It looks like a theme is developing in today’s posts: Artists who have taken esoteric forms of technology and are using them as the basis for their work. The sheep shown above were created a few years back by artist Jean-Luc Cornec, who ironically doesn’t even have a website. He took rotary phones and built the animals for an exhibition at the Frankfurt Museum of Communications.

We think is about time you travel to Berlin to meet on of the most talented Greek artists, Konstantino Dregos. His sculptures, although not always easy to define, are surprisingly inspiring and at the same time they challenge our perception of the beautiful. Often what is implied in his work is stronger than what you see at first glance and this is quite challenging.

Using your obsessions in order to make something unique out of it is something that unites passion with creativity in an ideal way. That’s the idea behind the work of Ryan McElhinney, an Irish designer that can’t stand still and uses his curiosity, his experience as an animator and his passion for toys and pop culture in his creations. All of them are limited editions and crafted with love, often used in his interior design commissions. This time he imagined a neo baroque 2.2 meters tall Westminster Chiming Grandfather Clock full of toys, which gives the impression of a crazy pop pile coming from out of space! It seems that there is a life after toys are retired, and Hulk or Toy Story characters look more than willing to take this second chance .The clock was a commission for a home on The Palms in Dubai and has a working Westminster Chime mechanism that chimes every 15 minutes. The internal structure is an original grandfather clock. The toys have been bonded together and then coated in a high gloss polyurethane white paint. We are sure that many of you will think: “this is very Yatzer indeed!” And, of course, we couldn’t agree more.

Rosemary Squire is a UK-based illustrator who creates three dimensional illustrations. Her models are created using polymer clay, wire, found objects, and cloth, which are then digitally photographed for illustration. Her work is influenced significantly by her close observation of people and their quirks. Squire has featured in The AOI Images annual (2008, 2009) and was awarded The AOI Art Critic Award 2008.

Jason Hackenwerth must get invited to a lot of parties with his amazing balloon-animal-making skills. I’d like to see an average clown or magician make elephant-sized plankton and protozoa.

We love it when designers encourage the buyer to customize their purchase, and when that customization involves smashing said purchase with an included hammer, you know we're in. Designed by Marijn van der Poll, the Do Hit Chair ($TBA) is a box made from 1.25mm stainless steel measuring roughly 40" by 28" by 30", which you're supposed to mold into whatever shape you like using the included long-handle, wide-head hammer. High-end furniture meets stress relief, with smashing results.

Art by 23-year-old London-based illustrator, Dan Stafford. Born in Manchester, Stafford graduated this year from Loughborough University School of Art & Design with First Class Honours in Visual Communication. He is now busily producing slightly mad illustrations for clients such as Who’s Jack Magazine.

This Papercraft Self Portrait was Eric Testroete his Halloween costume last weekend. Eric is a 3D artist in the Vancouver game industryand he was inspired by the big-head mode seen in videogames. It was probably quite fun for him to do an offscreen project with his 3D skills.

Weighing in at a massive 110 pounds and standing 5 feet 9 inches tall, this life sized Mario model is completely structured, modeled and built using over 40,000 LEGO bricks. The pictures do all the talking here.

Germain is a Parisian restaurant in a newly revitalized space at 25-27 rue de Buci in the 6th Arrondissement. The prolific, Iranian–born and Paris-based architect, India Mahdavi, created the interior architecture of the three-storey, funky establishment.

The most striking feature of the space is a massive yellow sculpture of a woman in an overcoat and high heels. Its lower half stands on the café’s first floor while the upper body and head break through the ceiling to the upper level VIP lounge area. The sculpture is one of three that the multi-disciplinary, Paris-based artist, Xavier Veilhan, made of his friend Sophie for an exhibition at the Emmanuel Perrotin Gallery (Miami) in 2006.

When Thierry Costes, scion of the Parisian hospitality family that owns Germain, asked Veilhan to contribute to Germain, Veilhan studied the multi-storey location and envisioned the drama that would be created if one of his Sophies “grew” in it, almost as if it were a feature that pre-existed the restaurant.

The Costes family is no stranger to using the talent and drawing power of well-known designers and artists in its hotels, restaurants and cafés. The fact that the 36-year-old Veilhan’s sculptural installation work has a prominent presence currently at Versailles cannot but help attract customers and the curious to the left-bank location of Germain.

On Saturday October 17, 2009 the Elisabeth Church was packed with people who wanted to watch the Swatch MTV Playground LIVE Art Battle. Berlin-duo, Ben and Julia, put their artistic skills to the test as they competed head-to-head while the clock was ticking backwards. The winner of the battle was Ben with his Obelix-like creature! We covered it LIVE from Berlin in addition with the ILLUSTRATIVE 2009 art festival, and just to refresh your memories a bit Yatzer is a media partner of Swatch MTV Playground which also took place in a successful event in Athens * GR. Enjoy images of this “Holy Battle” as their markers burn down like a candle.

Robert Bradford creates his life-size and larger-than-life sculptures of humans and animals from discarded plastic items, mainly toys but also other colorful plastic bits and pieces, such as combs and buttons, brushes and parts of clothes pegs.

What would you do if you discovered a pair of earrings bigger than your car lying on the streets of your city? Would you be amazed or scared that a fashionable giant was about to trample you?

Gehard Demetz is a mystery artist, the only thing that we know about him is that he was born in 1972, Italy, and that he currently lives in the mountains of Selva Gardena. Maybe this is the only thing that matters when you set an eye on his absolutely marvelous wooden sculptures, since you forget everything you may have in your mind. Why lie, this is not wood, this is the material of the dreams. And dreams are the perfect place for dark surrealism to rise. What are those lost children looking for? What’s the story that they hide? They look at you and it seems that they are inviting you to torture them. Or to pay for having tortured them in the past, as if they were the habitants of a forgotten orphanage where bad things were happening.

London-based design studio PostlerFerguson has been creating super realistic and accurate looking paper guns and other arms. Three of them will be released by German design publisher Gestalten. So now you can make your own!

Styled by Dazed & Confused fashion editor Robbie Spencer, Nicolas Petrou presented his spring 2010 collection during New York Fashion Week. Inspired by an illustration Sirichai completed for Geoffrey Beene during the spring 2001 season, Petrou blended the comfort of sportswear with the attractiveness of modern menswear. The result is a deconstructed mix of patterns, mesh and sequins that look best when presented on Petrou’s reinterpretation of the classic jacket. The beauty of Petrou’s work is his ability to hone in on an abstract style of fashion and still keep it accessible.

1948 is Nike’s creative playground-retail store in the old brick railway arches of Shoreditch, London. In addition to displaying and selling shoes, 1948 offers an entire art floor for events, installations and assorted fun.
 
The installation created by Finland-born illustrator/artist/designer Kustaa Saksi is all about the historical fun journey of the Nike running shoe. Typical for the currently Amsterdam-based Saksi, the sprawling scene has a pop-art, retro feel that fits Nike’s history as a brand. Saksi’s Volkswagen van and psychedelic colors illustrate the pre-swoosh era in an earnest and deliberately clunky way.
 
Saksi’s last name translates as “scissor,” or it could also be “Saxon,” depending on your preference. He is proficient in many media, including print, sculpture and now also more frequently 3D. Saksi has also designed massive building wraps, and even clothing and wallpaper. His book, Offpiste (2008), is a visual feast of his recent work. In addition to Nike, Saksi’s client list includes Comme des Garçons, Citroen, Diesel, Issey Miyake, Lacoste, Levi's, New York Times, Mercedes Benz, MTV, Playboy and Wallpaper.

Welcome to Matt W Moore's world. His retro, abstract inspired graphics with a steely, graffiti-edge have seen this young Portland-based artist's work traverse the globe. Moore's vast commercial portfolio includes gigs for mega brands including Burton, Nike, Wired, Citroen, Vodafone and many others. Fascinated with symmetry, geometry and saturated colour, he creates retro-spirited, abstract graphics with a wild, graffiti edge.

Iconic retro brands possess strong currency right now. The latest hails not from the annals of fashion or apparel but from the world of toys - we're talking about LEGO, the multi-colored building bricks that we all grew up with. While LEGO is still one of the top children's toy brands, it is spontaneously morphing into a credible street brand, adopted by Gen Y hipsters who still nurture happy memories of playing with the blocks as kids. It's part of a bigger trend, which has seen other iconic mostly 80s brands such as Reebok enjoy unexpected revivals.

LEGO has been appearing in all sorts of unlikely applications from watches to cameras, bags and belts, to usb sticks, mobile phones and even cupcakes. Our favorites include a recent ad for hot fashion house Lanvin, which used color-spray guns made from LEGO in a recent campaign and adorable LEGO fashion show video by Jean-Charles de Castelbajac which cast LEGO figures as fabulous high fashion catwalk models.

A.J. Fosik has been haunted by his last name for 12 years now. “The etymology of that word is sort of interesting and a little cheesy, but it’s a metaphor that I like and one that has served well enough. The word is Australian, originally spelled f-o-s-s-i-c-k: a verb to describe the act of people sifting through mine washings or waste piles to look for any gold that might have been missed; sorting through the garbage to find gold.” It seems appropriate that he would have adopted it as his moniker. Like any good idea miner, A.J. Fosik digs through folk traditions. In doing so, he’s found an aesthetic that feels at once old and new. Of course, like any good overseas name coming to America, it got slightly butchered on arrival. “From what I can gather,” he says, “the spelling I use means ‘to shit oneself’ in Hungarian.” There is a distinctly American quality to the three-dimensional ursine beasts and delicately rendered paintings that Fosik has poured out over the last years. Many people mention it to him, and he understands why. But “American” can be a challenging feeling to articulate, however much one knows it when they see it.

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Stain is a set of a teacups designed to improve through use. This project examines the assumption that use is damaging to a product (For example, scratches on an iPod).

The interior surface of the cup is treated so as to stain more in predetermined places. The more the cups are used, the more the pattern is revealed. Over time they will build up an individual pattern dependent on the users personal way of drinking tea.

Available for £35, please email the designer for more information and wholesale prices.

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The paper toy mania is constantly expanding and a bunch or artists have taken it to another level. Shin Tanaka is one of those designers that have put a lot of passion and creativity to make some amazing creatures out of paper! Shin Tanaka, as he describes himself, was a graffiti artist looking for an interesting canvas instead of a street-wall. One day, he hit upon an idea to draw graffiti on a toy. But as he couldn’t find a good toy for it, he made a toy from a paper as his new canvas. He got also involved into creating paper models of his favorite sneakers. His work surprised so many people that finally it was the same brands he was imitating that ended asking him for collaborations! His creations have two elements: Origami and Street Culture. And it is this mix of the Japanese paper culture and the colors and lines of street art that makes them special.