THE BEST Art

If the crackpots out there are right, there are just over 300 days before the world ends, so you might as well enjoy some cool art before it’s over? The calendar also lists mankind’s great achievements.

Special makeup effects artist Kevin Kirkpatrick made prosthetic models of the legendary Beavis and Butt-Head to show what they’d look like in real life; we wouldn’t want to meet them in a dark alley.

Dinoprints lets you upload a picture that will then be superimposed onto a detailed illustration of a dinosaur (or a wooly mammoth) and turned into a 24″x36″ print. We hope they accept group pics.

(Briefly NSFW) Sebastian Schmieg took a single image and fed it into Google Image Search, then picked its top “similar image” over and over, gradually morphing through over 2950 images.

Got two minutes? Watch kinetic artist Joseph Herscher take a sip of coffee and see fun Rube Goldberg hijinks ensue in this entertaining vid. Bonus: calm hamster at 1:30. (Thanks everyone!)

You might have a whole new type of weird crush on your favorite Disney princess thanks to these realistic character renderings from Finnish design student Jirka Väätäinen.

What can you do in 2 minutes and 20 seconds? In that time Fabian Gaete Maureira can make one painting and finish half of another. They’re small and simple, sure, but you try pulling that off.

Using a similar technique to Mark Khaisman, Zorn creates scenes of light and shadow using strips and cut pieces of brown packing tape. If you travel, here’s where you can find his work.

Riusuke Fukahori creates incredible depth in his artworks by painting a layer at a time onto acrylic resin, until a 3-dimensional image is formed, sort of like how 3D printers work. More photos here.

The gorgeous Three Cubes Colliding is a functional cube-shaped sculpture and kite, made from 3D printed connectors, carbon fiber rods and aerospace fabric; the video complements it nicely.

We may only see snowflakes dancing in the air for the next few months but we can still enjoy these long-exposure photos of Golden fireflies taken from 2008-2011 in Japan.

ShortList.com put together this collection of fan-made posters for Stanley Kubrick’s horror classic The Shining, ranging from the abstract to minimal to flat out creepy. REDRUM, indeed.

Multi-talented artist Brian Chan from the MIT Hobby shop has created a wonderful award-winning collection of complex, intricate origami insects, made from uncut, single sheets of paper.

Ed Barrett’s animated film tells the tale of a man who works at the top of a tall crane, and lives there to escape the world below. But his solitude is soon interrupted by never-ending vertical progress.

Among the many talents of Guy Laramee is sculpting. His projects Biblios and The Great Wall are made of thick tomes carved into landscapes, from mountains to canyons to ancient temples.

Photographer Ian Hobson produces incredible, colorful effects using LEDs and cold cathode tubes as his paintbrushes. He also experiments with Arduino-based devices to create some patterns.

Offering intricately handpainted sneakers and high-tops, Bangkok, Thailand’s WHAT’s Shop customizes shoes with everyone from Daft Punk to Chucky, and Darth Vader to The Dark Knight.

Peter Sluszka’s wonderful Morphology is a brief but fun claymation treat for the eyes; with these skills, we’d like to see something even more substantial. We love what happens after the fox.

Charles Bergquist put together this reel of eye-popping slow motion footage he shot over the course of the year, using the Olympus i-Speed 3 camera, which grabs HD footage at up to 2000fps.

Simple but very eye-catching, this ominous looking screenprinted lunar calendar from Brazilian designer Dimitre Lima politely leaves out the part where the Moon crashes into the Earth.

Fans of Terry Gilliam will appreciate the director’s warped sensibilities in this animation done using his trademark collage animation style all the way back in 1968. He’s brought joy to the world, indeed.

It’s Fruit Ninja gone universal and existential in the music video for Pelican, the single from British indie rockers The Maccabees’ upcoming second album Given to the Wild. Making-of video here.

With a similar sensibility to Natsumi Hayashi’s levitation pics, photographer Li Wei shoots surreal and incredible moments using only acrobatics, mirrors and wire-fu, not Photoshop.

Like the musical ones we enjoy, architect/designer Luis Urculo created his own Covers, a clever short film in which iconic monuments in architecture are reinvented as models with everyday objects.

An eye-popping time-lapse video shot using HDR exposure effects and a camera motion-control rig. Shot in the Czech Republic by Samádhi Production over the course of about two months.

Eclectic Method arms its beams and shines their blinding light on pop culture references to lasers in their latest musical megacut. Plus, it’s got a frickin’ good beat and you can dance to it. MP3 here.