Budgie or Food Art by Anna Keville Joyce

It’s likely that most of us were berated as children for “playing” with our food, but what if the sculptures and paintings we made with broccoli and spaghetti sauce hinted at our future career paths?

Food stylist Anna Keville Joyce creates truly spectacular imagery by using everything from crushed-up toast to slivered veggies, creating all manner of textures imaginable. After seeing the pieces she crafted with items that most of us have in our fridges and cupboards, it’s going to be difficult to see groceries as anything other than potential art supplies.

This art series that Anna created is in tribute to her pet bird: when Budgie passed on, Anna turned to art therapy to deal with her grief. As she works with food as a creative medium, it only made sense that she worked with the materials she knows and loves, and the result is astonishing. A flamingo crafted from crushed-up Fruit Loops cereal stands tall among paper-thin radish and kiwi slices; the plate becomes a canvas rather than just a serving implement.

Finger Painting by Iris Scott

Finger painting is now fine art at the hands of New York based artist Iris Scott. Why paint with one point of contact (a brush) when you can paint with several? In the same way a pianist utilizes all of her fingertips to hit the keys, Iris Scott is spearheading a movement that we left behind as kindergarteners.

Painting with her fingertips began in 2009, the artist took off a year after college to live in Taiwan. During this year abroad Iris stumbled up the technique by chance....she simply ran out of clean brushes and it was too hot to go clean them down the hall.  Iris was working on a painting in a nicely air-conditioned room when she realized that in order to switch to color yellow she needed to go out into the heat to clean her brushes. Not tempted by the idea, Iris added several yellow touches with her fingers. “I knew within 10 strokes that finger painting with oils was what I would spend the rest of my life doing,” she says.

Can someone please buy me one of these? Please...

Water Wigs by Tim Tadder

Inspiring photographer Tim Tadder and his series of Water Wigs photos.

These shots made his bald (or bald-capped) subjects look as if they had hair made of water, and required incredibly precise timing — and this video shows just how he did it.

Taking a look at the shapes of the “hair” in the resulting photos, it’s pretty easy to figure out how the pics are taken. Tadder’s assistants carefully place or drop differently shaped water balloons onto the models’ heads as he attempts to capture the ideal water wig shot.

Capturing the photos at the perfect time and freezing the action properly, however, is far from easy. His technique requires that the studio be completely dark (even a small flashlight can cause problems) and as much as we’re sure his models enjoyed having balloons thrown hard at their heads, Tadder eventually decided to start taping thumbtacks to their bald heads or bald caps to facilitate the perfect pop.

Each pop is unpredictable, and more often than not leads to an un-usable shot, but when he gets it right, the results are pretty darn cool.

A-Z of Dance

Sponsored by....Diesel!

Inspiring People - Christoph Rehage

Christoph Rehage started walking on November 9, 2007 and stopped in October 2008. He traveled over 4500 kilometers (2796 miles). All of the distance from Beijing to Ürümqi was completely on foot. The times where you can see him in the video riding a boat or sitting on a plane are during breaks Christoph had to take from walking, either to sort out bureaucracy issues or to take care of some personal issues.


Christoph was asked about his state of mind while he was walking and what he was thinking. He replied “It was just the way it would be on any normal day. Sometimes you think. Sometimes you don’t. Sometimes you worry about passports, dangers, pains, relatives and loved ones, and at other times your steps are light and you sing songs in the desert. Sometimes it is boring. And sometimes you feel at peace.”

When he was asked why he stopped walking, Christoph said, “I wanted to gain back my life. I had to regain control over myself, eliminate the inner boss that was telling me what to do. A lot of people look at the video thinking “I want to be free like that guy!” – but they don’t realize that I was driven by something, and maybe I was losing control over it.”

Would love to do something similar one day...!

RICHARD WILSON 20:50

Richard Wilson is one of Britain's most celebrated sculptors. He is known for his interventions in architectural space which draw heavily for their inspiration from the worlds of engineering and construction and are characterised by concerns with size and structural daring.

This installation is the permanent installation in the Saatchi Gallery, London and is basically a vast tank made out of sheet metal and filled to the brim with thick sump oil. The work reflects the architecture of the room, seemingly doubling its size. The installation contains 8,000 litres of sump oil 20:50, from which the work takes its name. 

Wilson has become renowned for his site-specific installations. Of this work he says: 'It can be applied to any internal space ... and in each space it will be radically different – because it will reflect it and adapt to its parameters'  

 

Erik Johansson Photography

Photographer Erik Johannson creates impossible but photorealistic images that capture an idea, not a moment.

Erik Johannson is a self-taught photograher who learned how to retouch photos to make impossible and extraordinary images. Growing up with a grandmother who painted and a penchant for escaping into the other worlds of video games, he naturally blended the two into a technique using computers to generate images that couldn't be captured by a camera.

Check the website or TED talk.

A Conversation With My 12 Year Old Self

Jeremiah McDonald recorded himself 20 years ago and with the material created this awesome little sketch as a 32-year old.

Why is it interesting? Because I literally cant believe he really recorded this 20 years ago and now he made this video. Must be the clever guy! After watching this I want to record the same video and watch it in 20 years time as well...or re-watch videos when I was 12 years old.
It is also interesting how Jeremiah is making the comment about the Internet. 'Life before the internet is kind of blurred to me...' It took over over lives and we spend many many hours looking at the screen.. So what did we do before Internet? :) I was actually also drawing random stuff...

But this is exactly how Jeremiah makes a link to his passion to draw. You can support him by going to his Tell Me to Draw Something blog and well, tell him to draw something.

Meme Myself and I - meowbook and slating

Cadbury has entered the second phase of the Cadbury Boosted Inspiration Series campaign, which runs in partnership with MTV Australia. This stage includes a three-part documentary series entitled ‘Meme Myself and I.’

Cadbury’s Boosted Inspiration campaign celebrates people who “seek to start stuff” and each video is a demonstration of one such person. The first installment of the fun series called ‘Meowbook’ features Thomas Mai, a man who intends to launch a social networking site for cats.

Michael Hughes’ Souvenirs

Ben Heine and Jason Powell were both inspired by Michael Hughes' souvenirs photography series! Not surprised now, why when discovered all three of them I thought that something should be in common. Actually, I thought that is one photographer. Oops..

Michael Hughes, who works as a freelance photographer in Germany, has created a set of optical illusions in which tacky souvenir replicas of famous landmarks are placed in front of the real thing.

Jason Powell looking into the past

If you remember “Pencil versus Camera” project by Ben Heine then this is something really similar, however this time Jason Powell allows us to look into the past.

Images are made by finding old photographs of places, printing them out, and then holding the print up in the modern day location that the original photograph was taken. Jason says that so far, most of the historical images have been available for free at the Library of Congress.

The artist still continues to add new photos to his series, and even created a flickr group for people who want to do similar pictures.

Peter Menzel or 'what the world eats'

Photographs by Peter Menzel from the book "Hungry Planet".
In the book Hungry Planet, photographer Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio present a photographic study of families from around the world, revealing what people eat during the course of one week. Each family's profile includes a detailed description of their weekly food purchases; photographs of the family at home, at market, and in their community; and a portrait of the entire family surrounded by a week's worth of groceries.

To assemble this remarkable comparison, Menzel and D'Aluisio traveled to 24 countries and visited 30 families from Bhutan and Bosnia to Mexico and Mongolia, and recorded what they ate for a week. Menzel photographed each family in their kitchen with the week’s worth of groceries, while D’Alusio interviewed them about their food habits and family structure. Accompanying the portraits and narratives are detailed breakdowns of each family’s grocery list, more photographs of the family and home country, and statistics for each country visited.

Here is a selection of pictures from the book. Note: the book was made about 5 years ago, and the prices were of that time.

Japan: The Ukita family of Kodaira City
Food expenditure for one week: 37,699 Yen or $317.25
Favorite foods: sashimi, fruit, cake, potato chips

Italy: The Manzo family of Sicily
Food expenditure for one week: 214.36 Euros or $260.11
Favorite foods: fish, pasta with ragu, hot dogs, frozen fish sticks

Felice Varini – Anamorphic Illusions

Felice Varini is a Swiss artist who is known for his geometric Anamorphic Illusions. Anamorphic Illusions are  images which only make sense from one view and can only be truely appreciated from a certain vantage point. What look like random fragmented shapes of colour form an interesting piece of art when viewed from the set point. Felice ‘s works are usually found on architectual and urban spaces and can give a modern twist to any scene. His works are formed using a projector-stencil technique.

Here is the best of Felice Varini’s work:

Hyper-Realistic acrylic body painting by Alexa Meade

Alexa Meade is a 25-year-old artist whose work lies at the intersection of painting, photography, performance, and installation.

Rather than creating representational paintings on a flat canvas, Alexa Meade creates her representational paintings directly on top of the physical subjects that she is referencing. When photographed, the representational painting and the subject being referenced appear to be one and the same as the 3D space of her painted scenes becomes optically compressed into a 2D plane.

Gary Chang's tiny apartment

Gary Chang, an architect, designed his 344 square foot apartment in Hong Kong to be able to change into 24 different designs, all by just sliding panels and walls.

He calls this the “Domestic Transformer.” Check out the video of Chang in his apartment below.

Liz Hickok Jell-O photography

Liz Hickok is a San Francisco-based artist working in photography, video, sculpture, installation, and currently, Jell-O. Hickok received her MFA from Mills College in Oakland, California. She earned a BFA and BA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University in Boston, Massachusetts. Hickok lived and worked in Boston for over ten years before moving to the San Francisco Bay Area. Hickok’s San Francisco in Jell-O series has become a popular subject of media coverage, such as The New York Times, NPR, and The CBS Early Show.

San Francisco-based installation artist Liz Hickok recreates famous skylines and landmarks using Jell-O as her construction material. “Remade in an unexpected material, seemingly permanent architectural structures are transformed into something precarious and ephemeral,” she explains in an interview with Inhabitat. “Their fragility quickly becomes a metaphor for the transitory nature of human artifacts.” Click through to check out her jiggly versions of New York City, San Francisco, and the White House.

Rashad Alakbarov - Shadow paintings

Artist Rashad Alakbarov from Azerbaijan uses suspended translucent objects and other found materials to create light and shadow paintings on walls.

Rashad graduated from the Faculty of Decorative Arts at Azerbaijan State Academy of Fine Art in Baku in 2001. The use of shadows in his instllation art has become the primary direction in the artist’s conceptual work, but also dablles in painting, sculpture, theatre decorations, video art and architectural design. His work is held in private collections in Azerbaijan, Italy, Turkey and Russia.

Li Wei photography

Li Wei is a contemporary artist from Beijing, China. His work often depicts him in apparently gravity-defying situations. Wei started off his performance series, Mirroring, and later on took off attention with his Falls series which shows the artist with his head and chest embedded into the ground. His work is a mixture of performance art and photography that creates illusions of a sometimes dangerous reality. Li Wei states that these images are not computer montages and works with the help of props such as mirror, metal wires, scaffolding and acrobatics.

Once more, there is no photoshop involved!

  For this picture you can see the video about how it was created.

Johann Lippowitz

Johann Lippowitz (real name David Armand) performs his mime version of Natalie Imbruglia's 'Torn'.
Yes, we all know that he does the guitar slide wrong. Get over it. It's still really funny.

Cadbury UK on Google+

Cadbury loves Google+. Not only has the UK-based chocolatier launched a product through Google’s social network, has also now created a chocolate version of its Google+ page.

Cadbury chronicled the construction of its edible Google+ page through a series of 10 step-by-step photos, shown in the gallery below.
Layers of Cadbury Dream and Dairy Milk chocolate were applied to a base of Dairy Milk bars. Edible inks were printed onto sugar paper to create detailed replicas of the Page’s buttons and photos of fans. Pieces were adhered using liquid Dairy Milk as a kind of glue. Text was applied by hand with edible ink.