Search results (tags) for: "diorama"

News From the Craft + Style Blogosphere: August 27, 2009

2009-08-27T15:00:00-05:00

"The world is mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful." — e.e. cummings

This week's edition of News From the Craft + Style Blogosphere has foreboding miniatures, a harmonious fusion of man-made inventions with nature's wild and wonderful terrain, lush and colorful advertising photography, and sewage stalagmites.

Read on!

Rune Guneriussen's photography makes the impossible...possible. His photo assemblages present a seamless melding of the mechanical age and the shapely beauty of natural scenery. Instead of a harsh dichotomy between man and wild there is a harmonious mise en scène. [Via All the Mountains]

If there's one thing I love, it's a good photo archive. This is especially so if said catalog of photos exists online (and especially on Flickr!). I recently discovered the George Eastman House collection, an independent nonprofit museum and educational institution that aims to tell the story of photography and motion pictures. One such story is Nickolas Muray's work, which immediately caught my eye. Muray was a pioneering commercial photographer, famous for establishing many of the conventions of color advertising. He is considered the master of the three-color carbro process. These vibrant commercial advertising photographs illustrated lady's magazines in the 1930s and 1940s. [Via Routine Investigations]

Hold on to your hats, because this is a doozy. The amazing crystals and stalagmites you see above have formed in — wait for it — the Moscow sewer system. The presence of these formations is really not so surprising, as a sewer system has many similarities to a cave (dripping mineral solutions, organic matter, limestone, etc.) The gorgeous colors of the crystals and roots growing through cement give the surroundings a magical ambiance. [Via English Russia]

Can you say "sinister miniatures"? Thomas Doyle's 1:43 scale dioramas take the concept of house and home to mysterious and diminutive places: specifically, precariously perched on the edge of a cliff, falling into a sinkhole, or a foreboding all-black facade. There's suspicious digging to dispose of evidence (who is attached to the legs under that blanket, I wonder?) and a sense of general unease. I love it. [Via Booooooom]

Wanna give me some more artsy, style or design blogs to peruse? Leave them in the comments! And check out past installments of News From the Craft + Style Blogosphere!

Etsy Finds: Nightmare Maker

2007-10-25T08:29:00-05:00

You know that strange place between horror and fascination? Attraction and revulsion?

That's where this amazing and revolting diorama exists for me. The work captures captures the artist's stated intent perfectly.

According to the maker, RavenX:

"Birth" is my depiction of Woman and how each emotion we hold makes us feel like a new person:
---Happy
---Sad
---Sleeping

The doll has 3 heads. The head turns manually so that you can change the emotion at any time.

I love it.

Excuse me so I can call my therapist.

Misaki Kawai: Punch of the Tiger, Cream of the Fight

2007-09-24T13:00:00-05:00

I recently (well, six months ago) checked out the work of Misaki Kawai, a Brooklyn-based artist with cheeky, off-the-wall installations and paintings. "Tiger Punch," her first solo show, was held at the Clementine Gallery in New York. It involved wall and floor installations of painted objects and works on paper.

Upon arriving at the space, I was instantly among a variety of brightly-colored kooky characters. Kawai creates a world of quirky cartoons with a child-like drawing style and whimsical approach to her subject. She constructs her works with handmade objects into an environment full of color, playfulness, humor and wit. Working from everyday materials like cardboard, paper, yarn, cottonballs, fabric, and glue, Kawai crafts what I like to call "wall-mounted, 3-D collage." Her narrative invites you into a world where spiders kiss instead of bite, birds hang out on a toilet, people burst through walls, giant waves are surfed by three people simultaneously, and farts and explosions go hand in hand. It's a cute and comical dreamscape drawn with a mastery of the skillfully unskilled aesthetic.

Misaki Kawai's work has also been featured at the Greater New York Show '05, at PS1 MOMA in NYC, and in a two-person exhibition at the Watari Museum in Tokyo, Japan. She recently had a solo exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, MA.

Photos courtesy of Clementine Gallery and Misaki Kawai.

Diorama Drama!

2007-08-07T20:00:00-05:00

We at Etsy were recently visited by an intrepid crew of videographers, Chop Wood Carry Water. The crew shot content about Etsy, for Etsy...and hopefully for television producers soon to be receiving our totally unique EPK (Electronic Press Kit). This visit prompted us to think about how we could spruce up our surroundings and have a "stage" on which to conduct interviews and get down to business.

With this in mind, the "Etsy elves" (Ahem, the Labs team!) soon got to work, and quickly built an incredible, life-size diorama, complete with an over-sized spool of thread and tomato pin cushion for seats. No detail was too small...Look at the wallpaper! It's just fabric with flowers attached!

The airplanes are a nice touch.

This is the "outside" portion of the diorama, that you might walk across in order to get inside "the house." It's also worth mentioning that you can only wear specially crafted Etsy-slippers to walk in the diorama. One pair has narwhal tusks for decoration. Also, did you see JackRabbit's Wiener Bench hiding in the corner?

And here is the beautiful "inner portion" of the display. Before this, the space was being used as a closet for Rob's coats and a non-functional glass display case, usually covered by a quilt.

The shoot went well, thanks to the sellers who gave some great interviews:
Kateblack
DewonaPetal
joannetracydesigns
1aeon
seealso
kartdesign

You can check out the photos from behind the scenes here on flickr.

Note: This was originally posted in the Etsy Garden.