Amazing Multi-Layer Mural

This is a video of artist Lewis Lavoie creating a large mural from a number of smaller ones.

It reminds me of Salvador Dali's portrait of Abraham Lincoln.

The Little People

Little People is a street art project that involves ... as you might imagine ... small, toy people.

All of the installations are quite cute, but I particularly like this one, which was the original link I followed from Dump Trumpet.

It doesn't look like much at this scale. You'll need to click on the image to see all the (tragic) detail it contains.

Amazing Animated Graffiti

At the end of a long journey this morning, following many links, I arrived at the Wooster Collective, which is a blog about street art.

It included this wonderful animation, done by repeatedly drawing over the same wall, using what appears to be charcoal. Truly amazing!

Do go and take a look at the blog, because there are many wonderful pieces there.

Too Many Times ...

... I've seen the sun come up through bloodshot eyes this week.

Particularly on Tuesday morning. However, I'm not complaining; it was a very nice end to a fantastic holiday!

So, here's how I spent my last day (and a bit) on Hamilton Island ...

It started out with a walk down to Foot Young's Gallery. He does some impressive sculptures in marble, bronze and granite. The subject matter consists predominantly of various sea creatures. I'll include a few in the photo set I'm planning for the next post.

I then went for a tour of the koala sanctuary and wildlife zoo. Pretty much what you'd expect: cockatoos, a cassowary, crocodile, wombat, a couple of kangaroos, some lizards, a frog and a snake ... and, of course, the very cute and cuddly koalas!

From there, I popped into the Resort Centre, to book a Reef Viewer cruise for the afternoon. While there, I discovered that there was a table tennis competition happening at 1pm that I could fit in before the cruise.

I came fourth out of about ten players, being beaten out of third place by a young whippersnapper who was sufficiently keen to have brought his own bat on holidays with him!

The Reef Viewer cruise was excellent, even though the overcast conditions meant that the coral appeared various shades of green, rather than their actual colours, through the glass bottom of the boat.

I met Michael at the Marina Tavern for a couple of cocktails and beers and some pool before dinner. We dined at Romano's, an excellent Italian restaurant; I'd say it was the best food we had during the holiday.

Our post-prandial plan was to check out the last couple of bars we hadn't tried. While waiting for the shuttle bus, we ran into two young ladies, Selena and Emily, who we'd seen sing a couple of duets at karaoke on Friday night. They asked whether we'd like to join them at the Toucan Tango Bar ... is the Pope a Catholic?!

They turned out to be lovely people. We played a couple of games of pool and drank a number of very interesting shots, concocted for us by Jamie, our Glaswegian barman.

When the bar shut, we retired to Emily and Selena's "bungalow" to kick on ... more beers, some pretty mediocre scotch, one of those horrible mixed drink cans and a couple of glasses of wine (no idea what Michael drank :-), plus a lot of good conversation.

It's kind of sad that we didn't hook up with these ladies earlier in the trip, but I'm not sure I'd have survived if we had done!

We ended up bidding them farewell and staggering back to the hotel just after 0500. Since we had to be on the bus to the airport at 0815, that didn't leave a lot of time for sleep!

Of course, that was no great change in my case; I calculate I caught ten hours across the three nights. As my old mate Barry Kyle would say ... "Sleep is death's rehearsal" :-).

The image below shows what our room looked like. This one's from the hotel's website, because I didn't think to take my own shot, but I swear they've photographed our specific room!

Avi Ornstein

My dear buddy Paul has a post on his blog containing a number of images of the works of Avi Ornstein.

I particularly like this one, but they're all great!

In my search to find more of Ornstein's works I came across a page, dated 1991, by a German high school chemistry teacher, explaining how he runs the first day with each class.

It's all about teaching the students to concentrate and listen carefully. One of the things he asks them to do is "Say 'ten' ten times". Excellent!

Beautiful Pieces

This jewelry, designed by Bernard Perroud, is very beautiful. The shape also seems somehow familiar; I can't quite put my finger on it ... but I'd like to :-).

  

A New Take On ASCII Art

Here's some artwork created purely via HTML code.

As Spluch suggested, more than likely this was done in reverse, with the image being drawn by some means and then a program generating the HTML from the pixels.

However, it looks very clever, nonetheless!

Holy Smoke

This is one of a series of artworks based around the hole in the centre of a CD.

Apparently, there are 25 in all ... every one is cute. You can find a few more here.

Vegemite Art

Yes, you read that correctly :-).

This video shows an artist creating a portrait, using nothing more than nine slices of toast and a jar of Vegemite.

Pregnant Belly Painting

Damn Cool Pics has some nice shots of an art form I'd never heard of before: Pregnant Belly Painting.

This one's probably my favourite, although the mother-to-be looks more like she's just scoffed down a couple of cheesecakes than carrying a bairn :-).

Most of the others look much more like something out of Alien.

Beer Can Art

Here is some interesting art sculpted entirely from empty beer cans.

I particularly like this guitarist.

Now, where did I leave those plans for the Taj Mahal?

Beautiful High Speed Photos

Using high-speed photography, this guy has taken some amazing shots of splashes in coloured water.

I can't imagine how some of these formed, but they're all truly beautiful.

World's Weirdest Art

Another great find by Dump Trumpet. Chinese artist Li Wei creates sculptures where the main materials are human beings (which always seem to include himself, by the look of it).

That's not the weird part. It's the environments and situations that are so bizarre.

The one pictured isn't the weirdest, either!

Beautiful LED Table

This table has LEDs embedded in its edges. When transparent objects are placed on it, they pick up the light and become beautifully illuminated.

Two Girls & A Keg

A photo of two nubile young lasses making out on top of some kegs spawned an amazing amount of comment and art.

I'll be right back ... just have to pop into a cold shower for a minute.

Be Still, My Heart

Yanko Design has a mock-up of a Mac tablet that I'd buy in a heartbeat if it really existed.

The integrated wireless keyboard is what does it for me. Plus, it just looks beautiful!

Spencer Tunick

Random Good Stuff just reminded about Spencer Tunick, the artist who uses live, naked humans in his installations.

They had this nice picture from his Mexican event.

There's a nice set on Attu World.

Have a play with the Naked World website. It includes a couple of radio interviews.

Rudy Rucker

I've been a big fan of Rudy Rucker's work for many years, but I only knew of him as a mathematician, computer scientist and novelist.

In fact, I just received his novel, Mathematicians In Love from Amazon, last week ... and it went straight to the top of my pile of unread fiction. I should get to it around September, when I finish The Contortionist's Handbook, which I started over the Bah Humbug break :-).

Today, via Boing Boing, I discovered that he's also an artist! He currently has a small selection (and discussion) of his paintings on his blog at the moment.

More can be found in his gallery at ImageKind.

Holy La Giaconda !!

This is pretty incredible.

Microsoft Paint has to be one of the least capable drawing packages available to an artist.

That didn't stop this guy from using it to recreate the Mona Lisa over the course of about two and a half hours ... mercifully reduced here to a few minutes.

Just imagine what he could do with a real drawing package!

Weird, But Impressive

Via Random Good Stuff comes this art gallery where the pieces are made from spools of cotton thread.

In general, they are best viewed through a glass sphere, which contracts the spools so that they are more like pixels.