Awesome Art

Mechanical engineer Kiyoshi Adachi created this wonderful work of kinetic wall art which features a tiny metal man who turns a crank, setting into motion a ballet of spinning gears and dancing rods. Those elliptical gears are especially cool.

You could cover your walls with paint or wallpaper, or you could do something a bit more special like woodworker Paul Jackman did. He used an X-CARVE Pro CNC machine to make 800 plywood hexagons, cut them to varying heights, colored them with Minwax stains, then glued them to his wall in an abstract pattern.

Printing and silkscreening produce full-color images by separating colors into cyan, magenta, yellow, and black, then printing them a layer in a dot pattern. This artist does the same, only using markers on transparencies. They didn’t bother with black because CMY is enough to create most colors, just without much contrast.

Gorillaz co-creator Jamie Hewlett presents a 288-page coffee table book filled with new interpretations of 2D, Murdoc, Niccals, Noodle, and Russel Hobbs, by 40 fellow artists and friends like Craig McCracken, Jack Black, and Robert Smith. Printed and bound with luxury art paper in Verona, Italy. Pre-orders ship starting 4.2022.

Select any map you want, and Foster Leathercraft will make you a custom work of wall art by carving and embossing real leather. Each map is mounted to a sturdy fiberboard backing, and can be framed for just a few dollars more. They offer small, medium, and large sizes.

Vietnam-based artists The Wooden Model Design build incredibly detailed laser-cut wood models, including replicas of professional camera equipment. Among their creations are a Sony Alpha 1, a Hasselblad 500CM, and a RED Komodo 6K, and a Mamiya RZ67.

Illustrating just how interdependent the world has become, artist Neil Mendoza built The Fragility of Complexity, a motorized, kinetic art installation composed of a row of hammers that rotate perilously close to a series of moving light bulbs. Neil says only a single light bulb was broken during its construction.

Artist Steven Richter is known for creating impressively realistic busts. In this video from 2020, he makes a 1:2-scale sculpture of himself which he posed making an even tinier 1:4-scale version of himself. We need to go deeper!

South Carolina’s Moore Than Just a Book makes works of illuminated using layers of laser-cut paper under glass to create a silhouetted depth effect. Our favorite is this scene inspired by the world of Super Mario. It measures 8″h x 10″w and comes with either a black or white frame.

After working with some black palm wood and seeing its unusual end-grain pattern, artist Andy Phillip wanted to make a piece of art from it. So he cut some slices of the wood, attached them to a plastic form, covered them in resin, then turned the whole thing on his lathe. The finished piece looks like it could make a cool bowling ball.

These unique maps are printed onto an aluminum panel, combining vintage cartography with a modern aesthetic. Designs are available for a variety of U.S. cities as well as a world map, in sizes starting at 12″ x 16″ up to 24″ x 36″. Sale prices through 11.2.2021 from Touch of Modern.

Artist Michael Pederson has been placing miniature signs and dioramas around parks and other public places in Sydney, Australia. The signs help guide ants, birds, and other small creatures through their tiny worlds. The airport for pigeons is our favorite.

Artist and engineer Robert Spillner created this unique plaything – a disc filled with a sparkly fluid that looks like an atmosphere swirling around a planet. As you shake and move the disc, the metallic liquid creates an endless variety of organic patterns. Its particles can also be influenced by a magnet placed outside of its chamber.

Realm Crafts spent a full year working on this incredible cross-stitch, packed with all 151 first-generation Pokémon characters. While we would have loved it if the time-lapse had more in-between frames to show us, the artistry of the work more than makes up for it.

Diamond painting kits offer a fresh take on paint-by-numbers. They let you recreate works of art by placing tiny rhinestones to create shiny, pixelated versions of pieces like Van Gogh’s Starry Night. In addition to the sets we found on Amazon, the guys at Pretty Neat Creative can make custom kits based on your own images.

Gav of The Slow Mo Guys poured paint onto a wooden disc, then spun it with a drill at speeds up to 1500 RPM. While there’s nothing particularly notable about spin art, what makes this video interesting is the rotation synchronized high-speed footage that shows how the colorful patterns emerge in a split second.