Dimitri Arleri is one of the best in the world at the subtle art of the card flourish. He has complete mastery over a deck of cards, moving them in gorgeous, intricate patterns, juggling, weaving, all in incredibly slow motion. To me, this is better than magic, since there is no pretense. It’s all real, it’s all skill. Enjoy…
Did you ever read the I Spy books? You know, the ones where each page is a scattering of little toys and you have to find 3 bats, a key, a needle, a baseball bat, and a squirrel? Here’s a reminder:
Turns out, these photographs are all shot by a guy named Walter Wick. I absolutely love his photography. Here’s a link to his web site.
Recently, Walter got an assignment to shoot a photograph of a bunch of toys in an upside down pyramid, all balanced on a single lego brick. Fun to watch him build the structure, more fun to watch him knock it all down…
Remember fractals? Fractals were discovered by Polish-born mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot. They are the set of numbers whose origins lie with the equation:
zn+1 = zn2 + c
where the set remains bounded as n increases.
Without worrying about the math (you can read about the math here), the beauty of fractals lies in the images they can produce. Here’s a typical example:
Fractals have fascinated mathematicians and digital artists since they first gained fame in the mid 1970’s. The mathematics of fractals are complex, but well defined, though one mystery has teased mathematicians since fractals were born. As you can see from the image above, fractals are a 2D kind of critter. Part of their charm is that you can zoom in infinitely to an everchanging image (here’s a fantastic example), but that image remains flat. The pursuit of a 3D Mandelbrot set has been a fractal holy grail for more than 30 years. Over the past few years, real progress has been made, culminating with work like this:
If you are interested in seeing more of these haunting and complex images, take a click over to this page. Lovely stuff…
I love this story. This portrait was thought to be by a 19th Century German artist:
Over time, a number of art experts became convinced that the work was by da Vinci, and they brought in a forensics expert to try to certify the painting. And he did, matching a fingerprint and palmprint to one found on a previous da Vinci work.
In the above image, the image on the right is the blown up version of the white rectangle on the left. Cool.
The architecture site archdaily.com ran a contest asking readers for their best architectural renders. These are drawings created using rendering software like 3ds Max, Digital Fusion, VRay, even Photoshop. Here’s an example:
Remember, this is a render. No photographic elements were used here. The shadows, highlights, everything in the picture is artificial. Lovely stuff.
This is a trailer for a conference. How interesting could it be? I guess that depends on your interest in film and in Flash. I found this inspirational. And brilliant. Made me want to dive right in. Well done, Artillery…
Liu Bolin is from Shandong, China (here’s a map). He is a camouflage artist. He paints himself to fit perfectly into the middle of a particular background, then has a picture taken showing his work. Here’s an example:
I am a big fan of Christoph Niemann’s illustrations. He’s done covers for the New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine, written children’s books, won all kinds of awards. But what I love the most is his creative blog posts. A while back, I posted a link to this post, Niemann’s look at the world, through the use of Legos. Fantastic!