Super Mario Genderswaps! This was a super fun design challenge, and I’m pretty pleased with how they all turned out — especially Luigi. My favourite thing is how Waluigi just looks the usual design, but in drag.
Absolutely fantastic.
(Via Scott Jon Siegel.)
This is a wondrous piece by Leopoldo Galluzzo from Altre scoverte fatte nella luna dal Sigr. Herschel. Here’s the Smithsonian Institution Libraries’ description of the work:
This portfolio of hand-tinted lithographs purports to illustrate the “discovery of life on the moon.” In 1836, Richard E. Locke, writing for the New York Sun, claimed that the noted British astronomer Sir John Herschel had discovered life on the moon. Flora and fauna included bat-men, moon maidens (with luna-moth wings), moon bison, and other extravagant life forms. Locke proposed an expedition to the moon using a ship supported by hydrogen balloons.
The SIL has five more images available online along with this one, including a few vistas. I highly recommend checking them all out at full size.
Gorgeous kinetic sculpture by Chris Burden, apparently inspired by traffic in Los Angeles. Would really love to see it in person.
“History of Science Fiction” is a graphic chronology that maps the literary genre from its nascent roots in mythology and fantastic stories to the somewhat calcified post-Star Wars space opera epics of today. The movement of years is from left to right, tracing the figure of a tentacled beast, derived from H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds Martians. Science Fiction is seen as the offspring of the collision of the Enlightenment (providing science) and Romanticism, which birthed gothic fiction, source of not only SciFi, but crime novels, horror, westerns, and fantasy (all of which can be seen exiting through wormholes to their own diagrams, elsewhere). Science fiction progressed through a number of distinct periods, which are charted, citing hundreds of the most important works and authors. Film and television are covered as well.
I’ve just uploaded a zoomed out version of this piece so you can view the fantastic form of the thing. I strongly recommend heading over to Ward Shelley’s site so you can view an enlarged version. He’s also selling prints for $33.95, or for just $26.95 until June 30.
Amazing, amazing cutaway drawing of the main branch of the New York Public Library from the May 14, 1911 issue of The New York Times’s Sunday Magazine. This scan comes from Sunday Magazine, which has a PDF of the full article for your perusal.
The drawing is by American illustrator Harry M. Pettit. Wikimedia Commons has three pieces of concept art for the Brooklyn Museum which are also fantastic. Here’s a short bio, courtesy of the George Glazer Gallery:
Harry McEwen (H.M.) Pettit was an American architectural painter and illustrator who enjoyed a long career from the 1890s to the 1930s. Born in Rock Island, Illinois, he worked as an artist for his hometown newspaper before moving to New York City at age 23, where he worked in interior decoration. At the turn of the century, he illustrated for publications such as Leslie’s Weekly and Harper’s Weekly and books such as King’s Views of New York.Nicknamed “the bird’s-eye view artist” he frequently produced prospective views and conceptual renderings for proposed architectural designs, both as illustrations and as larger commissioned works, such as a 15-foot mural for the Duquesne Works steel mill in Pittsburgh (c. 1920) and a 27-foot mural, The Gary Works and City of Gary, Indiana, for which he won a medal at the Panama Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. Other clients included Standard Oil, Deere & Co., the Pennsylvania and Grand Central train stations in New York, West Point Military Academy, and universities including Northwestern, Loyola, Columbia, NYU, CUNY and George Washington University. Among his popular images was King’s Dream of New York (1908), a futuristic view of the city with the skies filled with dirigibles, one of many works he did for the publisher Moses King. By 1915, Pettit had moved to Chicago and was the official artist for the Chicago World’s Fair in 1933-34, and the New York World’s Fair in 1939-40, though he died without completing his painting of the latter event.
Art made by folding a dollar bill. Click through for a few more. (I couldn’t resist linking the one with the X-Files reference.)
(Via Sebastiaan de With.)
