Floppy disks are not really good for much these days but one artist has been putting them to good use.  Nick Gentry uses old floppy disks to create his pictures incorporating them into the artwork itself by using them as a canvas. Anything from 6 to more than 100 disks are used to create each picture depending upon the size. You can see one example to the left here but for others take a look at this article.

According to this article people are increasingly choosing inexpensive pursuits such as painting and drawing during the recession. It seems people are moving away from more expensive hobbies as paint brush sales tripled and sales of A4 sketch books doubled at Tesco last year. They have put the increase down to their customers looking for cheaper ways to spend their free time and expect a further increase this year.

At first glance this might seem like quite a good buy for £3,000, but the bungalow is actually a condemned property. The bungalow at Knipe Point near Scarborough is situated dangerously close to the edge of a cliff and is likely to fall into the sea within 6 months. Artist, Mr Cunningham has brought the property so that he can spend his time painting its descent into the sea. He also intends to set up cameras inside the house in order to film its destruction. Many of the neighbouring houses have already gone over the edge and the property has recently developed cracks in the past few weeks so it seems the artist may need to paint rather quickly to get his moneys worth.

This is an interesting idea its a dress that you can decorate yourself. It has been created by fashion designer Berber Soepboer and graphic designer Michiel Schuurman. The dress features a black and white design and comes with several coloured fabric markers so that you can decorate it as you choose. It is available in four sizes and costs £250.

Artist Eugenie Scrase has won BBC Two’s School of Saatchi show with this tree trunk artwork. The piece beat five finalists to win a place in Charles Saatchi’s current show. The artist found the fallen tree whilst out walking in East London and asked the owner if she could remove the section of fence it was impaled on. The work entitles Trunkated Trunk has been on show at the Hermitage in St Petersburg, Russia since October. It’s certainly interesting but its not really my idea of art.

These pumpkins were carved by a gardener is Essex. He has carved many different famous faces into pumpkins such as Barack Obama, Michael Jackson, Wayne Rooney, Amy Winehouse and Cheryl Cole. The carvings take around three hours to complete but only last a few days as the pumpkins start to contort after that amount of time.

This is interesting its a chandelier made from gummy bears. It measures four feet high by two feet wide and is made up of orange, yellow and green sweets. Designer Ya Ya Chou made the sculpture as part of a series where she explored the relationship between food consumption and class

These realistic looking creatures are made by origami expert Sipho Mabona. Despite the intricate designs surprisingly they are each made from just a single sheet of paper. Each piece takes around 20 hours to fold and can take more than six months to design so it doesn’t come as a surprise to find that they sell for around £1,500 each. The preying mantis and stag beetle are just two of his many designs with others including grasshoppers, tigers and fish.

These gargoyles are made out of toilet roll tubes. French artist Junior Fritz Jacquet makes the faces by moulding the toilet roll tube to create the sculpture. He starts off by constructing the eyes and then creates the nose, mouth and the rest of the face. When finished the face is coated in different coloured pigments and fitted to a metal stalk so it can be displayed.

This is interesting its a man who makes famous landmarks from toothpicks. He has spent six years building the structures and in that time has used over six million toothpicks and more than 170 million litres of glue. The picture to the left shows him working on a structure of the Cambodian temple of Angkor Wat  and the second picture shows his version of the Taj Mahal.

These interesting looking sandwiches were created by Mark Northeast in an attempt to get his son Oscar to eat his vegetables. Fed up of his son not eating his meals Mark started to make them a little more interesting. His creation include a caterpillar and a crocodile (pictured) as well as Spongebob Squarepants and a piano. They are certainly more exciting than most sandwiches I have seen.

If this article is to believed the latest must have accessory to be wearing is a pair of bunny ears. According to the article the bizarre new trend appears to have been started by designer  Luella who shaped her models’ hair into ear shapes for a catwalk show. Since then various celebrities such as Madonna (left) and Lady GaGa have been spotted wearing the rather odd looking ears. I’m not sure this is a trend I will be following, I think they look a bit silly.

This is unusual, its 3D sculptures carved out of old phone books. They are made by Alex Queral an artist from Philadelphia. He produces two new pieces a month and has been working in this way for 14  years. He starts off by sketching a picture and then places it over the phonebook to use as template before using a scalpel to cut away at the pages to create the finished sculpture. You can see a work in progress above and a finished image of Obama to the right.

This is unusual, its artwork created on dirty cars. The work is done by artist Scott Wade who creates these impressive pictures simply out of the dirt on car windows. They range from more traditional pieces based on famous works of art like this Mona Lisa he created in the back of a mini to more unusual works like the one below of a family inside a car.

This is interesting its a piece of artwork created by sand artist Andres Amador. He creates these patterns in the sand some of which span over 500 feet. The work involves raking the sand into intricate patterns. Andres first works on the designs in his notebook before working with the sand. The work has to be completed quickly before the sea washes the design away so the effect is only temporary. After all his hard work the artist is left with just a snapshot of each piece of work. Still its fairly impressive stuff.

This is unusual its one woman's project to recreate the Sistine Chapel ceiling in a cross stitch. It took eight years to finish the piece which is actually longer than it took to create the original ceiling. It certainly is impressive.

The Tate have recently paid £30,000 for a till receipt from a little known artist. The receipt is supposedly a piece of conceptual art. Entitles Monochrome Till Receipt (white) it is simply a receipt for £70.32 worth of grocery items all of which happen to be white. It contains 36 items all of which are white, including boil in the bag rice and Andrex toilet tissue. The artist described the work as a modern still life where objects are imagined rather than shown. The receipt also comes with a list of instructions from the artist which state that a new receipt must be used every time the work is shown because till receipts are light sensitive and fall apart. Each time a new receipt is produced it must be based upon the original which is now archived by the Tate. This certainly isn’t my idea of art.

This is interesting its some pictures that have been taken by artist Alan Sailer of everyday objects being hit by pellets. He used an air rifle, a camera and a home made flash to create the shots which are quite amazing. He took them by using a laser to trigger the Nikon D40’s shutter and used a special flash to film the action in slow motion. To pinpoint the exact moment to take the perfect shot must have taken ages which makes the results all the more spectacular. Some of the picture are shown below.

 
Strawberry

 
Glass ball filled with water

 
Nut

 
Crayons

 
Christmas Decoration

 
Paintball

 
Tomato

This is Ziggy the Pekingese with a difference. Ziggy unlike other dogs can paint. He does this by using a paper towel roll attached to a paintbrush which he grabs in his teeth to create his masterpieces. Not surprisingly Ziggy favours abstract art such as the pieces pictured to the left. There does however, appear to be a demand for Ziggy’s work with his paintings selling at auction for around $250. Now I wonder if I can teach my cats to paint.

This is interesting its some artwork from Yuken Teruya who turns everyday objects such as pizza boxes, toilet rolls and bags into art. This is one of the projects featured on the website. Its called Corner Forest and includes lots of individual toilet rolls which are hung to create a forest.

This is interesting its a project to help raise awareness about breast cancer. It called Artful Bras and the idea is that members of the Quilters of South Caroliner have created a one of a kind bra. The results will be part of a touring exhibit and when the exhibit ends in October will be auctioned off with the proceeds being donated to the Best Chance Network. Here are just a few of the designs but you can see the rest at the website here.

A run down pub in Liverpool has doubled in value due to some graffiti on the side of it. The pub was originally worth around £495,000 before the graffiti appeared. It is now worth around £1 million after the graffiti was found to be the work of Banksy, an artist who is known for his images of vermin. The estate agents overseeing the sale have been inundated with offers from buyers looking for an investment.

The artists who decided to try painting in zero gravity managed to produce several pictures. British painter Nasser Azam managed to complete six pictures whilst on the flight. He also managed to complete the journey without getting sick. You can the video here. I must say the pictures are rather abstract but then what do I know? I'm no art critic.

Five artists are going to fly 23,000 feet into the air to create art inspired by the feeling of weightlessness. The flight will take place a specially modified plane which will take a series of climbs and dives allowing the team of artists to experience bursts of zero gravity whilst creating a work of art. It will be interesting to see what the end results are.

This is slightly odd, an artist who paints with his tongue. Ani K devised the technique last year and has so far completed 20 watercolours. However, painting in this way does give him severe headaches and body aches. He does say that he is growing immune to the effects of the paint, but it really can't be good for you ingesting paint. Still, its an interesting technique and if the effects of the paint should become too much, I suppose he can be happy in the knowledge that most artists work is worth more after they die.

This is quite an interesting article showing images of how the world would look if human life ceased to exist. This picture shows how parts of London would rot and how flood waters would enter the city, as without power to the Thames Barrier central London would be mostly underwater. Other pictures show impressions of how Buckingham Palace and Tower Bridge would decay. The pictures are based on both scientific expertise and an understanding of history to predict what would happen. Within a few weeks the planet would be plunged into darkness and within six months areas would start to be repopulated by animals including domestic pets. Within 40 to 50 years modern buildings would start to collapse and within 100 years cars would have rotted away. The more aggressive predators would become dominant with livestock being mainly wiped out. What a cheerful article.

My blogging has got a little bit out of control and what started out as a personal blog, now appears to be more of a mini news feed. With this in mind I have started a couple of new blogs to try and split the content up a little bit. This blog will remain a personal blog, and contain all the usual stuff I blog about. However, I am going to post most of the shopping related content at ineedashop and most of the news related content at atheniaglobe which will both be live soon. In addition to these you can already read my design related blog and my travel related blog.

Nine artists have been creating sand sculptures on a beach in Somerset. The sculptures show scenes from fairy tales including Sleeping Beauty and Hansel and Gretal.

While working on my Mac mini the other day I encountered an easily fixed but very irritating problem. When I tried to load my creative suite programs (Photoshop CS, Illustrator, In Design etc) they all failed to load. Instead they got to the stage where they were initializing and then just hung. After reloading creative suite and many hours of frustrating research trawling through forums looking for a solution I finally found an off the wall fix. Apparently if you change the time zone in the Macs settings and then restart the computer everything will work. I must admit to being very sceptical about whether this would solve my problem but after nearly 3 hours of trying to fix the problem I was on the verge of throwing my Mac out of the window. So try it I did. After changing the time zone from London to Dublin, restarting the computer and then changing it back to London again everything was back to normal and Creative Suite worked as usual.