intricate lattice panels. This video from Japan’s Shiroishi Woodworks gives us an idea of the level of effort that goes into each piece, as woodworker Tatsuo Kurozu plies his craft.

Filmmaker Gioacchino Petronicce’s abstract short film is as much a feast for the ears as it is for the eyes. It takes on the hefty subject of humankind’s impact on the world, exploring our feats and foibles, and contrasting them against images and sounds of nature. Turn up the volume for maximum impact.

Learn to build visuals for your own video games with this series of six intro-level courses, which cover the creation of game assets using free and open source tools like Inkscape and DragonBones. You’ll learn to make 2D characters and backgrounds, animate their movements, and design UIs and game branding and logos.

Australian artist David Morrell bends metal wire to form roller coaster style tracks, on which marbles spend their days rolling round and round in a perpetual loop. His kinetic sculptures are available in a wide variety of sizes and shapes, and he accepts commission work.

While it’s unlikely most of you have a system or display capable of displaying 8K resolution at 60fps, Armadas’ incredibly vibrant and razor-sharp aerial footage captured around Japan looks great in 1080p or 4K as well. Locations include Hakodate, Yokohama, Nagoya, Kyoto, and Tokyo.

Flat-pack model makers Ugears offers this very cool kit that lets you build a mechanical monowheel that actually drives. It has retractable training wheels, but can roll without them on smooth surfaces. With 300 parts, it looks like a challenging 3-hour build. No glue required.

We love the perspectives in the latest vid from Harun Mehmedinovic and Gavin Heffernan of the Skyglow Project. Here, they offer a glimpse into what our evenings might have been like if we had lived with the ancient Anasazi. Bonus: an appearance at 1:03 by something bloody good.

Forgive the punny title, but artist Keith Williams‘ description of his wooden geodesic sphere is factually accurate. Watch as he takes a bunch of pieces of knotty wood into an impressive sculpture. They also briefly doubled as dominoes.

There are a million different Bluetooth speakers out there, so in a quest to create something a little different, woodworker Matt Jordan decided to build one out of a hunk of wood from an apple tree. Watch as he turns the log on his lathe, adding coffee grounds and colorful powder along the way to give the finished piece a dramatic look.

THX has taken wraps off an all-new version of its iconic “Deep Note” trailer, created by the team at American Meme. It’s packed with vibrant CG animations, and a wonderful array of dynamic, spatial sounds to put any audio system through its paces. Sounds especially great on headphones. Go behind the scenes with its creators here.

It may not play music like Wintergatan’s marble-powered musical instrument, but we still enjoyed listening to the soothing sounds and watching the hypnotic movements of this wooden marble machine, which serves as an example of the modules you can buy from its creator.

Gold lion’s gonna tell me where the light is. Urban hunters, bring the king of the jungle to your home, office, or business with this shiny, low-poly, golden trophy lion head. It measures nearly 3 feet-tall, and is handmade in Ukraine from MDF plywood, paper, and plastic.

Artist Arktk Berkut created the mindblowing visuals to accompany Moa Pillar’s track And the Moon Stopped, complementing the dizzying ambient track with a kaleidoscopic journey through a virtual world made up of digitally-manipulated photographs.

In tribute to SpongeBob SquarePants‘ creator Stephen Hillenburg, a group of 86 talented animators organized by ExtraAbsorbent teamed up to recreate the entire first episode of Nickelodeon’s classic cartoon, with each scene done in a different style. Full credits list here.

Rus Khasanov’s experimental short film features vivid and colorful imagery created by shooting macro images of blobs of specially-formulated paints colliding to create new and larger formations, which are at times reminiscent of celestial bodies. Music by Dmitry Evgrafov.

Animator Joseph Melhuish presents a welcome video for observers and travelers to the planets of the fictitious “Udaya” system, which happens to share its name with Moon B’s album, from whence this smooth and funky electronic instrumental track comes.

CG artist pedro3dbh’s short film sends us on an epic journey deep within the most mundane of objects, the tip of an ordinary ball-point pen. As the virtual camera zooms deeper and deeper into its structure, we eventually reach the subatomic level.