These strips were drawn by the incredibly talented fellas over at pants are overrated. They have started to do what I only hoped in my wildest dreams Bill Watterson would take on himself. They are breathing new life into Calvin and Hobbes.  I have to admit that C&H is one of my very favorite comics and the idea that someone might do damage to its illustrious name is a bit scary. But these two totally nailed it! This is so spot on, I can hardly breathe. All I can say is: MORE! MORE! MORE! It seems like they’d only intended to do the two strips and I just hope they pursue this a little bit further. Because it is AWESOME! Woo!

I’ve spent a great deal of my life waiting to reach some magic point when things would just fall into place and everything would make sense and I would just KNOW who I was and what I wanted to make. The Big Secret? IT WILL NEVER HAPPEN THAT WAY. You have to make work to know yourself! Just do what feels interesting and the rest will fall into place. Even if you aren’t sure where something is going, keep going. The most exciting things happen when you get all tangled in an idea and then it just makes itself clear. But you’ll never get to that clarity if you don’t start!

I found this image via one of my new favorite websites: bookshelfporn.  I believe I’ve mentioned how much I love books?  This site is exactly what it promises to be – lots of photos of bookshelves in all their booky glory.  I would love to know who did this particular image though. Internet? Help me out?

[via bookshelfporn]

Illustrator Joel Kimmel wrote and illustrated short story describing the “history” of the ring he was using to propose to his girlfriend with. He then pasted the pages into an old Collier’s Cyclopedia and in the last bit, carved out a little hiding spot for the ring itself.

Here is the last page with the flap in the middle:

Which opens to reveal the ring!

What a huge amount of work!  Thank goodness she said Yes! 

[via Joel's blog]

UPDATE: Dangit, I forgot vimeo and wordpress don’t like eachother so much…Sorry, you are just going to have to click the link and trust me its worth it!

Water Sculpture video on Vimeo.

Water sculpture by Shinichi Maruyama.

{via boingboing}

This is the work of Brian Dettmer.  I’ve seen his work around without actually knowing who was doing it.  I love the idea of taking old books and finding something new in them.

From the artist statement on his website:

When an object’s intended function is fleeting the necessity for a new approach to its form and content arises. By altering preexisting materials and shifting functions, new and unexpected roles of old materials emerge. This is the area I currently operate in. Through meticulous excavation or concise alteration I edit or dissect a communicative object or system such as books, maps, tapes and other media. The medium’s role expands. Its content becomes recontextualized and new meanings or interpretations emerge.

Explanation of Book Dissections

In this work I begin with an existing book and seal its edges, creating an enclosed vessel full of unearthed potential. I cut into the surface of the book and dissect through it from the front. I work with knives, tweezers and other surgical tools to carve one page at a time, exposing each page while cutting around ideas and images of interest. Nothing inside the books is relocated or implanted, only removed. Images and ideas are revealed to expose a book’s hidden, fragmented memory. The completed pieces expose new relationships of a book’s internal elements exactly where they have been since their original conception.

I’ve done some work with altered books, but I can only imagine the amount of time and patience it must have taken to work on these.

This last one I found on his flickr stream which I highly recommend you all go check out right now.  He seems to have done an excellent job posting a lot of his most recent work there.  What caught me first about this piece was the title: Do it, Complete Yourself Man (2010)

and here is a detail from same work:

For more on Brian and his work, you can check out his wikipedia page.

These are the ingredients for Gingerbread people!

Here are a few more.

This becomes Vanilla Horns:

This becomes Almond Tarts:

Here are a few more of just ingredients (they just look so cool!!):

Photos by Carl Kleiner (who you should really go check out! I didn’t know his work before these images, but he has done some really cool things!)

Styled by Evelina Bratell.

[via craft]

Flortentijn is the same artist responsible for the giant inflated rubber duckie that was first presented in Amsterdam in 2007 and most recently shown in Osaka in 2009.

I really love that someone went to the trouble to put this in the world.  There should be more stuff like this.  We spend so much of our time and energy focusing on what is wrong with the world, it is really nice to see something that has no other function than to make people happy.

{via Recyclart}

The best part?  It is the Information Desk in a library!

UPDATE: The desk is located at Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands. From inhabitat.com:  “After the devastating fire in the Architecture building that took a portion of the library’s reserve, the school set out to establish a new collection that would consist of the salvaged books that went unburned and a bounty of others newly purchased to replace the destroyed volumes.”

While I can see how that would be very eye catching, the pragmatist in me thinks, “But how would you ever find what you are looking for?”  Books are for reading and looking at, not just for being pretty on a shelf!  If your books aren’t organized by author, or by subject, or even chronologically, you’d have to remember if your book on contemporary art had a red or a blue cover to ever find it!  That is not how my brain is organized! Gah!

Sorry, tangent.