Friday Favourites

I like the look of Jen Stark‘s new exhibition entitled ‘To The Power Of’, which has just opened at the Martha Otero gallery in Los Angeles. She creates fantastic colourful and intricate cut paper work, and works across various media including sculpture, drawing and also animation, with each piece of work featuring some interesting geometric and kaleidoscopic effects. If you’re lucky enough to be in LA, the exhibition is on from now until November 10th. Thanks to Katie for finding this, via the David Report blog.

This video about a toy train’s adventure to space has been shared around the interweb quite a bit this week, but it’s so cute I had to include it. If you haven’t seen it yet, father Ron Fugelseth sent his son’s favourite train, Stanley, up in a weather balloon fitted with a camera and GPS into the edges of space. When the balloon eventually came down, they were able to go and find Stanley safe and sound in a corn field 27 miles away. He made this video, a Toy Train in Space to show the experience from the train’s point of view, using After Effects and Photoshop to bring Stanley to life. There are lots of details on how he did it on the YouTube page. Thanks to James L for alerting us to this.

Thanks again to Katie for finding these amazing realistic line drawings of human faces, created by Dirk Dzimirsky, via My Modern Met. They were originally created in a response to the overload of Photoshopped images seen in magazines, where blemishes and imperfections are always removed. Dirk hand draws these large scale portraits layer by layer, building intricate details of the person’s features.

I love it when an artist or designer uses a simple, quite dull material to create something amazing, and these staple art pictures by Baptiste Debombourg are a great example of exactly that. The work is inspired by Italian Mannerism, and he uses staples as a way of playing with ‘contemporary aggression and the profane utility of the every day life‘. In some of the images on his website, the staples have been punched directly into the gallery walls. Found via Fubiz.

He also has some of the best intro pages to an artist’s website that I have ever seen – here are a few examples as they change when you refresh the page:

We mentioned Japanese design house Nendo in our recent post about the London Design Festival, but this great design for a complex of bird houses is my favourite work of theirs so far. Designed for both birds and bird watchers, one side has 78 nest spaces for the birds, with a space on the other side for one person to go up and peer into the nesting boxes. Found via Design Boom and a few other places too.