Who would have thought – foam cup art

We’ve all spent hours upon hours doodling on our notebooks at school, on napkins in coffee shops, or even on our hands it seems, but Cheeming Boey takes doodling to a whole new level. He draws intricate designs with his Sharpie pen on polystyrene foam cups!

Granted, it’s a unique idea, Boey is super talented (it can’t be easy drawing on foam) and the result is visually beautiful (and could look even better if some of them had a bit of colour maybe?), but what do people do with the cups once they’ve bought them – and at $120 to $220 a piece, they’re really not that cheap…? I guess art doesn’t need to have a use though, it’s just there to be admired and appreciated, right?

Sam Toft

Sam Toft is without doubt one of my favourite artists.  For the past 12 years, she has been creating artwork using oil pastels and coloured inks.  Her work is published as cards and limited edition prints by The Art Group and can also be seen nationwide in Waterstones, Borders and IKEA.  She has pictures on display in some galleries and sells well both here and in America.

The absolutely delightful story of the Mustard characters, which feature in the paintings, can be read here.  By the end of it, you’ll feel as if you know them all personally!  It gives the characters a more meaningful existence, making the painting all the more special.

Impressive Ice!

It’s not often that I find an article in The Metro particularly inspiring but today’s piece on the World Art Ice Championships in the US was just magical! What’s more, Britain did excellently in the competition, with Martin King and Aaron Costic coming out with gold for their single block sculpture named ‘Spring’. I adore the intricacy of the Surfacing Kingfisher by Junichi Nakamura and Suguru Kanbayashi.

Reading the article made me want to research the art of ice sculpting a little further.

The most famous ice hotels can be found in Sweden on the Torne River and in Canada, just outside of Quebec City.  To create an Ice Hotel, up to 45,000 tons of snow and 430 tons of ice are used over a five-week period to build a structure with ceilings as high as 18 feet.   The walls are built to be four foot wide at times to account for the slow melting.  In March, as the weather begins to warm, and the natural melting speeds up, ice hotels are manually thawed and removed until the following December.

This ice hotel near the village of Jukkasjärvi, Kiruna, Sweden was the world’s first ice hotel, first constructed in the late 1980’s.  There are more than 80 rooms and suites, along with a bar, a reception area, a gallery, and a church.  In addition to using ice glasses in the Kiruna ice hotel, the bar and room service also serves cold cuts on ice plates.

The hotel only exists between December and April, after which the work of art slowly melts into a pool of liquid… after all that hard work!  Each room is unique and the architecture of the hotel is changed each year, as it is rebuilt from scratch.

Light inside the rooms is generated by fiber optic cables that run through the ceiling or by candlelight generated by candles encased in an ice candleholder. Forget plugging-in those hair straighteners!!

table, chair and wardrobe!

The Hôtel de Glace, situated in Québec, Canada, has visual 360 degree tours available online, take a look!  Luxuries include two heated outdoor hot tubs, a sauna and spa. The hotel has more than 80 rooms and suites, a bar, reception area, cinema, theatre and church. The design layout of the Ice Hotel   changes every year.

And finally, just for the ’wow’ factor is the stunning image below. These people are so talented!

Paper prêt-a-porter, anyone?

If I’m honest, to me, the idea of a garment made purely from paper sounds a little silly to say the least.  I can’t help but picture a half-hearted, naive college-student attempt at creating a piece which is more ‘fashion faux-pas’ rather than Christian Lacroix.  Surely the result would just end up as a crumpled mess, right?

Well, wrong actually. It seems the fashion pack have been perfecting the art of creating paper garments for decades.

Paper clothes were all the rage in the Sixties as the industrialised world increasingly became a throw-away society. The Scott Paper Company released the psychedelic Paisley shift in 1966.  Priced at a meseley $1.25, it sold over half a million in the USA!  The paper dress was at the time developed to promote their toilet paper and paper tissues, posted to potential customers along with promotional coupons.

The trend grew popular in the UK 1967, when even the Beatles were wearing paper jackets!

In a similar yet far more appealing and complex fashion, Hussein Chalayan’s paper Airmail dress arrives as a letter and folds out to become a full-length garment. The paper is not ordinary paper, but Tyvek, which is unrippable. Each dress comes with a set of stickers and instructions on how to put it together. ‘It’s something you can personalise and you can also cut it up and sew it back together,’ he says.

Chanel keeps the trend alive on the S/S 2009 Catwalk…

Paper garments are the epitome of modern-day fast fashion fixes.  Just don’t forget your umberella…

Paper Fashion! is an exhibition in Antwerp showing until 16th August 2009.  It now owns more than 200 vintage pieces reflecting the kind of craze that took America by a paper storm in the mid-1960s. I’m hoping the exhibition will come to the UK soon!

And to finish off, beat the downturn with this recession-busting wedding dress, yours for just £5!