The Systematic Approach

When you first begin to teach in the public school system, they tell you about systems you should have in place. That there should be a system for seating, a system for classroom management, a system for conflict resolution, and a system for teaching. Don't get me wrong, I like some systems. Systems are necessary in order to get things done. An ordered approach is vital to the successful completion of almost any task I can think of, but my love for systems ends there.

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Rubik's Cubism

French artist, Space Invader has been bust recreating some of the most famous scenes from pop-culture using the humble Rubik's cube. I'm especially fond of the Roxy Music cover above.

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Bug Buddha

Scale-wise, this diminutive Buddha made from insects, pales in comparison to Jan Fabre's piece that I posted about last week. But what it lacks in size, it makes up for in detail. You should really click over to Japan Probe and check out the video in order to appreciate it fully.

African Beach "Doodles"

Calligrapher/artist, Andrew van der Merwe creates these stunning "beach carvings" near Cape Town, South Africa. This from the site:

"These doodles are done using instruments and techniques I have developed over the past 6 years. Before that, like anyone else, I did a lot of scratching with sticks.

As a calligrapher I have a particular interest in African colonial and pre-colonial writing systems, so when I doodle on the beach its often along these lines. The more angular letter styles take their inspiration from Tifinagh, the script of the Tuareg people of North Africa. It is interesting how that, even to this day, the Tifinagh resembles ancient Greek and Phoenician.

The interesting-looking characters in other pieces are usually taken from west African symbols such as the Adinkra symbols of the Akan people of Ghana and the Ivory Coast. They're mostly meaningless doodles - a play with form."

You can see more of his portfolio over at Behance. via NotCot

Rock Out with Your, er, Droid Out

Ran across a three-page megapost of Star Wars goodness over at Dark Roasted Blend that included this, my favorite Star Wars painting ever! The image above is a fragment of a larger painting by Hugh Fleming, which hangs near the entry of B building at the new Lucasfilm campus in San Francisco. link

Stuart Semple's Happy Blue Clouds

London artist, Stuart Semple has created a machine that mixes blue dye, glycerin, and helium to create floating, biodegradable happy faces which he releases around the city. Sweet!

Freya's Cabin

Check out this awesome little shelter by Weave Studio that is part of a series of buildings commissioned for Kielder Water and Forest Park, just south of The Scottish/English border. Built out of 150 pieces of individually cut plywood and skinned with a copper/aluminum alloy, Freya's cabin is a real standout at water's edge. link via NotCot

Buy the Stamps, Dummy.

In 2001 we held our third festival in Oakland, California. It cost a lot of money to produce. I'm not saying this to brag. I'm saying this to prepare you for one of the dumbest business arguments I've ever had.

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Leafy Goodness

I ran across a megapost on leaf art this morning over at the Crooked Brains blog. Everything from intricate cutting and folding to some really stunning examples of leaf painting. Brilliant stuff.

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Man Shoot Metal with Gun. Make Art.

Alabama artist, Walton Creel, deals in an unusual medium...guns and metal. The piece you see above was shot about 5000 times, each dot a bullet hole. That's a lot of ammo. You can check out more of Walton's explosive pointillism over at his site. Weird and wonderful, no? Thanks to Keith from Hand/Eye magazine for passing this on to us.

Competition

When I was starting my business in San Francisco, there was a very small group of people who were in the same line of work. We had our areas that we serviced and we all made a small but comfortable living. Then, all of a sudden, a major competitor decided to move to town. Someone with brand recognition, someone who had an established tribe, a great product, and an exciting reputation. Someone who, some felt, threatened our livelihood. And then, something sort of amazing happened.

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Cell Phone + DVD Lens = Macro Photography

If you are going to photograph small objects, close-up, you're going to want a good macro lens. Or, are you? The geniuses over at DIY photography have come up with this brilliant hack using the lens from an old DVD player and a cell phone. Just look at that picture! Awesome! link via BoingBoing

Tech Support Cheat Sheet

This is my favorite new cartoon. If you've ever helped your elders with a computer "problem", I'm certain you can relate. via swissmiss

The $3000 House

Check out this 360 square foot, cob house (a mixture of sand, clay, and straw similar to adobe) that 24 year-old Ziggy built with his own two hands and a little help from his friends. Total cost: $3000 and nine months labor. Check out the whole story over at TreeHugger

The Quest

Tonight I was thinking about mistakes I've made; really cringe-worthy blunders and other misguided attempts at being more than I was ready to be. I was thinking about it because, lately, I've been watching people make the same mistakes, which doesn't bother me in the slightest. What is most interesting to me is what happens afterward.

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Time Travel Posters

I love vintage travel posters to begin with, but add in a little time travel and I really love them. The fire poster above looks like a WPA effort from the stone age.Dig it! Check the whole series out over at the Echo Park Time Travel Mart. via NotCot

Brian Dettmer's Cassette Tape Skulls

From the man who brought you the incredibly intricate and beautiful book autopsies, comes a new and equally mind blowing project consisting of cassette tapes melted into the form of skulls. Great looking work.

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Desiring Nothing

I've heard Taoists call it the Yin Paradox. You might not know it by that name, but it has certainly happened to you. Perhaps you had a stretch in your life where you were single for a long time and then, as soon as you stopped caring whether you had a partner or not, the universe dropped somebody wonderful into your life. Happens all the time, right? Well, if we all know this is how things work in love, business and just about anything else, why is it that we go on chasing all those things to no avail when, really, what we should be doing is sitting still, doing our thing, and attracting what we need?

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Lego 8-bit Stop Motion

Found this complex and wonderful homage to 8 bit video games over on boing boing this morning. Have I mentioned how much I love Legos lately?

411 - The Work of Alex Queral

I ran across the work of Alex Queral recently via a tweet from our good friend Sister Diane. I'm digging the folk art quality of Queral's phone book portraits, and the fact that he's making use of something that most people just toss in the recycling bin these days.

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In Knots - The Work of Daniel Arsham

It seems unlikely to me that the work of Daniel Arsham should have escaped my notice up to this point. Not only is his body of work stunning, he's also pretty damned famous. Ah, well. The important thing is that I've found him now and can share him with you.

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Why I’m Not Following You on Twitter

Let me just say, right off the bat, that this is not a rant. Rather, it’s a simple, and hopefully, enlightening missive about why, even though you are following me on Twitter, I am not following you.

There are a whole host of reasons why I may choose not to follow you on Twitter, so perhaps it would be useful for me to lay bare my vetting process for you, the prospective followee.

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Treasure Everywhere

A little recommendation for your Sunday...Head over and check out one of my new favorite blogs, There's Treasure Everywhere. The hosts, oAk and Noah, do a fantastic job of photographing old signage and "typography made unintentionally beautiful". Indeed.

Difficult, Rare, and Sexy

I was flipping through marketing books in the business section at Borders tonight and I noticed that the conventional wisdom being thrown around concerning selling things on the internet is that you should make it as easy as possible for your customer to buy your product. For conventional products, I think that's true. If you sell dog food, you'll want to offer bulk discounts, free shipping, 18 ways to pay, and a lifetime guarantee. But if you make handmade goods, you're not selling dog food, and "ease" is not necessarily going to be the right marketing plan in every case.

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4 Free Twitter Backgrounds/Textures

I had a few textures left over from a project I just completed and thought I'd offer them up to you, my readers, if you want them. They are all photos I took and manipulated. They are sized to be Twitter Backgrounds. You may use and remix them with impunity. Cheers.

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EniCycle

I spent one entire Christmas vacation trying to master riding a unicycle by riding (crashing) from doorway to doorway in my house. I'm surprised my parents didn't kill me. I think, by day five, they were close. Compared to conventional unicycling, the EniCycle looks like an absolute walk in the park.

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Killian Mansfield - Rest in Peace

Killian passed away last night. At this time, I'm having difficulties writing anything resembling a fitting tribute. Perhaps, because he lived so large and with such courage, there aren't really any adequate words to describe him. He spent every waking moment pumping positivity into the world, and this planet is a colder place without him. He was a kid I looked up to. Lots of people did.

Thanks to all of you who made cranes. I'm not sure what the family wishes with regard to this project now, so I think that it would be safest to stop sending them at this point or until otherwise notified.

Please DO keep purchasing his CD though. Proceeds will insure that other kids with cancer will receive the integrated therapies that they need. It's available here, on Amazon.

Goodbye, my friend. I can't wait to play ukuleles with you again.

Strung Out - The Work of Chiharu Shiota

I've just been introduced to the delicate and slightly sinister work of Japanese artist, Chiharu Shiota. There's not much to explain the process on the website, but I'm definitely in awe of anyone who has the patience and the eye to create such a dreamlike environment out of fiber. I would love to walk through one of these installations!

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Heaven of Delight

If you know anything about Jan Fabre, you know he has a penchant for using strange materials. So, what, you ask, is this ceiling made of? I bet you'll never guess. I didn't.

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Mental Design

I got hip to Mental Design through a little post on BoingBoing this morning and, boy, I'm glad I did. Although the blog is not written in English, the work more than speaks for itself.

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People Pictures

I ran across these amazing shots by Arthur S Mole and John D Thomas over at Cakehead Loves Evil. Apparently, these photos were comissioned as morale building exercises after WWI. Fascinating and cool.

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Five Blogs I don't Want to Live Without

I spend a lot of time on the internet. My job, especially in the Summer, is office-based, so I'm able to look at a ton of content as I wade through my daily business. I've pulled content for DudeCraft from every corner of the internet, but there are only a few sites that I go to in order to recharge my batteries, to get some inspiration to keep moving forward, to get asked the big questions. There are lots of sites that I love, but here are five, off the top of my head, that I absolutely don't want to live without.

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Craft Storage Hacked!

Over at Ikea Hacker, Liz came up with an ingenious and space saving way to store her crafting tools and supplies by making this roll-away Craft Pod out of two Billy bookcases and various other parts.

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Miranda

There are some things that are around today that I really wish I had when I was a kid. The Miranda wall tile system is one of those things. It's like finger paint on a grand scale that you never have to clean up.

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Engraved

I'm currently digging on the glass engraving prowess of one, Charlotte Hughes-Martin. I especially love the limoges bottle pictured above, and I love it even more because it comes from a series called "Beautiful Bar Fight". Awesome. link

Paris Map Linocut

Two months and a lot of patience went into Mark Andrew Webber's stunning linocut map of Paris. I imagine this must be akin to performing surgery for sixty days. Unbelievable. via MocoLoco

Yes, We're...

I love this fresh take on the iconic "Yes, we're/Sorry, we're" sign by Aesthetic Apparatus. It's amazing to me that I've never seen anyone do this kind of thing before. Check out the whole series here.

More Papery Goodness

From the Inside Out blog comes this terrific interview with paper artist Emma Van Leest. This from the site:

"One of my favourite stories from the current Inside Out is our feature on art – how to collect it and what some experts would have in their dream collection. Brisbane gallery dealer Edwina Corlette nominated the paper art of Melbourne's Emma Van Leest as something she would love to own. When you see how staggeringly intricate her work is, I think you'd start imagining a place for Emma's creations on your walls, too …"

Check out the interview here. via notcot

Just because you call it "sustainable"...

...doesn't mean it isn't ugly.




I'm far from a purist in terms of materials that are used to create things, but I gotta say, I've had it up to my gullet with ugly wooden bicycles that are masquerading as some holy grail of sustainable transportation. When I was seven, I nailed two old rollerskates to the bottom of a two-by-four and called it a skateboard. Now, it seems, that you can win some design awards and grant money by bolting two wheels to a sheet of plywood and calling it a bicycle. I was way ahead of my time.




Don't get me wrong, I actually love wooden bikes and there are some stunning examples out there, I just prefer ones that, uh, look good. It's great that form follows function, I just don't think that form should trail so far behind function as to be almost invisible. Feh.

Remixed Album Covers

I love the concept of remixing. Especially when the remix goes in the vintage/retro direction. So, imagine my delight when I found this Flickr set of classic album covers remade as sixties-style paperbacks. Nice job LittlePixel!

Camper Bike

Does it tip over? I don't know. Is it practical? Again, up for grabs. Does it get an A+ for shade-tree engineering and chutzpah. Yes. A resounding yes! More here.

Bad Owl

We don't post about softies very much here at DudeCraft, mostly because they tend to be overly cute and there are plenty of blogs that handle that part of the crafting world remarkably well. This owl from artist, Ann Wood, however, is a worthy exception to our flimsy rule. He's bad, he's an owl, he's a bad owl. Love it. Check out Ann's blog here to see more of her work.