Awesome Art

These beautiful playing cards from Neversleep Co feature imagery of cats dressed in samurai armor. Each face card illustrates a different feline warrior, equipped with swords and other accessories surrounded by flourishes. The number cards have unique geometric patterns. Add-ons include poker chips, enamel pins, and a red deck as a stretch goal.

Tech journalist and print historian Glenn Fleischman teamed up with other experts to create How Comics Were Made: A Visual History from the Drawing Board to the Printed Page. The book takes readers through 130 years of newspaper cartoons with the help of high-resolution original art, newspaper reproductions, and interviews with cartoonists.

Handmade wood bowls are typically created by turning a block of wood on a lathe. But in this video from Taku Woodcraft, he shows how a miter saw can cut a perfectly smooth bowl shape. Working with a loose piece of wood under a power saw is dangerous, but it appears he had a short dowel under the board to keep it centered. Still, don’t try this at home.

Stanley Kubrick created cinematic masterpieces like 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange. Before his work in motion pictures, he was a staff photographer for Look magazine. Taschen’s coffee table book Through a Different Lens showcases nearly 300 of his black-and-white stills, which he started shooting in New York City at age 17.

This upcoming adventure game from Slow Bros. features artful animations that started as real-world miniatures, transformed into 3D digital models. Players take on the role of Harold Halibut, a resident of a spaceship submerged in an alien ocean on a quest to find a permanent home for his shipmates. Download and play a PC demo of the game on Steam.

Maker Ali Spagnola teamed up with the L.A. Department of Public Health to help promote sexual health. Her project? Inflate thousands of condoms for an art exhibit inspired by Andy Warhol’s Silver Clouds. It took three days to blow them all up. After filling some by mouth (and trombone), Ali and her pals sped things up with compressed air.

We’ve featured the hypnotic fluid creations of artist Roman De Giuli before. In this video, he demonstrates the Emitter – a custom-engineered machine that uses stepper motors to pump and drip colorful pigments into water. The resulting designs are still organic but exhibit a rhythm and repetition not seen in De Giuli’s earlier works. Shot in 8K HDR at 60 fps.

There are obsessions, and then there’s this. Artist Robert Wechsler spent seven years making this sculpture entirely from pennies. He built the 540-pound tower of pennies by cutting four slots into 100,000 pennies, assembling them into strings, and then into sheets for stacking. He had to build a special rig to press the pennies together, a dozen at a time.

Greg Blanpied makes CNC-machined and laser-cut functional art fabricated using parametric math and geometry. Among his amazing pieces is this elegant bowl, which acts as a zoetrope when filmed or spun beneath a strobe light. He’s also created a zoetrope vase.

Scandinavian brand Indigofera is known for its oversized Norwegian wool blankets. They teamed up with artist Björn Atldax to create a series of eye-catching textile art. The surrealist images incorporate skulls, monsters, and traditional Mixtec symbology. Each blanket measures 2 m x 1.5 m (~6.56 ft x 4.92 ft) and will wrap you in warmth and weirdness.

We’ve seen machines that can draw patterns in sand, but this is the first time we’ve spotted one that was built using LEGO Technic components.  Brick Machines created this sand art machine with a magnetic assembly that moves along a set of custom aluminum rails using corkscrew gears driven by a Mindstorms controller and tech from PyBricks,

In this short video from Posy, he shows off a neat visual effect that takes ordinary footage and highlights solely the parts that move. The resulting footage is artful and reveals aspects of each scene that might otherwise be overlooked. Best of all, Posy shows us how easy it is to replicate the effect yourself.

Artist M’Brick makes portraits from LEGO bricks. But rather than keeping things simple with 1×1 pixels, he uses a seemingly random assortment of parts to create depth and textures. The originals are hard to come by, but limited-edition prints are for sale at M’Brick’s Art Shop. His Frida Kahlo and Bruce Springsteen portraits are extraordinary.

This interactive installation reminds us of the Master Control Program in TRON. But instead of displaying the face of some omniscient computer, the pixels of FLUX 2023 display images of whoever stands in front of its cameras. The 20-foot-tall display was created by Ksawery Kirklewski, with sound by Arkadiusz Krupiński and tech mgmt. by Jakub Kirklewski.

We’ve previously seen art that was made by cracking sheets of glass. Artist Uncle Liu uses a pointed hammer to create tiny chips in glass, creating pointilist portraits from the indentations. You can find more of his astounding glass artworks on his page on Chinese website Douyin.

Insight Editions offers a glimpse inside the mind of filmmaker and adventurer James Cameron. The 392-page coffee table book is packed with exclusive images from Cameron’s personal archives, revealing concepts that led to classics like The Terminator, Aliens, Titanic, Avatar, and other films that were never produced.