shi jinsong gun shape baby carriage [designboom via Geekologie]

Gun Shape Baby Cradle
Gun Shape Baby Cradle
Gun Shape Stroller
Gun Shape Stroller
Gun Shape Baby Walker
Gun Shape Baby Walker

L'Hospice [Gilles Barbier via Nerdcore]

Dave Kinsey interviewed Stilkey for Fecal Face, and asked him why he decided to use books in his sculptures. Stilkey said:

I was painting on book pages for forever, and actually published a book in 2005 titled "100 Portraits" in which I drew one hundred portraits on old book pages. At the time, I was drawing on books, records or anything else I could find at a thrift store. Eventually, I started drawing on the books themselves. I was going to do a project where I just drew on the covers of the books, and as I finished them I would stack them against the wall. It dawned on me that it might be a good idea to paint down the spines of the books instead of just on the covers . . . As I did the smaller book sculptures, I would choose books based solely on the title. I wouldn't read the entire book, but I would read random sentences in them. I'm always interested in the notes or messages left in the books by people who used to own them. I would look for discarded or forgotten items left in the books. One time I found two unused plane tickets to New York from 1967.

via Fecal Face

In 2006, FriendsWithYou opened Miami's Art Basel show with Skywalkers. The premise of the piece was a procession of universal entities coming together to welcome the Earth into the universal community. For one day, 18 of these oddly shaped blimps hovered over Miami Beach.

Skywalkers [FriendsWithYou Studios via FFFFOUND!]

[Custom Creature Taxidermy via Super Punch]

Three-headed Frankensquirrel
Capricorn
Chimera
El Chupcabra
Feejee Mermaid
Flying Monkey
Frankensquirrel
Gold Griffin
Unicorn
Vampire Squirrel
Two-headed Chick
Two-headed Squirrel

These are some incredible shots of a few of the latest sculptures from retro futurist art maniac Nemo Gould. Specializing in robots and other outlandish creatures, Gould creates all his work from recycled materials gleaned from old mechanical devices, furniture, and knick-knacks.

You can see more of Gould's new work, as well as his back catalog, in his online studio.

Nowhere Fast
Nowhere Fast
Beholder
Beholder
Troglodyte
Troglodyte
Orbit

Alex CF includes a story to accompany each piece, which is available for sale. And if monster killing is more your thing than monster collecting, he also offers some classic vampire hunting kits, and a collection of useful research on European lycanthropes.

[The Art of Alex CF via Super Punch]

Menes - The Vampyr Pharaoh of Egypt
Golem; life from inanimate clay
R'lyeh expedition case and Cthulhu spawn specimen
The triceratops catalyst
"L'enfant Diabolique" - The devil child
Experiments in extra dimensions; The Cheshire cat
Edward Harrell's Infant Lycanthrope specimen
The Monkey's paw
Dantes descent into the pit
The collected Eldritch horrors of Merrylin

Hackenwerth started working with party balloons as a street performer, and now creates these enormous sculptures, the largest of which stands at 40 feet. Each sculpture uses hundreds of balloons and takes several hours to make. As many people comment that the airy monsters resemble sea creatures, Hackenwerth frequently photographs them at the beach, although they occasionally invade the cities and forests as well.

Attack of the 50ft party balloon [Daily Mail via Make]

These are but a mere handful of MacLane's dozens of CubeDudes, which include characters from the SuperFriends, Transformers, Dr. Horrible, and GI Joe. He has also built non-CubeDude Lego sculptures of Pixar characters WALL-E, BURN-E, and Carl Fredricksen.

[CubeDudes via Super Punch]

We spoke to Jordu Schell of the Schell Sculpture Studio. Schell has done sculpture and conceptual creature designs for numerous films, including Galaxy Quest, Dawn of the Dead, Hellboy, and The Mist, and he brought the Na'Vi to three-dimensional life.

When did you begin work on this project?

I first was contacted in about May of 2005. Jim picked people — there are only four of us — there were three other guys, including a famous guy named Wayne Barlow who's a creature and character designer, and I primarily was hired to just do illustration. Along with these other three, I started doing illustrations, drawing and stuff.

I was really frustrated because my real forte is sculpting — you know, actual sculpture in clay, not in 3D programs. And after a while, that frustration became obvious, because I just felt like I was working on design with my hand tied behind my back if you will and I left the project, actually in about June or so of 2005. But then, Jim actually called me back in November of that same year, just a few months later, and said, "Hey, listen, the guys who were doing the 3D brush renderings just aren't capturing what I want, and I think I do want sculpture after all."

So I went back in and I started doing sculptures. And Jim responded immediately to the sculpture. He really felt that that was the best way to capture the look that he wanted. So I started doing maquettes of the characters, starting with the main character named Neytiri. And from there on, I did maquettes and designs of every character in the movie.

And how long was the process? How many iterations did you go through?

At first, I started off doing busts of Neytiri, the main female character. And then Jim said, "I want to see a full body of her; I want to see her full physicality." So, I did a full maquette of her, which is roughly about 15 inches tall of her, which will probably be on the DVD and in a book of the making of and all this stuff. But that maquette is what I think really really established me with Jim as somebody important on the team, because I remember very clearly he came into the office I was in and went, "That's her! That's her! That's it! Don't change a thing. That's it." Which, to hear from Jim, is kind of incredible.

Was that the first time he had seen the entire thing?

Yes, that was the first time I had done a full body design of any of the characters.

How many characters did you design overall?

Oh gosh. I did a design of the lead female. I did — I don't know, I would say I did probably about 15 total maquettes of the characters, and I did a bunch of maquettes also of the creatures that are in the film. Most of those maquettes — all of those maquettes — were based on designs that come from other artists that I kind of massaged into a more realistic realm taken from the drawing.

And in fact, the design of the Na'Vi in general — that kind of cat-like appearance — was already established by Jim. That's what Jim wanted. He had already done a sketch of Neytiri, just of her face, which I thought was exquisite. And he did — somebody had done a very loose CBrush of what the bodies would look like, but it didn't look organic yet, and that's why I was called in.

When you started the process, what did James Cameron tell you about the Na'Vi?

Well, I knew that they were humanoid, that they were blue-skinned, that they were cat creatures, but that he very much wanted them to retain a humanoid, human-faced element to them. He wanted them to be elegant, slender. I think they were supposed to be about nine feet tall — three meters, whatever that is. I knew the basic physical parameters. Of course, I was given the script; I read the script and figured out how they fit into the context of the world, and all that sort of thing.

Were they at all influenced by any animal in nature, or any other alien in fiction?

I wouldn't say so. I certainly got no reference to go from, other than a whole stack of photos of actresses that he [James Cameron] really liked, not necessarily that he was going to cast in the role, the vocal role or...the motion capture. Not necessarily for the motion capture, but for inspiration in terms of the beauty of a kind of ethnic face. I remember he very much liked the face of a girl named Q'Orianka Kilcher, who starred in The New World, which was a Pocahontas movie with Colin Farrell. But, you know, I had pictures of Mary J. Blige and all these different people on the walls of really beautiful ethnic women.

You said that Cameron saw the first sculpture you did and said that was it. So has the design changed at all from there?

Here's the thing: that's an interesting question. I did the maquette. He loved the face; he loved the body; he loved the physicality; he loved the athleticism; he loved the anatomy. At some point, Stan Winston studios was brought in specifically to massage the faces, to do some work on the faces. And they came up with a face that was really quite radically different from the face that was on my maquette. And I thought, "Oh well. Stan will have designed the faces and I'll have designed the body."

But now that I see the trailer, it looks as if it has returned almost exactly to what I did on the maquette. I mean it looks almost exactly it. It might be a little less — I mean because things change somewhat in CG — it might not be quite as ripped in terms of anatomy or defined in terms of anatomy as mine was, but it looks very much like the maquette that I did.

Have you talked to anyone about that? Has anyone said anything to you about them changing it back?

No, because I've been off the project. I left the project in 2007. All this stuff ran out and Jim was starting to shoot by the time I left. Other than going to little parties that Jim has thrown, I haven't really been privy to what's been going on down at Weta. And I'm good friends with Richard Taylor, who runs Weta, but I haven't even really spoken to him much about it, like what's going on down there. But I know they've been very busy down there on it, and they probably still are.

What about the sex appeal aspect of it? Was the sexiness something James Cameron emphasized with you?

Well, he wanted them to be very beautiful. And I do believe that, at some point, he said something to the effect of...the audience has to want to fuck her. I mean, Jim is very plain in his language.

So, I went, "All right?" So I made something that, I don't know if I really particularly wanted to fuck it, but it was certainly a beautiful alien. He definitely, he wanted it — because he really prefers women that are kind of athletic, and buff and stuff like that, so I, you know, designed something with big hands and feet, a big presence that felt really big and strong.

So it was designed for his personal preferences in terms of sexiness?

It certainly wasn't mine. I mean, I would have sculpted, I don't know, Gretchen Mol or something. But I sculpted this big, tall, buff, kind of tough-looking, kick-ass woman.

To what extent are the Na'Vi a product of the physical environment of Pandora? Is it just the way they are for the aesthetics, or did he indicate there was something about Pandora that made them the way that they were? For example, why are they blue?

Oh, honestly, I believe that they're blue because it's unusual and weird. I mean, maybe there's some ecology-based sense that it makes in the context of the story. I don't remember reading anything in the script that went into — I mean, everything on the planet has kind of aqua to blue palette, at least what I remember seeing. But no, he didn't go into detail at least to me about the specific ecological or environmental reasons why they were the color they were. But I know that he wanted that from the start. He said, "I really want them to be unusual. I want them to have these weird patterns," and so that was definitely what he wanted.

So your impression is that it was more about making them exotic?

Yes, absolutely.

What about the feline aspect? Do you have any indication of why they are so feline?

I don't know. It's probably because he thinks that cats are elegant, and they are. I mean, so are horses, but we don't have horse-faced aliens, I guess. So, I think it was a matter of elegance, and he wanted them all to be trim — I guess they don't have Ding-Dongs on Pandora.

In the Avatar Day footage, we see a kind of appendage coming out of Sully's braid that binds him to the dragon-like creature. Is that part of the design, or were you just told "Oh, there's this big braid?"

Oh yes. That's definitely part of the design, and it does have something specific to do with Na'Vi culture. However, I probably shouldn't as yet say until the film comes out what's going on there.

Are there going to be other surprises like that in their design?

Definitely. There are definitely some things about them that are more than just meets the eye.

More Na'Vi weirdness?

Yeah, I mean, they don't split open into gigantic demon creatures or something, but you'll definitely see aspects of them that are unusual and cool and unique to this particular creature.

And how was designing for Avatar different from other designing experiences you've had?

The only main difference — it was a very long, long project. There was so much stuff and so much to do and so many people involved. I mean, hands down the biggest thing I've been involved with.

Are you aware of the backlash online, with some people being disappointed with, for example, how humanoid or how feline the Na'Vi look?

Well, I mean, I know some people were disappointed, some people think it's amazing. Some people were disappointed, some think it's amazing. To me, that's typical fan reaction. There's always some backlash against something with a lot of hype. The only way to avoid backlash is for there to be no hype. And it seems that there's always some kind of negativity surrounding this stuff. Some love it, some hate it.

So, when something like District 9 comes out — until something like two weeks, three weeks before it came out, there was no knowledge of it by anyone. It just came out of nowhere. So, as a result, it's getting a lot of accolades. I have a feeling that if it had been promoted as the biggest thing ever six months prior to its arrival, a year prior to its arrival, it would have had severe backlash as well. I can only chalk that up to typical fan reaction to something that has gotten a tremendous amount of hype, a huge amount of advance word, and there's bound to be people that are disappointed.

Do you have any response to the people who have been disappointed?

If their problem is with the physical look of the characters, then no, there's not much I can say. That's the way they're obviously going to look. But I think that the story is strong enough to transcend any visual issues anyone might have. We should not be going to the movies, in my opinion, strictly to be visually dazzled. That is a post-modern, special effects attitude. People should be going to the movies to be told a story and they should be going to be enveloped in a world where they're going to be transported somewhere else.

Find out more about Jordu Schell's work at Schell Sculpture Studio.

A reader at Upcoming Pixar who goes by the name Bryko614 spotted the framed picture hanging behind Pixar sculptor Greg Dykstra in a featurette for Up. It appears there is something to the images, because when Bryko614 tweeted Pixar artist Ronnie del Carmen, asking if he knew anything about the concept art, del Carmen replied:

@Bryko614 I do. But not telling. Nothing to do with anything Toy Story, tell you that.

Because the dinosaur doesn't seem to fit with Pixar's current slate of films (Cars 2, The Bear and the Bow, and Newt), many are speculating that the dinosaur might make an appearance in an upcoming short.

Sneak Peek at a New Pixar Production Featuring a Boy and His Dinosaur? [Upcoming Pixar via /Film]

Bell's series "Osteomechanics" and "Crania Mechanica," integrate animal bones into imagined machinery. With the heavy use of brass and electrical prongs, they have a steampunk feel, but Bell's core inspiration comes from 18th Century scientist Luigi Galvani, who experimented with delivering an electrical spark to animal muscles. The sculptures are supposed to evoke a sense of mystery, leaving the viewer to wonder at the era and person that gave rise to these strange little machines, and what scientific problem they were meant to solve.

International Museum of Surgical Science Current Exhibitions [Myspace]
Ron Bell's Osteomechanics and Osteomechanics 2 [Packer Schopf Gallery]

Scott makes realistic, incredibly detailed models of trilobytes and insects from PVC, and lectures on arthropods, evolution, and ecology at Vancouver's Stanley Park. But his imagined creatures, many inspired by the art of H.R. Giger and the tales of H.P. Lovecraft, are biofiction at its best — organic-looking beasties that look like they'll slither to life at any moment.

[Bugmaker's Flickr via Dark Roasted Blend]

Baby
Alien Embryo
Sandworm
Parasite
Crawler
Pickled Critter
Crazy Critter
Sand Creature
Brainworm
Baby Deep One
Dissection
Critter Looks Up
Martian Maggot
Alien Embryo
Beasty
Swamp Critter

Sadly, no-one actually lives in these structures, or in Ladonia for that matter. Artist Lars Vilk constructed the buildings as a sculpture titled "Nimis" and a stone fortress titled "Arx" inside the Kullaberg nature reserve in Skåne, Sweden. But the Swedish government determined that the structures were houses, which were illegal to construct in the reserve, and demanded they be removed. Vilks declared the region — "Ladonia" — a micronation in protest.

Since then, Ladonia has been the subject of much attention, both serious and lighthearted. In 2002, 4,000 Pakistani refugees mistook Ladonia for an inhabitable country and applied for asylum, but none were given residence inside the driftwood buildings. In 2006, the Pirate Bay-funded Armed Coalition Forces of the Internets declared mock-war on Ladonia, demanding that its government repeal copyright laws and recognize the rights of intellectual property pirates.

For a mere $12, you can become a citizen of Ladonia, joining its current membership of over 14,000 individuals. Presumably, membership grants you the right to move into Ladonia in the event of an apocalypse, or at least blueprints for building your own version of Nimis.

[Ladonia via Inhabitat]

You may already be familiar with the work of Andrew Chase, who has been designing a series of mechanical animals for a picture book called the Trionic Morphatractable Engineer. The cheetah messenger is his latest. A photographer and designer by day, Chase invents anatomically complicated animals out of metal, including elephants, a giraffe, and now this cheetah According to Baekdal:

The cheetah measures 24" high (61cm) and 50" nose to tail (127cm) and weighs about 40 lbs. She took about 60 hours, spaced over 10 weeks time to build. She's constructed out of . . . electrical conduit, transmission parts, and 20 gauge steel.

Chase has also posed the cheetah in a series of very realistic running poses, creating a stop-motion movie out of them. I can't wait to see his book. If you want to see more of Chase's art, check out his gallery.

Boogeyman is one of a new series of kinetic sculptures from robot artist Gould. He builds poignant, playful creatures out of scraps he finds in junkyards and yard sales.

Gould explains:

The Boogeyman is a tragically misunderstood character. Generally hated by the populace he serves, he works long thankless hours under beds and in closets. Just like the rest of us he longs for a little time off to enjoy life. Traditional rest and relaxation has alway eluded him however due to his extreme sensitivity to light and good humor. Fortunately for him, science has caught up with him in the form of a "Portable Gloom Environment". This bulky apparatus may seem cumbersome to you and I, but it for him it is the welcome cost of freedom. So if you should encounter this odd spectacle at the beach, show a little sensitivity to a monster on a well earned vacation. (Yes those are real chicken feet)

Here are a few more of Gould's new sculptures, including the amazing "Praying Mantis" (with gas pump claws) and the migraine machine "Psycho-O-Somatic." There's even a creature made entirely of retro bakelite radios. Click images to see full sizes.

I particularly like Gould's description of the deer sculpture "Re-Animated," which includes a fantasy about reanimating animals by converting them into cyborgs. He writes:

A few years ago I came across something at a yard sale that struck me as particularly foul. It was a mounted deer head with its hoofs arranged to serve as a rifle rack. The cruel irony of killing something and then compelling its corpse to hold the weapon that ended its life really got me. Naturally I bought the awful thing but only now have I been able to do anything with it. Re:Animated represents a major breakthrough in veterinary science. Concerned citizens can now bring in the trophy remains of game animals and have the creatures made whole again. The durable metal chassis is bullet repellant and should diminish the likelihood that these creatures, (when returned to the wild) fall victim to the same fate twice.

You can see all of Gould's sculptures on his website, and see video of all these sculptures in action on his YouTube channel.

The installation is called simply FIELD. Five years ago, FIELD creator Richard Box was an artist in residence in the physics department at Bristol University, and he got the idea to plant his fluorescent crop after hearing a colleague describe playing light saber games with a fluorescent tube beneath power lines in his backyard. So he bribed a local farmer into letting him set up this extraordinary scene, to recreate the light saber game times a thousand.

How does it all work?

According to the UK Guardian, describing the project when it was first created:

A fluorescent tube glows when an electrical voltage is set up across it. The electric field set up inside the tube excites atoms of mercury gas, making them emit ultraviolet light. This invisible light strikes the phosphor coating on the glass tube, making it glow. Because powerlines are typically 400,000 volts, and Earth is at an electrical potential voltage of zero volts, pylons create electric fields between the cables they carry and the ground.

Box denies that he aimed to draw attention to the potential dangers of powerlines, ‘For me, it was just the amazement of taking something that's invisible and making it visible,' he says. ‘When it worked, I thought: ‘This is amazing.''

You can see more of Box's work on his website.

These images are from a series of sculptures and concept designs called Soundsuits created by Nick Cave - not the singer, the artist. Here you can see his furry suits at rest, looking very alien indeed. Cave's eye for the absurd and otherworldly is delightful. Apparently many of his suits make musical noises as they move, especially these you see below, which are covered in adornments.

These two outfits look to me like spacesuits:

And of course this is clearly a cyborg who has merged her own body with the Earth itself. Or maybe it's Swamp Thing's cute younger brother.

Cave is a former fashion designer, and you can find out more about his latest work at Feuilleton. (via Ecstatic Days)

At least, that's what artists Christy McCaffrey and Sara Newey did, turning the Machine Project gallery space into a woodland forest that will flourish for the entire month of April. Along with a team of volunteers, McCaffrey and Newey converted this boxy room into what truly looks like an enchanted wood.

They built it using wood, ropes, tape, glue, and a healthy dose of actual tree trunks and soil. Throughout the month, they'll be holding events in the indoor forest, including lectures on bigfoot and elves, as well as screenings of spooky vampire movies.

Though their work is pure whimsical beauty, it has a kind of Silent Running feel to it, as if all the forests of Earth have become nothing more than a tame artwork that people construct in a gallery. It's a bit sad to contemplate that forests in 100 years may be exactly like this: Remnants of great trees, stored indoors.

via Machine Project (you can also see the schedule of events here too)

The throat of this machine is actually a piece of huge, walk-in conceptual art by Las Vegas artist Stephen Hendee. Known for working with illuminated foamboard and gaffer tape, Hendee has been constructing his huge glowing shapes for over a decade in museums across the United States. (He even did an installation for Sci-Fi Channel.) Though his work is abstract, it still evokes futuristic citiscapes, spaceships, or escape pods.

Hendee is tremendously influenced by science fiction and technology, and a lot of the work you see in this gallery suggests a world where everyone has become a brain in a box. Or where the smart boxes have simply taken over completely.

I went to high school with Hendee, and swapped Laurie Anderson albums with him when I was fourteen. Even back then he was making weird art that scared all the suburban kids in Irvine, CA. Perhaps that's because his work is all about the hallucinatory sterility of suburban life, where unidentifiable buildings pulse with information but people are nowhere to be seen. It makes perfect sense that he's wound up in Las Vegas, a city packed with freakishly glowing shapes that make no sense. And the city loves him: One of his recent sculptures, called Monument to the Simulacrum, was commissioned by the city and will remain in Centennial Plaza until the time capsule it contains is opened in 2105.

Check out more of Stephen Hendee's work on his website.