The Spanish blog Recortables shares papercraft models with political criticism, created by Sento Llobell, comics illustrator, and Toni Vaca, "speciallist on wasting time". There are papercraft caricatures of George W. Bush - El Carnicero Global, the king of Spain Juan Carlos I - El Campechano, Bin Laden - Ex-guerrero de la C.I.A., the pope Bendicto XVI and few others.They are available to download directly, as zip archive, or using eMule. (via Paper Forest)
My Lilliput is a fabulous Flickr set with catchy macro pictures with tiny plastic toys interacting with strawberries, nuts, flowers, vegetables and other stuff. The photos of those tiny people were taken by Gianluca Fabrizio.
Related posts:
Mini-Miam
Kita Usagi
Little People
Adalberto Abbate
Plastic Fantastic
in Photography, Photography, Toys |
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Kids, and many adults, love plush and stuffed toys. That's why there are so many options available: classic teddy bears, bunnies, hearts, cute animals, plush food, cthulhus, microbes, pee and poo, and even sushi for puppies. The Brazilian designer brothers Fernando and Humberto Campana also explore the huge universe of plus toys re-creating them in a project called "Banquete Chair": chairs made with plush toys, from chairs made using diverse plush animals, to chairs made only with bears, or only with sharks and dolphins.
Now I have a new great surprise in the plush science universe: Plush Internal Organs. The toys were created by I Heart Guts!, which has more options of stuff with pretty illustrations with those and more smiling internal organs: bags, T-shirts, buttons, stickers and artwork. The plush set contains lungs, liver, kidney and heart - a nearly anatomic correct heart, not those stupid fake hearts without veins - and it's available for $67.00. They are also be selling individually. That's a great gift, with the Giant microbes, for any children who wants to be a doctor, and probably to almost anyone you know.
Related posts:
Needies
Hanpanda
Open Puppets
Natasha Fadeeva
The Stuffed Kiwa Hirsuta
Rebecca Wheeler and Serena Kuhul
Nicole Gastonguay is a graphic designer, however, she has another talent: crochet. She makes marvellous (and super cute) crochet toys. And for toys I want to say adorable crochet food and animals. It's impossible not love her smiling creations with googly eyes. Seriously. Look at this squid, this robot, this robot hotdog, or this cup of coffee on Flickr. Even the glue is smilling. I just feel bad about this very sad piece of meat.
By the way, if you want to try some of those, here are the bad news: She doesn’t really have patterns. She makes things up as she goes along. (via MetaFilter)
Related posts:
Amigurumi
Patricia Waller
Monster Crochet
Hand-crocheted HIV virus
Make your own Dalek
Hieronymus Bosch is on the top of my list of painter that I think had a disturbed brilliant mind. His paintings full of bizarre and scary creatures are an example of how far can go the human mind and how far the Catholic church went to its absurd ideas of hell and sins.
Among his works, the "The Garden of Earthly Delights" is the one I most like. The reason involve the strawberries - meaning sex, the fantastic details, the numerous odd situations, the colours, the division in three stages, the luxury all over the second painting, situations and the grotesque creatures.
It's from that painting that Atom, from Glue² chronicle, got the idea of made two papercraft models: the helmet bird and the letter bird. As you can see, the models look pretty nice, and compared with its complexity, that turns them even more neat. Both models are ready and available to download as bmp or pdo. To open the pdo you will need the Pepakura Viewer, wich is also free to download. The kids won't have more excuses to play of purgatory at home. (via ectoplasmosis)
Related posts:
Bosch Universe
Parastone Mouseion Collection
Os sete pecados capitais
After those LEGO® Ice Brick Tray to make your own pieces of iced LEGO, the Giant Zombie LEGO Men ATTACK! are great present for LEGO enthusiasts. Two models of those customizes and painted 19" LEGO zombies were created using plastic, resin, metal, paint, for the for retro-inspired art show, Back In The Day by Andrew Bell. They aren't available for now, but they would be great to re-enact a George Romero's film and playing of eating brains of another toys.
I don't remember having seen wood toys prettier than those by take-g toys. Takeji Nakagawa, aka Take-G, creates adorable toys and crafts, like the wonderful wood robots. The robots and his other crafts are actually art works, sold only at exhibitions and art galleries. About his work:
Yosegi-Mokuzougan, or joined wooden block construction, is craft skills where combinations of original and unique colors and textures of different kinds of wood are utilized to express artistic patterns. In Japan, the Hakone-Odawara region is famous for this traditional handicraft. Products of the Take-g Toy’s have expanded this traditional craft skill, which usually employs two-dimensional patterns, by using three-dimentional patterns, instead. We use four different kinds of wood, a keyaki (a Japanese tree of the genus Zelkova), a teak, a walnut, and a white ash.
Arata Sasaki interviewed Takeji Nakagawa for Hitspaper. The interview is available in Japanese and English.
Here are my collection of links with cats, specially saved to blog today. And before you run away complaining "Oh no, cat pictures!", take a look on the images and their descriptions. They have cats, of course, but they aren't all just about cats.
The toy above, called Gato, was designed by Israel Chavira. This cat loves honey, probably cause his bee body type. A silly curiosity: the Spanish word "Gato" means cat, chat, Katze, katt, gàtto, and it has the same writing for Portuguese, gato.
Among the hundreds of cool scanned images of Modern Mechanix, the vintage articles with cats always get my attention. And, of course, I saved them to share: Cats Are Fun to Photograph, From Cats to Cataclysms, Cat Pictures Used to Scare Away Birds, Blows Glass Globe Around Cats (no cats were harmed!) and Things I Learned from Ten Thousand Cats. The last article is from 1934, but some things about what we know about cats didn't change.
By A. J. Adamson
ONLY by dealing patiently and kindly with a cat, particularly during its early life, may you develop the sort of animal everyone wants as a companion and pet. Unlike dogs, cats will respond only to kindness. Punish them and they grow surly and spiteful. I speak from rich experience, having bred fully 10,000 cats during the last quarter of a century.
The old idea was that every animal should be punished when caught in a wrongful act, but cats do not understand the meaning of a whipping. They are weak-willed and easily tempted and must, therefore, be guided in paths of righteousness.
Before all those stupid mania of LOLcats (I'm tired of them), there was The Laugh-Out-Loud Cats, a comic strip created and illustrated by the cartoonist Aloysius "Gorilla" Koford, according to Adam Koford his grandson. From 1912-1913 he produced a comic strip which was featured in 17 newspapers, including the Philadephia Star-Democrat, the Tampa Telegraph, and the Santa Fe Good-Newser. It featured the exploits of one Meowlin Q. Kitteh (a sort of cat hobo-raconteur) and his young hapless kitten friend, Pip. Adam is sharing those "treasures" (the comics are brilliant), and until now there are 340 images on the Flickr set. BTW, there is something on those comics that reminds me Krazy Kat. (via Will You Look At That)
The iCat is a project developed by Philips Research Technologies in 2005. I think iCat is a bit scary.
iCat is a research platform for studying human-robot interaction topics. The robot is 38 cm tall and is equipped with 13 servos that control different parts of the face, such as the eyebrows, eyes, eyelids, mouth and head position. With this setup iCat can generate many different facial expressions - happy, surprise, angry, sad - that are needed to create social human-robot interaction dialogues.
A camera installed in iCat's head can be used for different computer vision capabilities, such as recognizing objects and faces.
The giant Plant Cup designed by Gitta Gschwendtner, was available at YouSayTomayto for $338.00. You can't buy it for now, however, you can take a look on set of pictures Plant Cup, with more demonstrations of its uses by Eek, the grey cat, and Miss Moneypenny. Grey cats rock.
in Cats, Comics, Design, Friday Cat Blogging, Technology, Toys, Vintage ||
On Tummie-Design you will find the super cute portfolio of Tummie with illustrations, toys and animations, her shop with lovely bags and wallets with monsters (cute monsters I may say), and some very pretty things she made to download, including icons, wallpaper and the adorable papermodel "mover" (bellow). (via Paper Forest)
Related posts:
Mari-Chan
Plush Food
Jolanda Olie
Chameko-Do
Honda Zoomer
Makoto Muramatsu
in Craft, Illustration, Toys ||
The talented Sara Lanzillotta makes fantastic handmade dolls, creatures and monsters. Her site Devout Dolls presents a huge collection of her creations: Dolls of the Silver Screen, aliens, fairies, octopus, Siamese twin dolls, little strange creatures, witches, two headed kitties, Indian gods, mermaids, dolls of popular characters like Harry Potter's Herminone, Neil Gaiman's Death, Sally from Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas and the Wonder woman.
The Alice the Pirate bellow is a small homage to Talk Like A Pirate Day. (via The Mystery of the Haunted Vampire)
Grace Weston is an American photographer with a very special talent to shot toys. Through inanimate objects she recreates situations and feelings, transmitting them through her pictures. (via Canta Piriquito Canta)
Grace Weston is an award-winning photographer who works in her Portland, Oregon studio creating narrative imagery with staged vignettes that combine humor, wit and psychological tension. She constructs her sets as well as fabricates and fins props and characters to address the dilemmas, illusions, joys, and fears that at once seem so personal, yet are also universal.
More photography posts with toys: Monkey Suicide, Adalberto Abbate, Make Love Not War, Ciuco Gutiérrez, Junkoseven, McCarty PhotoWorks, Kita Usagi, LEGO Beatles Covers and Vignettes, Plastic Fantastic, Seven Deadly Sins by gummies and Mr Potato Head and Mini-Miam.
in Photography, Photography, Toys ||
To celebrate the 10 years of making toys, the ToyFare magazine made a list counting down the 100 best toys of the decade: 10 Years, 100 Toys:
From 1997 onward, toys only got better and better as companies continued to raise the stakes and collector tastes continued to mature. From #100 to #1, these are the figures whose articulation, sculpt, playability and overall cool factor had us in a perpetual state of regression. The rules were simple: it had to have come out in 1997 or later, and no re-issues of toys made pre-1997 were eligible. (Sorry, Imperial Shuttle.)
There are toys of Harry Potter, Captain America, Darth Vader, Batman, Legolas, Buffy, Muppets, Alien, Lara Croft, Chewbacca, Superman, Robocop, Balrog, Godzilla, Iron Man, Indiana Jones, Space Ghost and many other well known characters. Even a Bruce Lee is on the list. However, been a fan of Tim Burton's creations, for me the best choice was Jack Skellington. By the way, where is El Kabong and South Park action figures on that list? (via Toysrevil's I Like Toys)
After the Bunny Suicides, comes the Monkey Suicide. It's present with those words: This site is all about monkeys. In sticky situations... That's true. I would also said it's about monkey toys and black humour, the one I like. Until now 205 monkey were sacrificed. Help to increase this number uploading your monkey picture. (BB-Blog)
in Fun, Fun, Photography, Photography, Toys ||
Tapedeck is a project of neckcns.com, built to showcase the amazing beauty and (sometimes) weirdness found in the designs of common audio tape cassettes.
There's an amazing range of designs, starting from the early 60's functional cassette designs, moving through the colorful playfulness of the 70's audio tapes to amazing shape variations during the 80's and 90's.
It's called a "nostalgia" site, and I hope it is nostalgia for all my readers. I don't believe I have readers to young to have ever used them. (Thanks Damien!)
Curiously, in the last years emerged a whole cassette tape culture transforming the audio tapes in icons. Vintage Japanese cassettes from 1980's are now been used to create transformer toys. The Italian designer Marcella Foschi transformed them in charming retro wallets, while in the U.S., Alyce Santoro used recycled audio cassette tapes and cotton to make pretty dresses. Those were some examples.
Etsy has tons of products made with cassete tapes or images of them, from T-shirts to cassette belt buckles, passing through necklaces, ipod cases, earrings and card holders. Using the iconic image of the cassette, the design site FRED life created a neat cassette tote bag. (via Smidigt)
I still have hundreds of those audio tapes on my closet. I should give them a proper funeral and take some pictures of them before I do it. However, I saw many great ideas about what I can do with them at Design Boom. One of them is to do a USB Flash Cassette Mod. The BBC, they also link to an article with 10 uses for audio cassettes. Another good idea is to make a cassette tape evening bag with that tutorial. That is, after I learn to crochet.
I keep this blog safe for work and that's a pity, because I would like to post more not safe images. The funny thing is, that I know this blog was blocked by some (stupid) filters at work and school, as if it had some "immoral" content - at least in Brazil. Even they I blog about sex, I use a safe image - or make it safe.
So I hope I didn't offend anyone with the image above from Make Love Not War photo set. The set was created by cszar with his naughty T-800's robots. Warning: the set contains naked robots in sex positions. But in the name of the positions, there are binary codes.
in Geek, Photography, Photography, Toys ||
The site of Doktor A is full of his fantastic creations: pretty paintings of little men with pointy hats, paintings and illustrations and cute (odd) little fellows called Poddies, dark sculptures of fairies, clowns and creatures, digital illustrations of aliens and bizarre characters, and fantastic toys.
He designed several models of toys: little monsters, strange animals and kind of steampunk creations.They are a cross between the characters of vintage sci-fi pulp books, elements of new steampunk creations and something from a Jules Verne's book. It's tough to describe them, but that's the image which come to my mind the first time I saw the Professor Whistlecraft’s astounding Incendiary Automaton. (via Custom Toy Lab)
in Art, Illustration, Painting, Sculpture, Toys ||
Throw me the first paper ball who never built a paper plane. Folding paper airplanes in an A4 paper sheet is one of several artistic abilities I have, which also include drawing stickmen ("bonecos de pauzinho" in Portuguese) and very easy paper craft models. The Online Paper Airplane Museum gives me the chance to improve my incredible talent, with links to more than 810 airplane designs, links and list of books. From classic models with images step by step to complex cut and fold models. (via Make)
Sometimes, even images with step by step aren't enough, and you want a video. That's easier: a simple search at Google Video will return thousands of videos. The video below, called "The best paper airplane", is one of the most popular videos and it's also available in steps with pictures here.
Oh, what a lazy day is Sunday. I always heard that people love Sunday, but I never was a huge fan of it. It isn't a productive day for me and it goes too fast. On Sundays I have a strange feeling that I'm late for everything, even it been the first day of the week. Strangely, it's also one of those days I don't know what to do and I feel lost if I don't go out. Sunday turned into the day to go to a restaurant, or go to the cinema, or to an exhibition, or if I stay at home, it's the day to read a (whole) book or be hypnotised by TV.
That's why I love internet: you can stay at home in a grey Sunday and do something more productive. Try a new recipe, watch a feature film or a funny animation, play a silly game, answer all those boring e-mails, discover a new book to read, chat with distance friends, search for a new hobby or find some cool stuff to keep your hands busy. And that's my point for this Sunday: keep your hands busy with the following links of papercraft. Check the printer and the scissors and go to them.
The little fellow above is Walter Kitty is a character from the book The Secret Life of Walter Kitty
For the group who prefers dogs, Ben The illustrator released a second series of Speakerdog Paper Toys. The series 2 was created by 21 wonderful illustrators, graphic designers and graffiti artists. Twenty one lovely models to empty your printer cartridges. BTW, the series 1 still available at Ben's site. (via Urban Retro Lifestyle)
The company Furni has a free cardboard cutout toy in limited edition to download: Furni meet Bigchief. The little paper dude is a collaboration between Milan design company BigChief Design and Furni. It's a series limited to 5000 download, so be fast. Try also the BigChief - The original to download.
The Flickr is Flickr Monkey is there to share super cute papercraft models. Choose a dog available in brown and red, a red, green or blue bird, and a He's so cute on Flickr - Photo Sharing! available in five colours (orange, green, red, blue and purple). To thank Flickr Monkey for the toys, after print, cut and fold it (or them), submit the image to the group Flickr Monkey & Friends. I need a new printer to make a blue monkey to me.
My last suggestion goes to the excellent French blog Agence eureka. It's full of beautiful vintage images, from film magazines to illustrations of children's books. If you have some time, make a deep search on the archives, where you will also find several of images of vintage toys to print, cut and play. Among those preciosities, the last one was a Maquette d'Epinal, a small circus to fold. But my favourite post of last times is about some lovely Japanese paperdolls, who points to three complete scanned cutout dressing books here, here and here.
The photographer Ciuco Gutiérrez calls his work as "Perverse kitsch. may be". Yes, he, and his work are preserve and kitsch, combining colours, shadows and shapes masterfully.
Ciuco Gutierrez is an outsider artist who walks an uncomfortable tightrope - uncomfortable for us ah - between, on the one hand, the banal, the vulgar and the cheaply romantic; and, on the other, the ludic connotations or what we might call the small beauties of the same. [...] What I'm trying to say is that he likes these things that he also loathes, and what 1 am also suggesting is that he is telling is that in some strange part of ourselves we share both bis hiking and his loathing. It is this yes/no pan of ourselves that he is constantly foregrounding in bis works, in a vicious technicolor, a kind of insistent visual syntax, from which there is no escape, in an aesthetic presence that lifts the kitsch origin of many of bis materials into the formal terrain of art.
A short note before you check his pictures: the photos of galley "Un lugar donde vivir" plays with the curves of the (female) human body and toys are, I think, NSFW. The three other galleries are totally safe for work. (via Mira y Calla)
Related posts: McCarty PhotoWorks, The Adventures of Rodney Robot, Kita Usagi, Mini-Miam and Plastic Fantastic.
in Photography, Photography, Toys ||
We are living in a "cutefication" era. Everything can be turn into something cute, even those we had naturally understand as bad. I'm talking about things like the super cute Giant microbes, the lovely Pee and Poo plush toys, and South Park's Mr. Hankey, the "Christmas Poo". Maybe I shouldn't had add Mr. Hanky, since South Park is hors concours. Anyway, I'm was trying to prove those kind of stuff don't surprise us any more, on the opposite, they amuse us.
All this to introduce the pretty and coloured amigurumi-style hand-crocheted HIV virus by Le Petit Bijou Boutique. Those HIV virus, beyond being cute, they also don't hurt anyone. In fact, they were made for a good cause:
33% of the sale price of this item ($3.00) will be donated to Blood:Water Mission, a non-profit organization with a goal to provide clean water and blood and to support health care facilities in the face of this crisis in Africa.
(via Notcot)
in Toys ||
