Balloon Artist Creates Life-Size Inflatable Dinosaurs

Mark Verge combines his balloon-twisting talent with a passion for collecting fossils to create life-size balloon models of dinosaurs.

43-year-old Mark Verge, from Ontario, Canada, first started working with balloons in 1995, after getting his hands on a book on making balloon models. It was a lot more difficult than he thought, as balloons would constantly pop when twisted, but after 16 years of practice he has reached a point where he can create intricate sculptures using thousands of balloons. He has developed his own technique and uses a variety of different-sized balloons to create his inflatable masterpieces.

The idea of making life-size models of dinosaurs was inspired by his passion for collecting fossils, so one day he just started twisting balloons to make a dinosaur skeleton. It was a success and now he has a collection of balloon dinosaurs, as well, including a spinosaurus made from 800 balloons, a stegosaurus and triceratops made from 700 balloons, and a utahraptor made from 200 balloons. But his most impressive work yet is a 39-foot model of a T-Rex, made from 1,400 balloons. It took Verge 55 hours to finish, as he had to create each vertebra individually and put them together at the end, to make sure his T-Rex looked just right. You might think there’s a metal frame in there somewhere, but it’s all in the balloons (and the stands that sustain it). It took a lot of effort, but this inflatable masterpiece won Mark Verge the first place in the world balloon-sculpting competition.

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LEGO Masters Recreate Middle-Earth, All of It!

A group of LEGO and The Lord of the Rings fans have managed to create an awe-inspiring LEGO version of Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, spanning over 200 square feet.

The idea for this amazing project was born at BrickWorld 2010, where Chris Phipson and Mark Kelso started talking about a collaboration. After going through some ideas, and concepts, Chris said “Hey, I got it… let’s do Lord of the Rings.” Obviously, Mark’s reply was along the lines of “You mean like… a few of us build Minas Tirith or Barad Dur?” But his LEGO loving friend had something much bigger in mind – he wanted to recreate ALL of Middle-Earth using LEGO.

When they first heard Chris’ monumental idea, most of the people involved in the project thought he was crazy, but after a bit of probing, the plan was put into action. As you can expect in a project of this magnitude, things didn’t exactly go smoothly from start to finish, but what’s important is many members of the LEGO building community helped out as much as they could. And, after a whole year of planning and building, the LEGO model of Middle-Earth was finally completed and showcased at BrickWorld 2011.

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Lullaby – A Theater Show Designed to Put Spectators to Sleep

Usually, when members of the audience fall asleep during a play, it means the show was pretty boring, but at the Barbican Theater, in London, it’s considered a success.

Most plays are designed to excite and entertain spectators, but the Barbican’s “Lullaby” was conceived for a totally different purpose – it aims to put you to sleep long before the final act. Guests are asked to arrive at 10:00 pm sharp, and bring their pajamas and toothbrushes, as they’ll be spending the night in one of the beds crammed inside the theater’s hall. Single, double and triple beds are available, so you can enjoy the show by yourself or share the bed with someone you know.

Once spectators have put on their pajamas and taken their place in the pre-booked beds, lights are dimmed and the show is off to a slow, gentle start. It combines singing and storytelling designed to send you off to dreamland before proceedings come to an end, around 1 am. Instead of applause, actors are rewarded with occasional snores, as they take a bow before their sleeping audience, but that just means they did a good job. When lights are turned on, at 7:30 in the morning, spectators are treated to a classic English breakfast, to send them on their way.

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Art Student Creates Hair Raising Necklaces from Human Hair

Kerry Howley, a creative art student, from Cambridge, England, is creating quite a buzz in the art world, with her collection of delicate necklaces made from human hair.

The idea of creating jewelry from human hair was inspired by people’s aversion to cut hair. Hair is usually regarded as a very important part of the human body and is worn with pride, but once its connection to the body has been severed, it’s viewed as slightly disgusting. Through her art, the young Middlesex student “hoped to create a delicate balance between the viewer/wearer’s feelings of aversion and attraction.” She wanted to see if she could make cut hair attractive again.

The main material for Howley’s masterpieces was provided by one of her mother’s friends, a Japanese woman with hair down to her waist. She only cuts it once every five years, and when she had 30 cm cut off the bottom, she gave it all to Kerry. The 23-year-old art student used broken saw blades to cut and weave the strands of hair into abstract shapes inspired by wallpaper patterns, and spent over 60 hours working on each of the five hair necklaces she has created so far.

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Designers Recreate Double Coffee Logo from Coffee

Latvian coffee shop chain, Double Coffee, celebrated the opening of its second venue in Moscow, Russia, by creating a giant mosaic of its logo, from cups of coffee.

The event took place on June 18, on Old Arbat Street, in Moscow, where a group of designers armed with clipboards started arranging plastic cups of coffee right on the pavement. No one really knew what they planned to do, at first, but as their work started to take shape, everyone recognized the logo of coffee shop chain Double Coffee. To celebrate their second Moscow venue, right on Old Arbat Street, they used 3,300 cups, 220 liters of coffee and 120 liters of milk to recreate the brand logo. To finish the job, the young designers sprinkled ground coffee around the logo to keep the cups together. It’s not clear what happened with all the coffee once the tasty installation was dismantled, but I’m sure the curious crowd that gathered around it was more than happy to help clear the street.

A similar coffee mosaic of the Mona Lisa was created two years ago, in Sydney, Australia, using 3,603 cups of coffee and 564 pints of milk.

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Ukrainian Artist Creates the Most Amazing Wooden Miniature Bikes

We’ve featured some pretty awesome motorcycle miniatures, in the past, but few were as incredibly detailed as young Vyacheslav Voronovich’s wooden masterpieces.

The Lvov-based artist dreamed of owning a motorcycle ever since he was just a kid, and rode his first one in the seventh grade. At the same time he was always interested in hand-made miniatures, and developed a passion for woodcarving. So even though he couldn’t afford to buy himself a real motorcycle, he discovered he could create his own perfect wooden replicas.

The idea of making his first 1:12 scale wooden motorcycle first came to Vyacheslav a year and a half ago, and it quickly turned into a hobby. He was inspired by some other motorcycle miniatures he had seen online, and wanted to see if he could make his own, from wood. In the beginning, he had some doubts he could actually pull it off, but after figuring out what kind of wood to use for each component, things started going smoothly. He finished his first bike and noticed that every new one he created looked better than the last.

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Scottish Band Releases Single on Edible Chocolate Record

A collaboration between a talented chocolatier and Scottish band FOUND, this chocolate record can be considered the sweetest release of all time.

Chocolatier Ben Milne met FOUND members, Ziggy and Tommy, a couple of years ago, and they’ve become good friends, so when Ben approached them about doing something together in the shape of a chocolate record, it’s safe to to say they were pretty excited. But while the idea sounded pretty good in theory, it turned out pretty difficult to accomplish. At first, the Fife-based chocolate master went off and bought a 7″ single vinyl and covered it with melted chocolate, but that didn’t turn out very well, and he soon realized he had actually created the opposite of a record. Then he tried making a mold of the record and casting the chocolate vinyl from that, but he still couldn’t get the desired audio quality.

By this time, FOUND’s record company got really excited about this chocolate record, and they got PR companies involved, and Ben was just thinking his idea wasn’t going to work and he was going to let everybody down. As a last resort, he decided to ask the label to provide him with a template they use to press the actual vinyl, only use chocolate instead. That idea proved a winner, and when he played the first one to FOUND, the two members looked pretty impressed.

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Artist Carves Detailed Oreo Frosting Portraits

Somerville-based artist, Judith G. Klausner, has created a series of classic style cameos, using Oreos as her medium of choice.  Judith started making Oreo cameos back in August 2010, as part of her “From Scratch” series, which features artworks made from toast, cereals, condiments or cheese, and says they’ve all lasted fairly well until now. She keeps the carved Oreos in the fridge, because high temperatures cause the frosting to melt, and humidity causes the cookie to crumble, but in climate-controlled environments, the Oreos’ preservatives make them a “fairly permanent material”.

Judith G. Klausner creates her unique Oreo cameos using fine tools such as toothpicks, straight pins and a balled-tip sculpture stick.

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Photographer Makes Creative Portraits from Fruits, Vegetables and Flowers

Klaus Enrique Gerdes, a New York City photographer, has created a series of original portraits made exclusively from vegetables, fruits and flowers.

Seeing these incredible artworks for the first time, I thought they were masterpieces of the famous Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527 – 1593) – an Italian artist known for his imaginative portraits made entirely from fruits, vegetables and flowers. But whereas Arcimboldo painted his portraits, Gerdes first created them from real fruits, vegetables and flowers, and then took photos of them. They actually remind me a little of the fabulous vegetable art of Ju Duoqi, and Carl Warner’s foodscapes.

Gerdes told the PDN Gallery that the idea for his organic portraits first came to him while working with leaves.  “While I was photographing a human eye that was peeking out amongst hundreds of leaves, it occurred to me that I could actually utilize leaves to construct portraits or masks.” It just evolved from there and he started using fruits, vegetables and flowers.

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Artist’s Vomit Painting May Cause You to Puke

Vomit painter Millie Brown creates what some people call art by drinking colored milk and regurgitating it onto a white canvas or even her own dress.

Is it just me, or is art getting weirder and weirder. I mean I’ve seen “artists” paint with their breasts, create props from meat and eve dude that paints with his penis. Someone once told me anything is art if at least one person thinks so, but this is getting ridiculous. Take Millie Brown, also known as the Vomit Painter. She has mastered the art of regurgitation and uses her talents to create actual art. Her work requires her to drink colored milk and simply vomit on a white canvas, thus creating abstract “paintings” worth thousands of dollars.

Why anyone would pay to own someone else’s colored puke is beyond my understanding. I mean, if we were talking about Justin Bieber’s vomit, I could understand, I’m pretty sure there are some girls out there who would pay anything just to sniff his dirty underwear, but this isn’t the case. One of Brown’s artworks, Nexus Vomitus, created to an acoustic accompaniment of opera singers Patricia Hammond and Zita Syme, sold for $2,400, which is just mind-boggling. Read More »

Designer Creates Furniture from Thousands of Puzzle Pieces

Devon-based artist Rupert McKelvie has used thousands of discarded puzzle pieces to create a stylish table complete with a lamp.

If you’re wondering what inspired the 27-year-old artist to create pieces of furniture from a weird medium like broken puzzles, it was the frustration of spending hours of patient labor assembling a puzzle, only to see them wasted because of a missing piece. Apparently, charity shops get a lot of puzzles handed in these days, only most of them are missing at least one piece, so he decided to use these incomplete artworks to create something new and complete.

McKelvie has put in hundreds of hours painstakingly assembling around 4,800 puzzle pieces into what looks like a functional and stable table, from popular jigsaw puzzles featuring the Taj Mahal, the Arc de Triomphe and Winnie the Pooh. It must have been a pretty tedious process, but it beats searching everywhere for that one missing puzzle, only to find it under the couch, years later.

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Designer Gives Dollar the Pop-Culture Treatment

James Charles is not the first artist to use currency as inspiration for his original art, but his works are the geekiest I’ve seen in a while.

While some items of the “American Iconomics“series might have ou think that Charles simply manipulated the faces on genuine dollar bills, it’s just an illusion. The artist kept the original outline of the bills, but replaced the faces of former American presidents with those of famous pop icons like Jimi Hendrix, Master Yoda, Mr. Spock, Sarah Palin, and many others. In sone cases he simply drew over the faces of the presidents to give them a whole new look, but every one of his pop-culture dollars comes with a sarcastic and funny line of text.

The “American Iconomics” collection is currently on display at San Francisco’s Shooting Gallery, where pop-art fans can purchase their favorite artworks for anywhere between $600 and $1,000.

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Artist Uses Motherboards as Canvases for His Art

We’ve seen motherboards used as an art medium before, but Arizona-based artist Joe Dragt took it one step further when he decided to uses the basic computer components as painting canvases.

Joe first got the idea of using motherboards as canvases for his art earlier this year, when his full-time job required him to take more than 30 old computers to be recycled. Looking at that huge stack of computers, the idea just hit him. He thought thought the complexity of the circuits could make motherboards really great backgrounds for his paintings, and during these troubled economic times, they were much cheaper than traditional canvases, too.

He asked if he could take one of the old computer home, to give his idea a go, and it just blossomed from there. He recycles 100% of the computers he uses, meticulously unscrewing every component. He uses the motherboards as canvases, the co0l-looking parts for his sculptures, and sends the rest of the plastic and metal bits to recycling facilities. All potentially harmful elements are taken to a special facility, in Phoenix.

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Crayola Crayons Used to Create Colorful Artworks

Nashville-based artist, Herb Williams, makes incredible 3D sculptures from hundreds of thousands of colorful Crayola crayons.

37-year-old Herb first started working with Crayola crayons, after he was inspired by a dream. He had worked with various mediums, but his career wasn’t really going anywhere, he had no money and was alienating his friends due to frustration. He even got to the point where he thought “this is not worth it”, burned some of his works, but it was that very night that he has a powerful dream in which someone inspired him to use crayons in his art. He got up the next morning, wrote some ideas in his notebook, and he has been making a living out of it ever since.

Most people would have probably used the crayons as drawing tools, but not Herb. He painstakingly cuts ever crayon to size, using a double guillotine cigar cutter, before sticking them to a shaped mould, with industrial glue. He is the only person in the world who has a personal account with Crayole, because of the high number of crayons he buys from them every year. Each of his spectacular 3D sculptures numbers thousands, sometimes even hundreds of thousands of crayons, and he always has crates of 3,000 of each crayon color shaped to his workshop.

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Italian Artist Recycles Found Objects into Colorful Sculptures

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and the work of Italian artist Dario Tironi is evident proof. While most people look at discarded objects and see only trash, he sees precious materials for his beautiful sculptures.

Old toys, discarded computer components, broken calculators, even plastic bottles, they’re all part of Tironi’s recycled universe. Similar to Robert Bradford, who uses old toys for his sculptures, and Leo Sewell,  the young Italian artist manages to glue together various junk items and create detailed sculptures of people and animals, and gives everyone who sees his art a whole new perspective on the concept of recycling.

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