What I Like About …

Wandering about through my RSS feeds of websites of cool stuff — an addiction that started with the great Boing Boing years ago — I hit on two feeds in a row that had artists using nails to make their art. It comes out something like those metal peg toys that can take impressions of your hand or face, and are pretty awesome.

But it’s so much more than this.  It’s a black and white form of sculptured pointillism, with the pointy parts on the inside.

Chen Chun-Hao is a Japanese artist who uses a nail gun to recreate famous paintings.  He gets texture by changing the length and size of the nails he uses, which must take an amazing amount of planning ahead.  The picture Neatorama has, complete with an audience not touching, looks like a grayscale painting instead of a three dimensional sculpture.

Chen Chun-Hao creates using a new kind of pointillism.

Immediately after I moved over to Gizmodo and saw Kumi Yamashita’s amazing use of nails with thread to make faces that could be an Instagram pic, just slightly distorted from realism.   But when you come up close and see how the details it’s actually kind of creepy, like something out of a horror movie. A kind of acupuncture torture.

Kumi Yamashita creates wonderful texture by doubling up on the thread for darker shades, and spacing nails for the lighter.