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Design Inspiration for the Inventive Mind..

October 17, 2011 By Zog

Ninja Turtle Nose

Ninja Turtle Nose Ron Paul

This is one of those ‘once seen, cannot be unseen’ kinda sites. Draw a ninja turtle nose on a picture and send it in. My submission above, freedom ninja Ron Paul. Check out the Teenage Mutant Ninja NosesTumblr here.

 

update: Well, it looks like the Ron Paul media blackout is moving to the internet as the picture was never posted on their site.

Filed Under: Design Inspiration, Ideas Tagged With: Art, Corrupted, Design Inspiration, DIY, Funny, Idea, Involuntary Collaboration, URL

March 13, 2011 By Zog

Involuntary Collaboration

Involuntary collaboration- Monsters in landscape paintings

Involuntary collaboration refers to a project contributed to by multiple parties in which at least one of those parties did not intend to be working with the others. Examples include things like covers of songs, spoofs of movies, and in the case of the pictures above (painted in part by Chris McMahon), unwanted landscape paintings bought at yard sales, which he then painted monsters into. I think they’re brilliant, and would be a perfect DIY project to hang in your kid’s room, or send to your grandmother.

A similar process (seen below from The Monster Engine), has adults upgrading children’s drawings of monsters to add realism. Sometimes the toughest thing for an artist can be just sitting in front of the canvas wondering what to paint, or going through all the trouble of painting a whole landscape when what they really want to paint is a big hairy monster, and it can be hard to throw away original artwork, even if it is boring.

Children's Drawing Collaboration

Update: It looks like more people have been picking up on this idea.

Dave Pollot and his thrift store paintings:

UFO stuck in the mud

Related Posts:

Involuntary Collaborations

Filed Under: Design Inspiration, Ideas, Innovation Tagged With: Art, Design Inspiration, Design Tool, DIY, Idea, Innovation, Involuntary Collaboration

February 3, 2011 By Zog

Green Advertising with Reverse Graffiti

Reverse Graffiti Advertising

Eco friendly marketing is a rapidly growing field, as it should be. With an ever growing number of consumers taking such things into account when choosing which companies to support, a marketer needs to as well, or see their market share go to their competitor.

Now this method in particular isn’t for everyone, as it has social implications from being a bit radical, but some companies have taken to power washing their logo onto dirty sidewalks. It’s hard to prosecute someone for only cleaning part of the sidewalk, and if anyone wants to remove the branding, they have to finish the job. It’s win-win.

See Also:

Reverse Graffiti

(via DudeCraft)

Filed Under: Design Inspiration, Ideas Tagged With: Art, Corrupted, Design Inspiration, Funny, Idea, Involuntary Collaboration

January 20, 2011 By Zog

Recycled Pull-Tab

We live in a world full of uniform, mass produced, cheap little wonders. Case in point, the humble pull tab. Tossed out as refuge in the millions every day, but what better way to attach something on the wall? Just screw a pull tab to it and hang it over a screw/nail in the wall.

Yet another brilliant redneck repair brought to you by the folks at thereifixedit.

Filed Under: Design Inspiration, Ideas, Innovation Tagged With: DIY, Idea, Innovation, Involuntary Collaboration, Recycling, Upcycling

October 20, 2010 By Zog

Tilt Shifting Paintings

Tilt shift Paintings

Tilt shifting in photography is when you deliberately put your lens out of line with the sensor in such a way that it changes the focus on the sensor/film rather than just based on distance of objects and depth of field. The resulting photos and videos trick the eye into thinking it is seeing a tiny scale model rather than something miles away. A similar effect can be created through video/image editing. In the above pictures, artcyclopedia has added an effect similar to tilt shift via software to several of Van Gogh’s works (click the picture to see their full gallery and the originals). I love the effect.

I think the kind of visual cues we take from tilt shifted photography are to some extent a product of the photographic age. We are used to seeing two dimensional representations of three dimensional space as seen through the single eye of a camera. When you look at a real scene through two eyes, whatever you are looking at is in focus, while anything out of focus is blurry and doubled (and by definition, not what you are currently looking at). One of the flaws with the current round of 3D movies is that while things have depth cues based on sending a different signal to each eye, there is no adjustable depth of field based on what you are looking at. The focus of any given object is chosen by the camera, rather than the viewer, and the whole image is the same distance away, even if each eye sees a different angle.

I did a little experimenting on my own to get a better understanding of things. I think the choice of impressionism is a good one. Impressionists have a tendency to capture the soul of a thing crisply, but without much detail. This means that when you blur a background, it looks believable rather than smeared. Creating this effect in Photoshop can be pretty simple.

Part of what makes tilt shift photography make things look miniature is the difference distance makes to depth of field. In tilt shift, focus is much more independent of distance. In a large scale photo, once you are focused a ways out, it tends to focus to infinity. Painters tend to make their paintings fully focused at all distances, which improves clarity, but degrades the feeling of depth. With a tilt shift effect I wanted to choose a subject in the composition, bring the eye to them, and then create the illusion of depth in the rest of the image by virtue of knowing where the eye is already looking. This is counter to one of the usual goals of composition: To keep the eye moving. Below is a Monet I found with a quick image search that served my needs nicely for a very simplified test.

The alterations I made can be seen below. I don’t think it made the image nicer, but I think it accomplished my compositional goal of directing the eye and holding it on the subject.

Monet Tilt Shifted in Photoshop CS5

I chose it because it covers a vast distance, contains a subject to draw the eye, and has a tree that exists within the plane of focus, but in front of an area that I planned to blur. The  clarity of the tree is what makes the end result different from what you would see with a tilt shift lens. This only took a few minutes. Below are the steps I took. If you have a copy of Photoshop, give it a shot. It’s a good skill to have in your repertoire.

  1. After opening the image, duplicate your background layer and work in the duplicate.
  2. Select anything outside your intended focus area that needs to remain sharp. In this case, the tree and the canopy on the right.
  3. Click on Select/Inverse.
  4. Click the add layer mask button in your layers pallet.
  5. Click select/Reselect.
  6. Click on the gradient tool and make sure you have it set to a black to white reflected gradient.
  7. Click on the part of your image that should remain focused and drag toward the edge of the picture perpendicular to the intended strip of focus and release.
  8. Right Click on the layer mask and click on Apply Layer Mask.
  9. Click on Filter/Blur/Gaussian blur, and drag the slider to create the blur.

I’m sure you can find a more long winded tutorial somewhere, but if you have a moderate knowledge of Photoshop, this should suffice as a bare bones process to get you started.

Filed Under: Design Inspiration, Ideas, Software, Tools Tagged With: Art, Design Inspiration, Design Tool, DIY, Idea, Involuntary Collaboration, Photoshop, Tilt Shift, Tutorial

November 15, 2009 By Zog

Using Rock Band / Hero Games as Instrument Trainer

With the flood of dumbed-down instrument games like Guitar Hero that do wonders for your button pushing but don’t do much for your guitar skills, there has been a flood of innovators trying to rig controllers that will make real instruments work in the game.

In the above video, we see a simpler solution. Instead of focusing on the instrument, focus on the sound. By using the Rock Band mic, she is able to control the game via flute.

Obviously, this would be better if the game were designed for such, but I don’t see much chance of that coming from the big developers. What we need is a good open source program to do for the mic what StepMania did for the dance pad. If anyone out there knows of a good equivalent, let me know and I will update this post accordingly.

(via Neatorama)

Filed Under: Design Inspiration, Electronics, Ideas, Innovation, Software Tagged With: Design Inspiration, Electronics, Idea, Innovation, Interface, Involuntary Collaboration, Music, Software, Video

February 14, 2009 By Zog

Design Masterpiece

mona-lisa_chairI keep a few folding chairs stashed away somewhere for those rare occasions when I have too many guests. Sooner or later they end up in the way or covered in spiders. Korean designer Kwang Hoo Lee has come up with an alternative to these problems with his Mona Lisa folding chair. 

I can see a few design modifications I’d make. I think at risk of losing some novelty, I’d put the painting and gilding down to prevent wear, and I’d have the back of the chair be the side it swings away from in order to put in cross bars for back support. I do think this concept has potential. I think they would sell fast at Target.

Would anyone care to redesign my Christmas tree stand and vacuum cleaner as works of art? They are in the way too. (via treehugger)

Filed Under: Design Inspiration, Ideas, Innovation Tagged With: Art, Design Inspiration, Idea, Innovation, Involuntary Collaboration

November 16, 2008 By Zog

Reverse Graffiti

Graffiti is one of the most controversial art forms. Made most famous by vandals, it tends to be used mostly in a somewhat territorial defacing of property with motivations varying as much as any other art form, if not more. It is one of our most ancient arts, with cave paintings dating back at least 32,000 years, many of them less socially acceptable than the standard bison image that comes to mind.

Reverse graffiti is the art of removing grime or graffiti in such a way that it leaves a message behind. The artist can vary all the way from that kid who scrawls ‘wash me’ with their finger on all the dirty cars they see, to masters like Scott Wade (top) and Alexandre Orion (video below).

As you can see from the video, the legality of reverse graffiti is still leaving officials scratching their heads. Are they really going to arrest you for cleaning the subway? As with anything that irritates people or costs them money (£750,000 to (finish) cleaning the Wills Memorial Building in Bristol) expect them to manage to trump up some kind of charge if you get caught making a nuisance of yourself.

Graffiti writers are not real villains.  Real villains consider the idea of breaking in someplace, not stealing anything and then leaving behind a painting of your name in four foot high letters the most retarded thing they ever heard of. -Banksy

Update: Here’s another good one:

reverse graffiti car

Filed Under: Design Inspiration, Ideas, Innovation Tagged With: Art, Corrupted, Design Inspiration, Funny, Idea, Innovation, Involuntary Collaboration, Video

November 15, 2008 By Zog

Slow Prototyping with Bees

Rapid prototypers are falling in price, but are still expensive to use, and the field of swarm robotics continues to work on making better bots with more useful emergent behavior, but today, the hardest working hives on the planet are still organic. Tomas Libertiny made a form for his hive in the shape of a vase and then let the bees do the rest. It took 40,000 of the little ladies a week to make the vase. The materials are free, as the bees gather them themselves, and even better, they work for queen and country. I was spoke with a beekeeper this morning who has been working on something similar, and others have made use of the concept in the past, inclding Garnett Puett, who twenty years ago apparently put a queen bee in a life sized cast of his wife and let them sculpt a work known as Apiscaryatid, but I have yet to see a picture. Hilary Berseth has some wonderful slow prototyping work that can be seen here.

I think it would also be fun to use a lost wax process to cast the final product in a more permanent material. Next thing you know, the Danish will be using slow prototyping termites to make their clogs.

Update: It looks like Libertini is still at it. He has taken on a project much like Apiscaryatid, creating a life size figure of Jesus in a glass case entitled Unbearable Lightness. He started with a mesh small enough to trap the queen within, but large enough to allow the workers through. The bees built the honeycomb, filled it with honey, and then removed the honey when they were later relocated, leaving just the honeycomb structure behind. Why he chose the religious iconography I don’t know, but it scares the beeJesus out of me.

And some video as well:

Filed Under: Design Inspiration, Ideas, Innovation Tagged With: Animals, Art, Design Inspiration, Design Tool, Idea, Innovation, Involuntary Collaboration

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