Japanese artist Takanori Aiba makes tiny, enchanting worlds, such as this fanciful castle wrapped around an imitation bonsai tree. His whole site is a browsing delight. The only pity is that his creations aren’t real places that we can visit.

Link -via Geekosystem | Artist’s Website

Happy Valentine's Day, Neatoramanauts! (Or to those who are married, Happy Tuesday!)

I thought that this clever "match art" by Russian IT Specialist Stanislav Aristov, which went viral last year (but as often the case, not attributed to him), is appropriate for today. See more beautiful examples of what you can do with fire, smoke, and matches at Stanislav's website: Link

See also: Fascinating Matchbook Art over at Dark Roasted Blend - Thanks Avi!

If she could just stop getting kidnapped, Link would finally be able to give her his heart, but I doubt that’s ever going to happen. Oh well, we can still appreciate the card, created by Adam Bing, even if Zelda herself will never get it.

Link Via Kotaku

The perfect geeky Valentine for any Whovians out there. I don’t know about you guys, but I’d love to get a homemade card tailored to my personal interests like this.

Link Via The Daily What

Just because the video games in the Mario Bros. franchise feature Mario and Luigi as good guys doesn’t mean that the other denizens of the Mushroom Kingdom don’t see them as total jerks.From their penchant for destroying brick structures to their cold blooded turtle kicking tactics, the Mario Bros. just might be the enemy after all.

These propaganda posters from the Mushroom Kingdom urge you to take action against the moustachioed plumbers, and they ask the question the Shy Guys are afraid to answer- “The Koopas are fighting, why aren’t you?”

Link  –via Super Punch

In the world of fine art there’s always someone trying to radically change the game with their artwork. While this can lead to some  innovative and interesting pieces, it can also turn things into one big mess, and forced innovation causes artists to lose sight of how important traditionalism can be to maintaining artistic integrity.

Enter Barry X Ball, a sculptor who’s decided to take it back to the old school by sculpting portraits and figures out of marble. He crafts these incredible works of art while paying attention to fine details, such as the natural flow of the veins in the marble and the retention of natural edges and form whenever possible.

You can check out a selection of Barry’s marble works at the link below, works which somehow manage to be traditionally beautiful and utterly surreal at the same time.

Link  –via Beautiful Decay

Let your geekiness show in the valentines you send! Express your love for your sweetie plus your love for your favorite video game, online community, scientific discipline, movie, or TV show. There are lots to select from, but you won’t find them in your local greeting card store -no, these out-of-the ordinary valentines are found on the internet. Shown here are some valentines based on the TV series Breaking Bad, by Beth at Butt Horn. See the rest of the collection at mental_floss. Link

What started as an art form practiced by prisoners and tramps has become a really cool way for crafty folks to show off their modeling skills by building awesome structures, and sculptural works of art, out of a million or so little pieces of wood and lots of glue.

Hit the link to peruse a gallery featuring eight matchstick art masterpieces, full of fine detail and fantastic constructs, just don’t light up anywhere near these highly flammable works of art or you can kiss them goodbye!

Link

Can french fries be objects of art? That's debatable, but they sure can be objects of lawsuits!

Here's what happened when a gallery lost a pair of french fries that "were the basis of an artwork":

The artwork comprised a cross made of two golden chips, alongside two normal fries, deep-fried and not gold-leafed.

The catalogue for the original 1990 exhibition “Pommes d’Or,” described the work of artist Stefan Bohnenberger as “the metamorphosis of a profane everyday object into a sacred artwork.”

But the gallery’s reverence for the chips declined in the intervening decades, because when Bohnenberger asked for the two normal fries back last year, the Munich gallery Mosel and Tschechow could no longer find them. An incensed Bohnenberger promptly demanded damages, which the gallery refused to pay.

According to a report in news magazine Der Spiegel the court ruled that the gallery must now hand Bohnenberger €2,000 plus five percent interest from May 2010. On top of that, the gallery is being forced to pay 90 percent of the court fees.

The judge found that the gallery had neglected its duty to keep the chips safe.

What were they thinking? This could've been solved for $0.99 with a quick trip to the local McDonald's: Link - via Arbroath

(YouTube Link)

You might not know the name Wayne White, but you’re bound to have seen the works he has created over the last thirty years or so of his artistic career.

From stop motion animation, puppets and set design for PeeWee’s Playhouse, to music videos (Peter Gabriel’s Big Time and Smashing Pumpkins’ Tonight, Tonight) to his fine art series, which features 3-D text painted into classic lithographs.

Wayne White is an amazing artist, his talent is such that he’s left no artistic medium untouched, and there seems to be no limit to what Wayne can accomplish, so why has it taken so long for someone to make a documentary about him? Probably because all the money has been tied up in making supernatural teen love stories and Romcoms. Oh well, better late than never I suppose…

Link  –via TDW

Sure it seems like a conceptual idea that would never work in real life, but this bathtub is actually completely functional, not to mention totally awesome -or at least, it would be if the creator actually finished the project. BoingBoing is trying to track down leads to find out if it was ever completed or not. If you have any information, share your knowledge in their comments section.

Link Via BoingBoing

You don’t often think of a garbage can as an art medium, but some artists do. And how nice is it to disguise an ugly-but-necessary object as something delightful? My favorite of the collection at WebUrbanist is this graffiti-embellish can by Job Willemsen and Tom v.d. Hurk in the Netherlands. Link

(Image source: Wooster Collective)

What’s the connection between electricity and the American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson? It’s a play entitled Call Me Waldo in which an electrician is consumed by the spirit or at least the ideas of Emerson. The promoters of a new off-Broadway production commissioned Noah Scalin, the artist behind the Skull-a-Day project, to make this image.

Link -via Boing Boing | Scalin’s Website

After seeing this great Star Wars version of Marcel Duchamp’s mechanically abstracted Nude Descending a Staircase, Irene Gallo wanted to see what other geek interpretations of classic artworks have been put out there. The resulting round up is quite enjoyable.

Link Via Geeks Are Sexy

We’ve featured a number of great art shows that took place at Gallery 1988 before, but that’s because they have so much awesomely geeky stuff go through there. Their most recent show, Multiplayer x2, focuses exclusively on classic games of the past including Castlevania, Mario and Pac Man. If you happen to be in LA before March 3, be sure check it out.

Link Via Laughing Squid

Digital artist Petros Vrellis created an interactive version of Vincent Van Gogh’s painting Starry Night. The brushstrokes movie and activate music. Vrellis tells more about the project at Creative Applications. Link -via The Daily What

See also: Starry Night is Everywhere!

This might just be a better movie than both the Phantom Menace or The Adventures of Tin Tin. Would you go see it?

Link

Grant Snider at Incidental Comics found the secret to making life a lot more artful, interesting, and …strange. Link -Thanks, Rich!

Caleb Kraft decorated his 1977 VW Microbus with a mural of an “octophant,” an elephant head with a trunk and tentacles! That’s not all -he installed handmade stained glass in the van as well. So if you see a Microbus with stained glass and an elephant inside, you know who it is. Or continue reading for a video of the project.

(YouTube link)

You can see more pictures of the project at his blog. Link -Thanks, Caleb!

This illustrated chart by H. Caldwell Tanner shows how much time is needed to properly enjoy each genre of video game, from casual games to epic length RPGs, and in my opinion it pretty much sums up what all hardcore gamers know-each genre has a different level of commitment, and appeals to a particular type of gamer.

This chart is a great way for newbie gamers to figure out what kind of games they’re looking for, instead of borrowing your copy of Mass Effect 3 for six months just to discover that they don’t really like RPGs.

Link  –via Geeks Are Sexy

I’m amazed that this is possible. Jim Dingilian adds a layer of soot inside bottles and then etches at the surface until he makes sharp looking landscapes. If you’re in New York City, you can visit an exhibit of his work that opened yesterday.

Link and Exhibit Website -via Craft | Photo: MacKenzie Fine Art

Ted Lott builds houses, but not like any house that you've ever seen. In this piece titled "Sit Stay," he took an old armchair frame and turned it into a foundation for a miniature house.

Designboom has more photos: Link | Ted's official website (Don't miss his artwork Mobile Home)

This really should have been posted last night, while the running theme was coffee, but better late than never. Artist Gwyneth Leech paints paper coffee cups. Over 700 of the finished cups are on display in an exhibit titled “Hypergraphia: Gwyneth Leech, the Cup Drawings, Studio in the Prow” at the Sprint Flatiron Prow Artspace in New York City. Leech herself is on exhibit, too, as she sits in the window with her cups and paints more cups five days a week from 10AM to 2PM through February 18th. Link -via Laughing Squid

There’s a lot to look at in these beautiful paintings by Audrey Flack, and I can’t help but wonder if she used the house of a hoarder as the inspiration/reference for her paintings.

It’s like a little adventure for your eyes, a tour of mystical terrain that takes you to some strange places and provokes a myriad of thoughts.

There are many stories being told by these works, the brilliant colors of life, beautiful shading and skilled rendering of multiple surface types playing off one another and further selling the realism.

Even though these pieces were painted in the 1970s, they look fresh to this day, and I’m sure digging that mystical vibe. Check out more of Audrey’s masterpieces at the link below, it’s a great way to feed your head.

Link  –via Beautiful Decay

These Victorian style portraits of Star Wars characters by Terry Fan lead one to believe that C3PO is powered by steam, and that droids actually enjoy wearing three piece suits. Everyone knows that these things are untrue, of course, but it’s a romantic version of the Space Opera that hasn’t been fully explored yet, so let’s just go with it.

In this series you get Darth Vader looking quite dapper, Yoda with a top hat that somehow makes his head look even smaller (and his ears even bigger), C3apo as a gentleman about town and Boba Fett fresh from overseas service in the military. These portraits  look like they were taken a long long time ago, in a place that’s not so far away after all…

Link  –via Rampaged Reality

And on the Seventh Day, God rest after a nice cup of coffee. We've featured Karen Eland's coffee art on Neatorama a while ago, but it's always neat to revisit and see her newest creations: Link | More neat coffee pics and art over at Dark Roasted Blend - Thanks Avi!

Saimir Strati composes mosaics out of unusual substances, including toothpicks and nails. His message in this 270-square foot mosaic made of coffee beans is simple: “One world, one family, one coffee.” The five human figures represent five continents (sorry, Australia and Antarctica) uniting together in a caffeinated peace.

-via The Presurfer

Artist Marcelo Gallegos has several lovely Valentine cards that stray from the normal hearts and flowers but still convey romance. This card depicting the elder god in love is my favorite. See the others at his Etsy store. Link -via Buzzfeed

Confucius has never looked so creepy! Sculpted by Zhang Huan in waaaay more than life sized scale (32 feet tall!), this is one version of the Chinese philosopher that you’ll want to steer clear of when it’s feeding time.

It’s so startlingly realistic that I have to wonder if Zhang hired a giant figure model for reference while sculpting. I kinda want to climb on top of giant Confucius’ head and pretend I’m Remy from the Pixar movie Ratatouille.

Link  –via Geekosystem

Photo: Combo-pictures/Flickr

Hadouken not withstanding, I agree with urban artist COMBO that Muhammad Ali would totally best Street Fighter's Ryu. But I'm not so sure about E. Honda. It's not so easy to defeat a fat man in undies. Via Twisted Sifter

One morning, after she had two pear-sized tumors removed from her brain, Debbie Wagner decided to paint the sunrise. This became a daily ritual for her — a celebration of the life that she still had. For seven years, that’s what she’s done almost every day. Wagner explains why:

“When I look at a sunrise, it represents a new beginning. I’m just so happy to be here another day and see my kids do different things and go to dinner with my husband. I suppose that’s the addiction of it — it puts me in a state of mind focused on gratitude.”

Seven years have many sunrises, so Wagner has produced more paintings than she can display. She sells them to people who want to mark a special day:

Increasingly, Wagner’s artwork is taking on personal significance for others as well. People moved by her story have started requesting sunrise paintings for their own milestones: the day of a wedding or a baby’s birth; the day a loved one came home safely from Iraq or Afghanistan; the day a person finally overpowered a stubborn addiction.

Link -via Oddity Central (where there’s a video) | Photo: Debbie Wagner

Hill Valley of the future is such a wonderful place to live, or at least it is when created by Lego artist Alex Jones. He has even more cool movie sets on his Flickr page for the viewing enjoyment of any Lego enthusiast.

Link Via Geekologie

Lots of people love playing with tape, but Rebecca Ward has elevated sticking-tape-on things into an artform.

Take a look at her geometric installation, featured over at My Modern Met:

The tape artist redefines the space she's working in with her evenly spaced parallel and interweaving stretches of bright lines that form three-dimensional shapes. Taking her architectural pieces around the world, Ward has shown her installations from a gallery in Texas to a Kate Spade flagship store in Tokyo.

Link | Rebecca Ward's official website

Steven Spazuk draws with fire by holding a candle up to pieces of canvas, then adjusting the soot with brushes, knives, and his fingers to create images. I really like his impressionistic works, like the one above. But from a technical perspective, his massive composite portraits consisting of hundreds of smaller pieces demonstrate the magnitude of his skills. Watch a video at the link showing how Spazuk does it.

Link | Artist’s Website

Sir, it’s quite possible this staircase is not entirely stable. Nonetheless, C3PO will descend it as Mr. Duchamp requires. John Mattos composed this painting. You can see a roundup of other famous works of art with a science fiction twist at the link.

Link -via The Uniblog | Mattos’s Website

You’ve seen many minimalist art posters based on movies, but how about minimalist posters for internet memes? Artist Stefan Van Zoggel created 29 of them so far, illustrating both classic and recent memes. Link -via Blame It On The Voices

This is what happens when the person who actually saw something is not the same person who has the art supplies to illustrate it. They probably never even met, so what you end up with is somewhat akin to the Telephone Game. There are more examples at Buzzfeed. Some drawings may be technically NSFW. Link

Who knew Sabotage was so perfectly written to become a venn diagram? Really though, sabotage should go into another bubble. After all, it’s sabotage.

Link Via Laughing Squid

Modern technology might sound better, hold more songs and be easier to use than the vintage stuff, but it sure doesn’t have the same visual impact as a classic phonograph. Fortunately with this iPhonograph you get the stunning classic style blended with the beauty of new technology. If you’ve got the skills, Instructables has the steps to make your own.

Link Via Geekosystem

Illustrator Tim Doyle had a rather clever premise in mind while creating the pieces for his debut art show “Unreal Estate”- give various locations from pop culture an artistic makeover.  Here’s what Tim has to say about this series:

“Unreal Estate” is a collection of locations that many of us know and have been to on a weekly basis at times, but we can never actually visit. These places are in our memories- transmitted and entrenched there through a cathode-ray tube. Some of us have been going to these places for decades- some of these places were taken from us, way too soon.

Man, giving the Kwik-E-Mart a realistic edge makes it look even scummier than it does on The Simpsons!

Link  –via JazJaz

While I find it impossible highly unlikely that humans will still exist in 50 million years, it’s horrifying fun to see what some scientists artists think we will look like at the end of eternity.

According to these illustrations by madman speculative zoologist Dougal Dixon, humans will evolve into some sort of organ shaped being, with yucky cute trunk tail and our own built in bat wings umbrellas.

The illustrations were published in Omni magazine in the early 1980s, and I can’t help but wonder- would Dougal arrive at the same horrifying interesting conclusion if he were asked to draw future humans again today, or would modern scientific discoveries force him to simply leave the page blank?

Link

Whiteboard artist Bill Taylor proves that a little time “wasted” at work can be a beautiful thing. He spends less than ten minutes a day, over up to six weeks time per piece, recreating classic artworks by Picasso, Lichtenstein, Banksy and Escher, among others.

And when he’s finished he just wipes the board clean and starts all over again, after taking a photo of the finished piece, of course. I wonder how he keeps his co-workers from messing up his masterpieces?

Link  –via Flavorwire

Jenine Shereos’s delicate leaf sculptures look like the real thing from a distance, but they’re actually made of hair. She made them by stitching the hairs together on a backing, then dissolving that backing in water.

Link -via Colossal | Photo: Robert Diamante

Images: Museo Nacional del Prado

Conservators at the Prado Museum in Madrid, Spain, discovered something fantastic when they cleaned up their replica copy of the Mona Lisa.

At first, they thought their Mona Lisa was made after Leonardo da Vinci's death, but it turned out the painting was made side by side by Leonardo's apprentice, and it revealed astonishing new details:

The final traces of overpaint are now being removed by Prado conservators, revealing the fine details of the delicate Tuscan landscape, which mirrors the background of Leonardo’s masterpiece. Darkened varnish is also being painstakingly stripped away from the face of the Mona Lisa, giving a much more vivid impression of her enticing eyes and enigmatic smile.

In the Louvre’s original, which will not be cleaned in the foreseeable future, Lisa’s face is obscured by old, cracked varnish, making her appear almost middle aged. In the Prado copy we see her as she would have looked at the time—as a radiant young woman in her early 20s.

The Art Newspaper has the story: Link

Lisa Nilsson used Japanese mulberry tree paper and gilt-edged paper from old books to recreate human anatomical images. It was clever of her to see a similarity between curled paper and human body tissues. View several more works at the link.

Link -via Nerdcore | Previously: Paper Quilled Starry Night

If you’ve ever wondered what the Angry Birds look like after they take down those dastardly pigs, these illustrations by deviantARTist Scooterek should fill you in on what they look like after battle. Their medical bills must be through the roof, good thing their game is so popular!

Link  –via Rampaged Reality

Scientists have known what is contained in the Earth’s core for about 75 years now, but that hasn’t stopped sci-fi authors and artists from doing some wild speculation of their own.

These images by Japanese sci-fi illustrators are really far out, and I’m sure you’ll agree that the Earth’s core would make the awesomest setting ever for a Dungeons and Dragons campaign, or a great video game premise-Astronauts Vs. The Earths Core.

Just don’t go looking for science, because these sci-fi illustrations are mostly fiction.

Link

Psshh…chocolates are so twentieth century. In a world that’s obsessed with zombies, there’s no better Valentine’s gift than a simple, handmade set of zombie monsters. You can buy you own set over at Etsy.

Link Via CraftZine

Artist Alex Hurret made this delightfully cute Nintendo monster for your papercrafting pleasure. You can make your own at home if you can’t wait to get your hands on this cartridge-eating terror.

Link Via Geekosystem

Who knew Homer was speaking dragon this whole time?

Link Via The Daily What