Hasta La Gadget!

Aside from shows like iam8bit, galleries and museums are rarely places to find cool gamer art. But it doesn’t take long over on Etsy to turn up a wide variety of impressive artworks for fans of all sorts of video games. At the moment, I’ve got my eye set on this awesome original painting, inspired by Final Fantasy IV.

This original acrylic was painted by John Moriarty and depicts a scene in which Edge, Rosa, Cecil, Rydia and Kain go up against the evil Demon Wall. The painting has so much depth thanks to the effective use of light and shadow, that I thought the demon was about to pop out of my computer screen and crush me. So I can only imagine how great this would look hanging on a wall with proper illumination.

For $475(USD), you get the original 16 x 20″ painting in a rustic gold frame. Since it’s an original, it’s a one-of-a-kind piece, so if you want it, get on over to Etsy now and claim it before it’s gone. If that’s too much Gil for you, grab the 8.5 x 11″ print for $15.

While there are a lot of free downloadable foldable papercraft templates online – we’ve actually featured a few of them – I’m sure many of you wished you could create custom ones yourself. Your wish has been granted. Or it will be when Foldify is released.

Launching as an iPad exclusive, Foldify makes it easy to create custom papercraft, from coming up with the shape of your boxy creation, adding color and parts to actually printing it. The only thing it can’t help you with is with the quality of your art. Thankfully you won’t need to waste cardboard because you can practice and re-do your papercraft on the app as often as you like.

There’s no word on the price of Foldify, but developer Pixle has submitted it to the iTunes App Store and expects it to be released on December 13, 2012. In the meantime you can check out more examples of Foldify creations on its Facebook page.

[Foldify via Daring Fireball]

If you’ve ever wondered what thinking about nothing looks like, here it is. It’s the result of an experiment by artist Gustav Metzger, who hooked himself up to a robotic carving machine—while thinking long and hard about absolutely nothing. More »

Now I’m pretty sure it’s illegal to draw on U.S. currency, but the way I see it, it’s your money and you should be allowed to do what you want with it. So while these hacked dollar bills are probably no longer legal tender, they are pretty damned awesome anyhow.

I can’t decide if Bob Ross, the Oompa Loompa or the Lincoln Facehugger is my favorite. All I know is that I’d totally use cash more often than my debit card if paper money were this funny.

[Various Sources via Imgur]

Looking for a totally unique piece of jewelry? Well it doesn’t get more special than a piece you designed yourself. And thanks to an awesome app from the guys over at Nervous System, you can create your own earrings, necklaces and other art objects in a snap.

Their Radiolaria website lets you design and preview your own jewelry and art pieces that you can construct simply by clicking a few buttons. By manipulating a grid of honeycomb-like cells, you can create a huge number of cool “bio-inspired” designs in seconds. Here are a few example designs I knocked out while writing this post:

And here’s a demo of Radiolaria in action:

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

Not only can you change designs and sizes, but choose from stainless steel or 24K gold-plated stainless for jewelry, and bamboo or black wool felt for trivets or other art objects. Metal items are photochemically etched out of metal, while wood and felt objects are laser-cut.

Once you’ve created your design, you can scale it, share it and purchase it if you so choose. Prices range from as little as $7 for a really small and simple form to hundreds of dollars, depending on the size, complexity and material selected. Head on over to the Radiolaria app right now if you’d like to play with it, while there’s still time to order custom pieces for Christmas delivery.

While you’re over there, you can always check out Nervous System’s original app, which lets you design custom 3D-printed jewelry.