An absolutely amazing paper craft installation by the art student Wataru Itou in Tokyo. Hand made over four years. More details and more pictures at Tokyobling.

First time I saw Figments I was “cruising” through all the articles that had been piling up in my feed reader. Not so interesting articles usually gets about 1 sec. of attention while interesting ones get around 20 sec. (if they do not have a lot of text to read). The article about Figments had very little text, but it got about 1 min. of my time!

It was like the Figment characters were alive, and of course I was attracted to the high level of detail put into these characters. One can truly tell that these are one of a kind characters made by the hand of an artist who uses his art to express himself. These artists leave a small piece of themselves in every product, and I believe that’s how the characters end up so very alive and full of soul!

Figment was born out of the artists love for shoes, and that’s clearly visible by the major role the tiny baby sneakers serve in the characters. All the characters are made from carefully chosen fabrics and accessories, and through the process of their making their personalities take shape little by little.

It is a truly great “toy” for those of us who love designer plush with a whole lot of soul.

Figments will be available online when they get their web store up and running, and until then the characters can be found at Lower Haters (San Francisco), The Reed Space (NY) and Acycle (Tokyo).

Via Blog Clops

The Dutch artist Selwyn Senatori is the brain behind Arttops – laptops with an artistic touch.

Arttops comes in two versions, blue King and pink Queen, both are decorated all over the top and has decoration around the keyboard and screen too.

The Arttops are limited edition. Only one hundred are available of each and all have been signed by the Selwyn himself. They look to be a great alternative to the usual plain business like black, grey and white minimalisticly designed laptops and might make a great confirmation gift for an art loving teen.

Both “King” and “Queen” comes with an Intel Core 2 Duo 1.86GHz processor, 1024MB DDR2 memory and 120GB(King)/100GB(Queen) hard drives. The “King” has a 15.4-inch screen while the “Queen” has a smaller 14.1-inch screen.

Via BornRich