In the year 1515, Giuliano de’ Medici presented the newly crowned King of France, Francois I, with a mechanical lion that walked on it own. The automata was designed by Leonardo Da Vinci, but all that is left of it is the diagrams. However, from those plans the lion was reconstructed in 2009. Watch it move, and imagine seeing this almost 500 years ago!
Another of Life’s Little Mysteries solved.
Strolling through the Louvre, you stop at Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. Initially, she appears to be smiling; but as you move your gaze, the expression changes — not so happy anymore.
Among the top questions baffling art enthusiasts is the elusive grin. Did da Vinci intentionally create the ambiguous appearance?
Here’s her secret: Your first stare at the legendary canvas will most likely be directly at the sitter’s eyes. At this point, the part of your eye called the fovea that picks up fine details such as color will process the image of the eyes, while your imprecise peripheral vision will pick up the image of the lips. Because peripheral vision can’t distinguish fine details, it mistakes the shadows from the sitter’s cheekbones as a smile. When you return your gaze to the lips, your fovea sees the fine details of the lips. Voila! A smile turned upside down.
Using videogame controllers, an Android phone and custom-built wings, a Dutch engineer named Jarno Smeets has achieved birdlike flight.
Smeets flew like an albatross, the bird that inspired his winged-man invention, on March 18 at a park in The Hague.
“I have always dreamed about this. But after 8 months of hard work, research and testing it all payed off,” Smeets said on his YouTube page.
Smeets got the idea from sketches of a futuristic flying bicycle drawn by his grandfather, who spent much of his life designing the contraption but never actually built it.
Brian Stuckey spent 3 months drawing The Last Breakfast, where all your favorite breakfast mascots get together for one last breakfast.
Via Neatorama
Michigan artist Laura Bell is a little fuzzy about the details of her portrait -The Last Supper. That’s because she used fluffy dryer lint as the medium for her take on this famous work of art.
The massive masterpiece measures 14 feet long by 4 feet tall and has been acquired by Ripley’s Believe It or Not! It will eventually go on display at one of the company’s 32 odditoriums around the world.
Bell, an amateur artist from Roscommon, Michigan, was inspired by a laundry lint portrait she saw about 10 years ago at the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Wisconsin Dells Odditorium. In 2009, with some encouragement from her husband and a handful of lint from her dryer, she began creating The Last Supper for the ArtPrize 2010 competition in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Bell says she spent seven months saving the lint from her own dryer, but the problem was it was usually the same color. She tried laundromat lint, but it was always shades of gray and full of dog hair.
She ended up buying towels in the colors that she wanted to use in the portrait and washed and dried them separately to get lint with just the right tint. She estimates that she spent 700-800 hours just doing laundry to get the lint she needed for The Last Supper. She says it took another 200 hours to create the portrait. All the lint in her portrait is as it came out of the dryer and has not been colored or dyed.
She says she’s been thrilled by the response from people who have seen it, and the prospect of millions more seeing it via Ripley’s. “For some people, it’s a very spiritual experience,” said Bell. “Others are simply amazed at what someone could do with basic laundry lint.”
