It’s often cute when couples dress in matching outfits. Artist Nonaine took this practice a step further with her Codependency Suit. It can be two separate outfits, or it can join together into one. At the link, you can see similar shirts and hooded capes that couples can use to bind themselves together.
Link via GearFuse | Artist’s Website
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This statue of a guardian type robot near Odessa in Ukraine is made from old, junked cars, among other things. Apparently it was constructed by a logistics company called TIS (Transinvestservice) in order to serve as a signpost of sorts. Now, instead of telling visitors to take a left at the 161km post, they can just say “Turn when you come upon awesomeness.”
Link [EnglishRussia] I can’t find any source for the photo; if anyone knows who it belongs to, please let us know in the comments.
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The Impossible Lamp is a work of craft and film by Jeeves Basu. It begins with a large wax candle sitting atop a clear plastic lampshade. Basu and his team had the difficult task of melting the wax so that it would drip over the mold, but cooling it before it could drip off. This time-lapse video shows how they did it.
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The objects above are remarkably ornate baby rattles/ teething toys, as crafted by a master silversmith. They are attributed to Nicholas Roosevelt, an 18th-century American craftsman, and are now part of the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
This rare and precious gold toy, with its elaborate chased and repoussé ornament, might have been given as a lavish christening gift. It consists of a whistle, a piece of teething coral, six of the original eight bells, and a loop to hang a toy on a ribbon around the child’s neck. Aside from being a teething device, the coral in the whistle and bells was thought to ward off enchantment and disease.
One can’t help but wonder if creations such as this had some influence on the development of the idiom “bells and whistles” to describe supplementary showy functions.
Link, via Titam et le Sirop d’Érable.
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James Stowe has a neat collection of Star Wars cards for Valentine’s Day, which is this Sunday. There are six cards, one for each episode.
Link (Previously on Neatorama: A Very Wrong Star Wars Valentine)
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British artist Rob Smith has some lovely wood carvings in his deviantART gallery. One of the most striking is this table that looks like it’s melting. It’s made of recycled oak and took him four weeks to make.
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Don’t throw away that used subway ticket! You could be holding a potential starfighter in your hands.
Artist Hubert de Lartigue was playing with his Paris Métro ticket between stops, folding it this way and that, wondering how he could give it a cool shape. He did this for six months, and discovered that with a scalpel and a folding tool, but no glue, he could transform two subway tickets into an X-wing fighter.
Lartigue says:
“I’m very proud of how it turned out and I feel like I am the author of a little masterpiece. I got to the point where I asked myself whether the Parisian metro tickets hadn’t actually been designed to enable me to one day use it as a canvas for this ‘work.’ Their proportions and even the patterns and drawings on them take part in the whole of the work. I’m not kidding, I find that there is a great underlying mystery here…”
He gives step-by-step directions for making an X-wing starfighter here.
More about Paris subway tickets and the history of the Paris Métro here.
Photo by Hubert de Lartigue
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Craftster member teriyakimoto made this knitted gas mask for a friend who thought it would be a cool way to stay warm while riding his bike in winter. It is attached to his knit cap by Velcro straps. Link -via Unique Daily
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Louise Hill of Love to Cake is a London-based graphic designer and visual effects artist. That is her trade, but her passion is making fancy cakes. This sea turtle cake won her the gold medal at Britain’s 2009 Cake Show.
flickr photostream via reddit | Artist’s Website
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Photo: Lauren Besser
Urban artist Specter created a series of hand painted billboards that lampoons the gentrification of Brooklyn. The art is very tongue-in-cheek (don’t miss the "Ghetto Fabulous Condos"), but let me ask you this: what is wrong with gentrification? What’s so bad with cleaning up the neighborhood and raising property values?
Link – via Wooster Collective
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Photo: VVORK
This Steven Shearer’s art piece, titled Geometric Healing Cell for Youth – Model III (2007) reminds me of two things: first, a Borg space ship, if a Borg space ship were made from copper plumbing.
And second, the Redneck Pool Heater, a BBQ grill modded by Todd Harrison and his daughter Veronica Harrison into a DIY pool heater. More BBQ stuff: Top 10 Coolest BBQ Grills (And Then Some!)
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Justin Van Genderen designed a series of five posters of places in the Star Wars universe. They remind me of vintage travel agency posters. See posters featuring Tatooine, Hoth, the Degobah System, and Bespin as well as Endor at Gigantor. Link -via Buzzfeed
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I love it when people turn the ordinary into something special, it’s a nice change of pace. For example, check out these 31 cool benches, found all over the world.
From the Upcoming 
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Urban art comes in all kinds of flavor, but this may be my favorite: "A Love Letter For You," a project by Stephen Powers where he paints various murals with lovey-dovey messages around Philadelphia (yes, the City of Brotherly Love – how appropriate!)
Just in time for Valentine’s Day, too! Link – via 30gms
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The man behind the blog Kitty Hell (“one man’s life with cute overload”) has brought to our attention this marvelous/disgusting instrument of household utility. He writes:
While Hello Kitty fanatics may see something like this as cute (you have to seriously feel for the lumberjack significant other that has to carry this around at work), for the rest of us it pretty much exemplifies what any horror movie villain (or the evil feline herself) would undoubtedly use to dismember victims. In fact, The Hello Kitty Chainsaw Massacre is probably already in production and is guaranteed to be the most horrifying movie that you have ever seen.
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Last year, organizers at the Rocks Aroma Festival in Sydney, Australia, made an enormous image of the Mona Lisa using thousands of cups of coffee lightened with milk (to varying quantities) in order to create different shades:
The different colours were created by adding no, little or lots of milk to each cup of black coffee.
It measures an impressive 20 feet high and 13 feet wide and took a team of eight people three hours to complete.
Link via Digg | Photo: EpicFTW | Previously on Neatorama: Mona Lisa in Coffee (as a Paint)
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Artists in Detroit have encased an abandoned house in ice in order to bring attention to the startling number of foreclosures in the region. The Ice House blog chronicles the project and provides stunning pictures of the ice house.
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Artist Stephen Pfeil depicted the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in the styles and poses of the artists for whom they were named. And then he added some more artists from history into the mix. He writes:
But seriously, while going through Art History class I had a hard time NOT thinking of the Ninja Turtles. They may or may not have been doodled into the margins next to Brunelleschi’s perspective business.
Larger image at the link.
Link via Popped Culture
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This video is circulating the Internet today. It shows an unnamed artist making a portrait of Conan O’Brien out of cheetos. Allegedly, he (she?) used about 2,000 cheetos from 50 bags for the work, but the provenance on that information is iffy.
via The Agitator
UPDATE: In the comments, mikerbaker provides a link that informs us that this was created by artist Jason Baalman, and that it measures 5 by 4 feet. Thanks, Mike!
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With the rise in popularity of a certain movie lately, and its stunning advancements in 3-D technology, the titular question is being asked worldwide. The short answer? Yes, but it won’t look very good. Shucks, there goes my dream of seeing The Empire Strikes Back in glorious 3-D.
The Michael Jackson tribute at the Grammys last night, for instance, caused headaches and nausea among many. This is a sign that despite the verdict, prepare for a whole new way to decide if you want to see a movie in 3-D or not, because the bad versions are coming.
Shooting a film in 3-D requires some careful decision-making so as to maximize the depth effect while minimizing potential eyestrain. Directors may feel constrained by these limitations. In any case, not every 3-D director agrees that conversion works just as well. James Cameron, for one, has criticized Tim Burton for using this approach in his upcoming feature, Alice in Wonderland: “It doesn’t make any sense to shoot in 2-D and convert to 3-D,” he said.
Link to Slate article. (Photo: Wikipedia)
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The blog Women, Snakes and Stalkers features South Asian book covers from the University of Chicago’s Regenstein library. This commercial art is very much worth preserving and sharing! Link -via A Journey Round My Skull
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Some very creative work with cardboard, glue and other random items went into this fun little video. It’s simply another chapter in London DJ Jake Williams’ book of funk, and the song is a sampling of Yaz/Yazoo’s “Midnight.”
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Crepuscular rays – sunbeams to most of us – can be caught by a camera, mostly just after sunrise and just before sunset (hence the name). Many photographers will loiter for what seems an age to capture the right light and techniques used are known variously as The Golden Hour, Chiaroscura and the Rembrandt effect – all of which those little (or large) sunbeams can help. Here in a remarkable series of images, take in the beauty of those rays.
(image credit: Flickr user Pear Biter)
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by 
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Pop artist Sam Carter’s Birth of Zbornak is inspired by Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus as well as the TV show The Golden Girls. The recently passed Bea Arthur is featured at the center in her role as Dorothy Zbornak. The painting is quite detailed, and if you’re foolhardy enough to look at an enlarged image, you can even observe the varicose veins on her legs.
Link via Popped Culture
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This article highlights seven interesting things you can see if you look closely at masterpieces. It includes paintings with a baby flipping off the pope, UFO’s in the sky, and the shape of a brain that surrounds God as painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
While some might dismiss this as a coincidence, experts suggest that it would be harder to explain that this was not Michelangelo’s intention. Even complex components within the brain, such as the cerebellum, optic chiasm and pituitary gland can all be found in the picture. As for that sassy green sash running down the pons/spinal column/dude-holding-God-up, it follows the path of the vertebral artery perfectly.
Along with drawing, painting, sculpting, St. Peter’s Basilica building and generally being among the universe’s top bananas, Michelangelo counted cadaver dissecting as a favorite way to pass the time. He was so mad about corpse-cutting, in fact, that a friend once presented him with a perfectly formed dead Moor as a gift.
NSFW. Link
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by 
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Philadelphia-based artist Alex Queral carves the faces of celebrities into phone books, then coats the results with acrylic:
For me, the human head was a natural choice of subject matter because of its inherent expressiveness. I carve the faces out of phone books because I like the three-dimensional quality that results and because of the unexpected results that occur working in this medium. The three-dimensional quality enhances the feeling of the pieces as an object as opposed to a picture.
In carving and painting a head from a phone directory, I’m celebrating the individual lost in the anonymous list of thousands of names that describe the size of the community. In addition, I like the idea of creating something that is normally discarded every year into an object of longevity.
Gallery at the link.
Link via The Presurfer | Photo: Projects Gallery
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“Unidentified” and “A Collection of Memories” by Nick Gentry
Nick Gentry uses old floppy disks, VHS tapes, and other antiquated media storage devices as his chosen medium for painting. The subjects tend to be facial in nature, most likely due to the omnipresence of circular mechanisms inherent in such things. From his About section:
Throughout history, information has always been recorded on physical objects. Important documents, favourite songs, videos and more were stored on mountains of tapes, polaroids, cassettes and disks. As media is rapidly absorbed into the World Wide Web the rich variety of formats of the past are becoming obsolete.
This represents a big shift away from physical, real world objects, driving towards a human existence that is ultimately governed by billions of invisible data files.
Each floppy disk used in the paintings has a history and story of its own. It represents the increasing pace of the modern life cycle, where objects are created, used and disposed of quicker than ever. To challenge this notion, as these personal artefacts of life are cast aside, the obsolete are now given new life and a renewed purpose by using them as a medium for art.
Link for more of his outstanding work. (via Twisted Sifter)
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Urn-A-Matic, made from vintage vacuum cleaner parts, by Darin Montgomery
Quick, what does the word "cremation" bring to your mind? An image of spending eternity in a boring ol’ urn? Well, not anymore. Behold the new trend in the cremation industry: artistic funerary urns!
"I wouldn’t be making urns if they were just a cookie jar with a lid on top, sitting on a mantel," Knapp said. "That’s too morbid. If it’s a wacky-looking guy holding his own ashes over his head — now that lightens everything. The baby boomers all want to stand out. Even in the end, we want some whimsical receptacle for ourselves."
Jeff Spurrier of the Los Angeles Times has the story: Link | Photo Gallery
Previously on Neatorama (all the way from 2007): Darin Montgomery’s Urn-A-Matic
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An unfinished work is a creative work that has not been finished. Its creator might have chosen never to finish it, or might have been prevented by circumstances outside of their control (including death).The Mystery of Edwin Drood is the final novel by Charles Dickens. The novel was left unfinished at the time of Dickens’ death and thus how it might have ended remains unknown. The novel is named after Edwin Drood but it mostly tells the story of his uncle, a choirmaster named John Jasper, who is in love with his pupil, Rosa Bud. Miss Bud is Drood’s fiancée, and has also caught the eye of the high-spirited and hot-tempered Neville Landless, who comes from Ceylon with his twin sister, Helena. Neville Landless and Drood take a dislike to one another the moment they meet. Drood later disappears in mysterious circumstances and Dickens’ death before he completed the story means that what happened to him remains a mystery for real.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by 
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Photo: gammaraybots [Flickr]
What do you get when you mash up Charles M. Schulz’s comic Peanuts with Star Wars? Behold the Charlie Brown TIE Fighter by Tom Torrey: Link – via The Zeray Gazette
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