Bag Art

Friday Drive In: Combo

COMBO a collaborative animation by Blu and David Ellis (2 times loop) from blu on Vimeo.

Odosketch

Dust off your beret and get to work. Odosketch is an online tool that let's you create very natural sketches that look like they were done with colored pencils. It tracks your movements as you draw, so when you're done you can watch a video of your sketch being created.

Some of the featured sketches are truly amazing. Especially as someone who isn't an artist it's fascinating to me to watch the process people use to create these amazing images.

Free. Will. Power.: Cool videos and T-shirt Design Contest

Naral Pro-Choice America has launched a new website, Free.Will.Power, to get younger audiences involved in the issue of reproductive rights. It features 3 videos of spoken-word artists with awesome soundtracks by DJ Spooky. Here's one that launched today:



(Side note: as of today, YouTube now supports larger video dimensions. Jams.)

They also have a t-shirt design contest. The winner gets $1,000 and their design will become the official T-shirt of Free.Will.Power. Comment with a link to your entry so we'll know to vote for you!

A New Kind of Economy from David Horvitz

David Horvitz is offering some very unique goods and services in exchange for various amounts of money. His website came to my attention because it was featured in The Best American Non-Required Reading 2008. I recommend checking that out too.

Design Your Own Tequila Bottle

1800 Tequila is letting you design your own bottle. Just upload your artwork and rotate, re-size, and position it to fit on a bottle. Once you're done you're automatically entered into a contest to win $10,000 and appear in an ad campaign. Also, if you're feeling flush, you can pay $475.00 (not including shipping) to have the bottle you designed created and shipped to you. This is especially silly when you see the tiny, tiny print on the bottom of the buy page that says "For legal reasons, your custom bottle will not contain 1800 tequila". So $475.00 for an empty bottle? What a deal...

And coming soon, the website will let you design your own "kicks". Web Diversions will keep you posted...

Banksy's "Village Pet Store and Charcoal Grill"

Banksy has created an insane installation in the West Village (that's NYC, of course): an animatronic leopard, fish sticks swimming in a fish bowl, chicken nuggets that peck at a dish of dipping sauce... Crazy. Amazing. It's open from 10am - Midnight until halloween. 89 7th ave, between West 4th and Bleeker I'll be there tonight at some point. See you there?

Make Your Own Netflix Origami

Here's a fun way to be a little nicer to the planet. Those Netflix flaps you tear off and toss? Why not make them into crazy awesome art? Netflix Origami will show you how to make everything from an origami swan to a dive bomber. Email us with pictures of your Netflix origami creations and we will post them on Web Diversions!

Friday Drive In: Western Spaghetti

Western Spaghetti is an amazing stop-motion short by PES. Check out some of their other great videos (I especially like Game Over).

The Human Clock and the Human Calendar

Human Clock and Human Calendar are both cool projects that display the current time or date (duh) using images. You can also submit your own photo to be included in this never ending project. Putting the fun in functional, har har.

Great Graffiti Site

Pictures of Walls is a site dedicated to text-based graffiti. Some of these are beautiful, some strange, and a lot are just plain hilarious. Browse and enjoy. 

Make Your Own Demotivation Poster

Ah, the ubiquitous motivational poster: high school counselors love them, middle management loves them, and whoever decorated my dentist's waiting room loves them.

But for snarky, pessimistic people like me there's Despair, Inc., which makes demotivation posters and calendars. And now they're giving you the chance to make your own demotivation posters. Just upload a picture, choose your font and colors, and add your own funny headline and caption. Then you can download the image for free or, for $12.95, you can order an 11" x 14" poster.

CONTEST ALERT!!!

We want to see what you come up with! Post your image online and put a link to it in the comment section of this post. We'll pick the 3 we like best and post them on Web Diversions. Here's one we made:

  

Fun with Flickr

Type anything into Spell with Flickr and it will create an image for you by pulling up random letters from Flickr images. Click any letter to change its to a different image. Fun!

Thanks to Kate in CA (a.k.a. my big sister) for finding this site (and many of the other pages we've reviewed on Web Diversions).

Feeling Sketchy

Online etch-a-sketch! What's left to say!

This Ain't Your Average Sketch Pad

This game (if you can call it that) seems as yet unnamed, though maybe it's called Next Physics? Regardless, it's really awesome and will leave you wondering: how did they do that? To get a real idea of what it can do, draw a lot of sketches on the same page and watch what happens. 

...and his bucket of parts!

Another great recommendation from Rebecca Kosick of On Style for Moderns (as well as Crafts for Moderns).

Mr. Picassohead lets you create your own "painting" of a Picassoesque face. You can then save and email your head to show off your aesthetic flair to all your friends. Saved heads are also saved to the Gallery, where you can browse the work of other burgeoning Picassos.

Splatter!

I don't want to ruin the experience, so I'm just going to tell you to head to JacksonPollock.org and check it out.

Thanks to Rebecca Kosick of Chicago for bringing this site to the attention of Web Diversions (as well as for being one of our most loyal readers!). Check out her fabulous blog, On Style for Moderns.

Some Like it Modular

In the spirit of George Vlosich, the guy who took Etch-A-Sketch to the level of artistry, we bring you another toy artiste, Eric Harshbarger, Lego master. 

All Harshbarger's sculptures and mosaics are 100% Lego bricks. He only uses glue when he has to for shipping purposes.  Check out his portfolio to see some of the awesome things he's built. The desk above was built for a guy who had it stipulated in his hiring contract that he wanted a desk made out of Legos.  

 

mosaic your face

You know those lame Bob Marley posters where the big picture of him is a mosaic of tiny pictures of him? Well now you can make your own lame mosaic pictures!

Image Mosaic generator  lets you upload any image and turn it into a photo mosaic using pictures they collect from flickr. Then you can download the image to share with friends. Kind of creepy, kind of neat. Give it a go!