Man, talent is talented. Watch fantastic artist Heather Rooney draw an amazingly photorealistic picture of the famous Ellen Oscars selfie. You know the one with a billion celebrities that got retweeted a billion times. All she used was Prismacolor colored pencils to turn a blank sheet of paper into what looks exactly like a photo.
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Tilt-shift photography originated with large, billowing lenses to capture the proportions of architecture. Today, its often used to blur parts of a frame and make the world appear in miniature. However you use it, for this week’s Shooting Challenge, you’ll photograph in tilt-shift.
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What happens when you squish together the best of underexposed and overexposed photography? You get HDR
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Human civilization has littered the natural terrain with sprawling megastructures too big to be entirely seen from the ground. But when seen from above, isolated from their surroundings—as in the work of Jenny O’Dell—these vast tangles of organized chaos will wreak even more havoc on your sense of scale.
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These lumpy, interconnected tubes of concrete, like wet rolls of old newspaper, are from a series of speculative architectural images by artist Dionisio Gonzalez, on display at Gallery Yusto in Malaga, Spain, until March 20th. Gonzalez claims the designs offer "disaster-resistance," something that—with no structural testing, no wind-load assessment, and an awful lot of plate glass—should be taken purely as an artist’s statement. Let’s just enjoy these houses for their futuristic aesthetics, instead. [designboom]
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Before its Diablo III art contest, DeviantART also held a competition for another major video game – Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII. The contest called for the art community’s members to show their own take on the heroine Lightning. The entries were judged by none other than Square Enix’ artist, designer and director Tetsuya Nomura.
The contest was held last month, from February 11 to February 20. Out of the 4,655 submissions, Nomura – known for his character designs for Final Fantasy VI, VII, VIII, X and XIII and the Kingdom Hearts series – chose three grand prize winners.
Below is Nicolas Barge’s winning piece, of which Nomura said, “At first glance it looks like a CG, and it has a level of quality that makes it look like it was captured as a screenshot. While there were many heroic costumes for Lightning, I was drawn to the femininity of this costume and her hairstyle.”
Nomura was also impressed by Randis Albion’s piece, saying, “It’s wonderful as an illustration, but in addition to that, the artist drew in both the front and back views, so I felt the artist’s clear intent when they created this piece. The red and blue color scheme was very beautiful, too.”
Marga Donaire’s submission is one of my favorites among all of the entries, and it sounded like Nomura felt the same way too: “With one look I was hooked. The costume itself is sophisticated, and it’s also very well done as an illustration. The background that reminded me of the Japanese flag (Hinomaru) matched well with the piece and was beautiful. As an artist, when I look at different works of art, I think to myself “If it were up to me, I would do it differently,” but that thought didn’t cross my mind once when I saw this picture.”
As if earning praise from such an accomplished artist wasn’t enough, Nicolas, Randis and Marga also won an original sketch from Tetsuya Nomura, a custom Xbox 360 and controller, $1000, a keychain, a shirt, and copies of the Final Fantasy XIII trilogy. They were also featured on the front page of deviantART. Congrats guys! Switch to your browser costume and head to deviantART to check out all of the entries.
When it comes to speakers and TVs one of the fashionable things to do is hide them so that when they aren’t in use, you can’t tell speakers or a TV are in the room. We have seen TVs hidden by art on the wall in the past. Now, a company called Soundwall is now offering a speaker that is a work of art.
The speaker is called Soundwall and it hides a high fidelity speaker and amplifier in plain sight. Interestingly, there are no speakers hiding behind the canvas. The surface itself IS the speaker. Specs for the speaker are 40-20,000Hz frequency +/- 1.5dB on the largest size Soundwall, and the it’s powered by either 2x25W RMS or a 2x100W RMS Class-D amp, depending on the size of the artwork. They also include a subwoofer output if you’d like to place one on the floor to improve bass response.
Each Soundwall unit has a Raspberry Pi controller inside that supports AirPlay and UPnP formats for wireless streaming. The Soundwall speakers can play individual tracks when multiple units are installed in one location or they can be set up to all play the same track.
Buyers can choose from a variety of sizes, a gallery of existing art, or even upload their own photos. You can also order one with a blank canvas if you want to create your own painting. Prices range from $949(USD) for the smallest poster size Soundwall to $2499 for the largest 40″ x 60″ unit. Some of the original paintings can increase the price of the speaker as well.
Satellite images of cities at night look wonderful—until you zoom in and realize that they’re a big, blurry mess. These gorgeous city images, made by Marc Khachfe, solve that problem—because they’re actually computer generated from OpenStreetMap data.
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When you come across a painting, sometimes it evokes certain feelings in you. Perhaps one of tranquility, one of anger, one of euphoria, and so on. In fact sometimes some paintings look like they might be nice if there were background music accompanying it. For example looking at any of Monet’s paintings and you were to hear some peaceful nature music playing.
Well Soundwall is a project that is hoping to bring music to art by integrating a speaker system into the painting’s frame itself. Basically on the surface, as you can see above, Soundwall looks like your typical piece of art hanging on the wall, but little does the viewer know that it packs a speaker in it as well. (more…)
Soundwall Is A Painting That Can Play Music Wirelessly original content from Ubergizmo. 
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No, this portrait isn’t made up of thousands upon thousands of magnetic sculpture beads. The metallic wonder’s lifelike contours and shimmer comes from painstakingly hand-placing 13,000 variably sized platinum beads.
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This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
