Awesome Sculpture

Artist Zak Miskry likes to make sculptures of animals and insects by recycling old electronics and other junk. Here, he shows us how he created a spider with gangly metal legs and a working light bulb for its body. He rigged up three LEDs inside an old incandescent bulb and powered them with a button cell battery, making it completely wireless.

North of the Border’s sculptures keep getting weirder and weirder. His latest creation imagines what Earth’s creatures might have looked like had dinosaurs not been wiped out by an asteroid. And yes, the Man-a-Saurus Rex is as demented as it sounds. There’s something about that wrinkly human flesh that’s so off-putting.

Adam from North of the Border made realistic versions of some Super Mario Bros. monsters, so it was only a matter of time before he got to Mario himself. His less-cartoony Mario imagines Nintendo’s plumber as a gritty, stubble-faced human with proportions based on the Norse god Thor. Instead of a hammer, Mario carries a pipe to take down his enemies.

How do you stop a bear from attacking? Take away his right to bear arms. Adam from North of the Border imagines a way to make a grizzly bear more deadly: by arming it with a high-capacity, rapid-fire weapon. After sculpting the bear’s body, head, feet, and hands, he imparted a fur texture before building a mini minigun and ammo pack.

Artist Steven Richter has made some very impressive sculptures over the years. He did something different for this piece by replicating Drew Struzan’s poster art for Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade as a three-dimensional sculpture. After casting the faces of the movie’s stars, he painstakingly replicated the painted light and shadow of the original image.

Back in 1976, they took red M&Ms off the market because red food dye was thought to cause cancer. While those M&Ms couldn’t really kill you, this one might. Adam from North of the Border imagined what it might be like if M&Ms ate people like people eat candy. It’s amazing how creepy you can make stuff by adding teeth.

Engineezy has engineered all kinds of neat mechanical devices, including an overcomplicated candy dispenser and a robot that types. This time, he built a pair of machines that endlessly toss tiny basketballs into each other’s hoops. You can purchase a 3D printable model of the Roboballer on his website.

Willem Dafoe has played lots of baddies, but he’s never portrayed the Clown Prince of Crime, Joker. Crafty Art imagines what the sharp-featured actor might look like in the role with this impressive sculpture that took over 300 hours to create. After creating the clay bust, they cast a resin version for painting and detailing.

Modern cars are made from thousands of parts, precisely engineered to fit together and carry us safely down the road. Commissioned by Nissan China in 2012, Dutch artist Paul Veroude took a car’s 3,421 individual parts and suspended them from the ceiling relative to the locations where they are normally assembled.

To celebrate the release of God of War Ragnarök, artist Steven Richter created this impressive likeness of the game’s protagonist Kratos. He started by sculpting a clay bust, which he used to create a silicone mold. After filling the mold with resin and letting it set, he painted on all of the details and applied facial hair.

Artist WUZU clay made the cutest little sculpture of a Nintendo Game Boy / Game Boy Advance hybrid. They built the display inside a metal tin with an acrylic control section and working switches, then sculpted the game’s D-Pad, buttons, and characters out of polymer clay with magnets to hold them in place.

Adam from North of the Border likes to imagine that when Mario or Luigi get eaten by a piranha plant, their next life is a lab-grown clone of the original. So after sculpting some cloning tank versions of Nintendo’s iconic plumbers, he built them a mirrored chamber that appears to be an endless cloning laboratory.

Artist Greg Olijnyk makes incredible sculptures and dioramas out of cardboard, glue, and toothpicks (with a little help from coffee and whiskey.) Among his creations is David vs. G 2.0, a retelling of the David vs. Goliath story with a tiny cardboard samurai taking down a gigantic robot. His robot assembly line is fantastic too.

After Adam at North of the Border made his last blue-haired monster, many of us suggested that he use the leftover fur to make Cookie Monster. He obliged and sculpted Sesame Street’s #1 carb addict chomping on Shrek’s Gingerbread Man and his family. He didn’t bother using the fur because it was a pain in the ass.

Actor Tom Hanks and Woody from Toy Story are so indelibly intertwined in our minds that we didn’t notice anything wrong with this image at first. Zedabyu Creations sculpted a 3D model and used a 3D printer to create a custom Tom Hanks head with moving eyeballs, then attached it to a knock-off 1/6th-scale Woody figure.

Adam from North of the Border turns his attention from making creepy-looking cartoon characters to making creepy-looking food. Inspired by JackJack’s killer cheeseburger sculpt, Adam’s bowl is filled with toothy fruit that looks like it was harvested from the Upside Down.