Stop! Don’t even think about screaming “Photoshopped!” because Mike Libby’s Insect Lab is 100% real. And so are his incredible Steampunk insects.

Mike began his unusual project on a day like any other, when he found an intact dead beetle. Thinking about how the little bug functioned as a mechanical device, he remembered he had also found an old wristwatch and decided to combine the two. After dissecting the beetle and mounting the mechanical parts, he realized he quite liked his new craft and decided to stick to it.

Now Mike Libby creates all kinds of Steampunk insects, from scorpions to ordinary beetles and dragonflies. He only works with non-endangered species from all around the world, fitting them with mechanisms from antique watches as well as old typewriter and sewing-machine parts.

Check out Mike Libby’s Insect Lab and feel free to email him if you want to purchase any of his Steampunk wonders or place a special order.

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I know it clearly says “robot” in the title, but there’s hardly anything robotic about Mitzy. She does look incredibly cute, though.

Designed and built by Will Wagenaar, mostly out of recycled metal parts, Mitzy has an antique camera and binoculars as a head, rusty wheels and a spring tail that actually wags if you flick it. As I said, of you’re looking for a high-tech robot dog, Mitzy is not for you, but if it’s a Steampunk dog you’re after, you won’t find a better one.

via Etsy

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Bruce and Melanie Rosenbaum have always loved steampunk and decided to turn their passion into a business. That’s how ModVic Home Restoration was born.

The couples offer home-design services to people who want to restore their Vicrorian houses to their original beauty and, to prove their skills, they turned their 1901 Craftsman-style home into a steampunk paradise. Combining antique pieces with modern gadgets, the Rosembaum’s managed to preserve the original charm of their Victorian residence as well as incorporate all the modern gadgets of our times.

If you’d like to know more about this amazing steampunk house, head over to Steampunk Workshop and learn every little detail.

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James Corbett takes used card parts and, using them like pieces in a puzzle, creates amazing steampunk sculptures.

Corbett showed artistic talent ever since he was a little boy. Colleagues at his Redcliff school would always tell him he’d grow up to be an artist. But, at 36 years old James was running a motor wrecking business. That’s when he started welding together a bunch of car parts and awakened the dormant talent inside. In just 18 months he closed his wrecking business and became a full-time artist.

James Corbet says he makes these original sculptures because he can and it would be a shame to waste his God-given talent. The Car Part Sculptor has exhibited his works in galleries all across the world.

via John Davies Gallery

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I never imagined LEGO and Steampunk actually worked together, but Radiant Kestrel‘s yacht proves they make a deadly combination.

As you might have already figured out by checking some of my previous posts, I love LEGO and steampunk, so I just had to post some photos of Kestrel’s amazing LEGO-Steampunk yacht, for y’all to see.

via Gizmo Watch

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Well doesn’t this strange creation leave you breathless? I think Joe from bookofjoe said it best: “Amazing people bestride our planet. As do their creations”.

Designed and created by the amazing Andrew Chase, this steampunk cheetah is 24 inches tall and 50 inches long, from nose to tail. It weighs just 40 pounds and is able to move just like a real-life cheetah.

You know what the best thing about this mean-machine is? IT CAN BE YOURS!

That’s right, created by artist Jake Hildebrandt, for the release of Damnation (a video-game from Codemasters), this Steampunk PC is now the prize of a competition initiated by Destructoid. All you have to do is show your love for Steampunk design. The most original comment gets to take home this cool rig. Unfortunately the contest is only available to people in Canada and the US. You have until June 19 to enter.

The Damnation Steampunk PC sports an Intel Core i7 965 processor, 12 gigabytes of DD3 RAM, an X57 chipset motherboard, dual Radeon 4870X2 graphics-card and 1 terabyte of hard-drive. So it’s not just a “pretty face”, this baby can handle just about anything you throw at it.

I like Datamancer’s Steampunk Laptop a bit more, but Jake Hildebrandt’s work of art isn’t bad either.

photos via Jack of All Trades on Flickr

Glass Symphony, a Ukrainian family-owned company specializing in hand-made glass sculptures, has become famous for its anatomically-correct arachnids.

Using a centuries-old technique known as lampworking, the artisans at Glass Symphony, use glass rods, extreme heat and fine wrist movements to manipulate colored glass into intricate miniatures. A gas burner is used to heat the glass to a temperature of 1800 degrees, after which trained artisans shape the glass into various animal-inspired shapes, from different species of spiders and locusts to snails and octopuses.

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A Japanese DIY prop enthusiast recently shared his latest creation – an otherworldly-looking magic book with glow-in-the dark text – along with instructions on how to do it yourself.

Last month, Twitter user @mikel_cresson, a steampunk and fantasy enthusiast from Japan, went viral on the popular social network with a very intriguing prop – a vintage-looking book featuring mysterious text that glowed a vivid green in the dark. He called it a magic book, and it certainly looked the part; so much so that people started asking how much he wanted to sell it for and if he took commissions. However, the young DIY master did something even better – he shared exactly how he did it using only simple stuff anyone can buy on Amazon.

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Silpo, a popular supermarket chain in Ukraine, has attracted a lot of attention since the opening of its new Lviv venue, which is decorated with elements from the popular GTA: San Andreas video game.

Featuring decorative panels in the same style as the artwork for Rockstar Games’ 2004 hit open-world game, as well as the same font for it isles, the new Silpo supermarket in Lviv has been scoring a lot of points with GTA: San Andreas fans. The venue also features visual references to Venice Beach, and iconic elements like lifeguards, surfboards and lots of color.

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Jason Stieva has been doing Gothic assemblage art for roughly two decades, but his most intricate and impressive creation has to be the Leviathan – Ark of Apocalypse, an 8 feet high, 7.5 feet long ghost ship populated by hundreds of strange creatures.

Most of the artworks in Jason Stieva’s ongoing “Gothic Times” series are incredibly detailed, but he himself admits that the Leviathan – Ark of the Apocalypse was his most daunting project ever, and that he will most likely will never make anything like it again. And just looking at pictures of this incredible artwork, you can understand why. Although measuring over 7 meters in length, 2.5 meters in width and standing at a whopping 8 feet tall, this ghostly ship is brimming with detail. From the steampunk-inspired gears at the bottom of the ship and the dozens of cannons dominating its sides, to the hundreds of skeletons and other ghastly creatures populating its deck and multiple crow’s nests, it’s just so much to take in.

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After French tattoo artist JC Sheitan Tenet lost his right hand 22 years ago, he never thought he would ever be able to use it again. He trained himself to use his left hand to do tattoos, but after recently receiving the world’s first tattoo machine prosthesis, he can proudly call himself ambidextrous.

Tenet got the idea for the unique steampunk-inspired prosthesis after seeing the work of Jean Louis Gonzales, a.k.a. Gonzal, an artist and engineer known for his mechanised taxidermies and skulls. After meeting Gonzal at various tattoo conventions, Tenet asked him if he could somehow mechanise an old prosthesis he had lying around the house, and the two started working on a prototype.

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At first glance, this rock, placed strategically in a small clearing in the woods part of an outdoor museum in Germany, seems like an ordinary boulder. But a closer look will reveal that the inconspicuous 1.5-ton boulder is far from ordinary. It’s actually an art installation with a fire-powered WiFi router and USB drive hidden inside!

Created by Berlin artist Aram Bartholl, the rock, named ‘Keepalive’, tries to highlight the contrast between ancient and modern survival techniques. Bartholl revealed that his inspiration to merge the concepts of primitive and modern survival came from the sight of people selling BioLite stoves during Hurricane Sandy. In the absence of electricity, people were actually using the flame-powered stoves to power their devices and stay connected. “It was funny – the power goes out, and people would buy these little stoves and make a fire to charge their phone,” he said.

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UK-based artist Julie Alice Chappell has chosen an unusual medium for her sculptures – discarded electronics. She tears out circuit boards and other components from broken devices, and converts them into delicate insect figurines.

Julie’s introduction to the unique art form occurred several years ago, when she happened to find a big box of tiny electronic components at ‘The Craft Bank’, in Portsmouth, UK. “The first thing that came into my head when I looked at them was, ‘a mass of tiny bodies and legs… ants!’ I took them home to my children and we made ants.”

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We recently learned women’s thighs can be used as premium ad space, but Boston-based film student Jodi Steel found a new intriguing use for her upper leg. She recently shot to internet fame after photos of her detailed thigh drawings went viral on popular news sharing site, Reddit.

Like many other bored students, Jodi Steel used to pass the time during boring school lectures by doodling, only instead of exercising her artistic talents on the back of her notebooks, she did it on her bare thighs. Despite having no kind of formal training as an illustrator, Jodi’s dermal masterpieces look like the work of a seasoned artist, a fact which she attributes to relentless practice, despite what everyone else may think. Her talents didn’t go unnoticed, and after seeing the artworks on her thigh one day, a teacher at Emerson College, in Boston, asked Jodi to draw the illustrations for a ‘steam punk’ book called Steaming into a Victorian Future: A Steampunk Anthology. She recently uploaded photos of her thigh drawings on Reddit, where some of them were actually mistaken for tattoos. Steel has since gotten multiple job offer from all around the world, but she doesn’t want to work full time as an illustrator, instead hoping to one day to concept art for films and paint on the side.

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