Riusuke Fukahori is an amazing artist who pours resin and painstakingly paints layer on layer until the goldfish are formed in three dimensions.
Goldfish are a very lucky symbol in Asian culture as they represent wealth (an abundance of gold) and harmony. (One of most popular washi necklace pendant patterns over the years has been our goldfish pendants!)
video via The Awesomer
We’re winding down here at Blend Creations since the last day for holiday orders was yesterday. Any orders between December 20th – 26th will start shipping on Tuesday December 27th. If you’re wanting to give a Blend Creations jewelry gift though, you can always give an email gift certificate (no shipping and no expiry!) — for now, you’ll even get $5 off $100 gift certificates.
In the meantime, we’re preparing for our own celebrations and our Jr. VP has certainly helped out by designing some ornaments:
Santa and his elves? Nope. The Jr. VP did a self-portrait and drew his best bear friends, which we turned into ornaments.
We hope you and yours have a wonderful and restful holiday season :)
We draw inspiration for not our modern jewelry in a number of ways, such as seeing what other creatives are doing. Since both of us have a design-background, we regularly use tools like Adobe Illustrator of Photoshop in our ‘ideation’ phase when we come up with new products.
When we saw this “Real-World” photoshop image, we knew we had to share. There’s a Flickr set of how they put this image of the Photoshop interface using real-life objects:
(via BoingBoing. See the full-size image here).
We also love illustration, which is part of the reason why we started up our Metal for Monsters line — it gave us an excuse to collaborate with some really talented illustrators. The second image that crossed our paths recently is a great illustration by Patrick Moberg:
Both of us really enjoy a certain style of illustration, and we have a soft spot for monsters, so of course, Justin Hillgrove‘s work gets our admiration. His style to me is rather Burton-esque (which is no surprise I guess, if you read in his bio that one of his influences is Tim Burton). You can buy original artwork and prints through his site, Imps and Monsters.
Eric’s rather partial to Justin’s “Sock Monsters” (11″x14″ prints for $18):
But for me, “Bath Time” always brings a smile (limited-run giclee print, $100):
See more of Justin Hillgrove’s work at Imps and Monsters.
While I am an industrial designer and dabble in graphic design and other such creative endevours, long before that I used to be a big lab geek (in applied biochemistry — it’s a weird mix of backgrounds, I agree).
I found Ph.D. comics through a friend of mine (hi Shona!) who’s a grad student. This one strikes me as funny because it’s true (click to see the larger original):
(I particularly like the little floating fume skulls). My hat’s off to Jorge Cham for capturing this and many other academia life moments in his comic.
I’ve been very negligent with the whole blogging thing. I’ve been leaving it all up to my better half. Once in awhile I would send her links to cool stuff, but that’s been pretty much the extent of my involvement. Well there’s no turning back now…
Just when you thought you’ve seen it all someone shows you something that was never meant to be seen. Like the early sketch of a painting, the complicated tools used to create the simplest tasks. These are often more interesting then the final product. There’s something magical about the thought process, the production method. Along comes Kent Rogowski with his photographic art of teddy bears turned inside out.
Childhood magic lives on, albeit in a slightly twisted way. In his interview with Nicole Pasulka, Rogowski says that his work is more about the childhood icon represented by the teddy bear than about recreating the toy. I beg to differ, but I’m not about to turn my boo bear inside-out to test it.
Found via BoingBoing.
This is a video excerpt (runs about 5 minutes) from the documentary “Beautiful Minds: A voyage into the Brain” featuring Stephen Wiltshire, aka the ‘Living Camera’. Stephen is autistic and has the remarkable ability to be able to retain visual details — in this case, details from an aerial view of Rome — and put them on paper. (You can buy prints and originals of his work on his website).
Truly amazing.
Every once in a while I get bored with the look of my desktop. Whenever this happens, I end up going over to Pixel Girl Presents and seeing what sort of sexy new wallpapers she’s got up. Yup, this is the same Pixel Girl (aka Shanalyn Victor) who runs the Pixel Girl Shop — where along with many cool things are some Blend Creations products. :)
Pixel Girl Presents is a great place to find things like icon sets:
and Illustrator tutorials while you’re at it.
But mostly I just go for the pretty pictures done by some pretty talented illustrators:
“Organic” by Tomek Ferenc
“What makes you happy” by Megan Hopkins
“Kumori” by David Hoe
There are well over 1000 different desktops to choose from, so good luck finding the perfect one for your compy. :)
Both Eric and I read BoingBoing on a regular basis. It’s a “directory of wonderful things” aka a mishmash of cool things on the interweb, design stuff, tech stuff, and generally a really good daily read.
Recently they featured this link to The World’s Most Photorealistic Vector Art. It’s truly amazing to me that someone has this much control over gradients in Illustrator.
This isn’t a photo of Keira Knightley, but rather an illustration done by Paul Bush.
This one’s an illustration by Halim Ghodbane:
Check out the gallery of other vector illustrations at the bottom of the post. Make sure to hit the “Outline” button to see the mesh used for the gradients. Wow.
Eric found the work of Jan von Holleben and pointed out to me this wonderful series of photographs that von Holleben has called “Dreams of flying“.
The Dreams of Flying photographs features children in fun, semi-fantastical poses that are accomplished by having them actually posed on good solid ground.
Here’s a few favourites from the series:
For the complete series go here. Information about von Hollenben’s other works is here, and details about purchasing his work can be found here.
© Blend Creations 2013
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