What Santa Rides During Off Season - Video

Santa Car Mark III. Actually the full name is Lincoln Santa Is Coming To Towne Car and was created by Brian Taylor who also created the Metro Santa Car and Machete Betties Roller Derby Art Car. I just came across this video of him riding his latest Santa Car that gives you a glimpse into what its like riding an art car around town. I know its Summer time but I needed cheering up today so Brian's Santa Art Car is just what the doctor ordered.

Mercedes Truck Painted with Russel Crow - Finland Truck Show 2010

These art trucks were seen at the Finald Truck show recently which sorta reminds of the Japanese Decotora Trucks I wrote about some time ago. I love this first one, a Mercedes tanker truck covered with the face of Russel Crow actor of my favorite movie Gladiator. These truck drivers go all out with leather seat, LED lights, lots of chrome and of course all out airbrushed works of art that completely cover their trucks.

Russel Crow Truck

Worm Harvesting Using a Car

In my opinion there are much better ways to harvest worms and growing them on a car is not one of them. This is what happens when you leave your car unattended under a tree for some time. Worms, Worms and MORE Worms, maybe he is harvesting worms for fish baitvia

ELBOW ROOM

There are artists who make great big pictures of great big subjects:


Albert Bierstadt's "A Storm in the Rocky Mountains" is 12 feet wide.

And there are artists who make tiny little pictures of tiny little subjects:


A page from a gothic illuminated manuscript (circa 1494) at Peacay's superb Bibliodyssey blog.

But it takes a special talent to make tiny little pictures of great big subjects.

Observe how some of the masters of the graphic arts-- Mort Drucker, Leonard Starr and Noel Sickles-- squeeze a feeling of great space and weight into pictures that are not much larger than a postage stamp.


Here you see the difference between digital compression by a computer and artistic compression by a true draftsman. Mort Drucker had a mere 3 inches to convey a school bus crossing a yawning chasm. His radical foreshortening of the bus and his condensed treatment of the bridge preserve our sense of perilous height despite the miniature scale.



Look at the wonderful clarity in this small drawing. Drucker conveys the great distance between the two planes, and the even greater distance to the ground below. His description of the ground contains just enough information to explain our altitude, but not enough to confuse or distract us from the men performing various complex functions. This is an amazing example of visual problem solving.




In Leonard Starr's On Stage, the artist convincingly portrays a huge snowball rolling off the side of a cliff.


In just a few inches of space, Noel Sickles gives us the feeling of immense heft of a battleship listing.

All representational artists create the illusion of three dimensions on a two dimensional plane. However, it requires an excellent draftsman to convey great scale under such extreme limitations.

These are artists who have slipped the bonds of space limitations. You get the feeling they have the technical ability to implement anything their mind can conceive.

Art Car Book by Harrod Blank - A must have for your coffee table

What got me started in the journey with my own art car the Mercedes Pens and now with Art Car Central was a book called "Art Cars: the cars, the artists, the obsession, the craft" by Harrod Blank.I walked into the library one day and was browsing the car section when I came upon the most amazing book I had seen in a long time. In it was filled with images of people who had decorated their cars with paint, glued objects, car modifications and everything in between. Many of those cars have since been featured on Art Car Central like the Fruit Mobile, Hoop Car, Camera Van, The Phone Car, The Button King, Glass Quilt, and many more from Harrods Blanks Art Car Agency.

If you have ever seen an art car around town and wondered why would someone do that to their car. Or where curious about the type of person who would drive an art car, then this book is definitely for you. I now have my own copy and it never gets old. You never now, you might end up making your own art car and one day it could end featured here on Art Car Central, I look forward to your art car submission.

CarPuchino - Car Powered by Coffee Grinds

For those of us who plan their trips from coffee shop to coffee shop finally a better solution. A car that is powered entirely by roasted coffee grinds is now a reality, I can feel my hear raising as I write this.

The car is called the Car-Puchino and was created using a 1988 Volkswagen Scirocco that sorta looks like a time traveling DeLorean from back to the future. It was created by a team from BBC1 science program Bang Goes The Theory and driven 210 miles between Manchester and London.

It does about 60mph and uses about 2.2 lbs of coffee for every three miles or 56 espressos per mile (56epm). Its going to take 154 lbs so price depends on the type of coffee you use:

1. Premium = Kona Coffee = $30/lb = $4,620
2. Plus = Starbucks Breakfast Blend = $10/lb = $1,154
3. Regular = Folgers = $5/lb = $770

A trip like this is a bit of grind since you have to stop every 40 miles to add coffee grinds, every 60 to clean out the coffee filters. Even with a top speed of maybe 60 mph a relatively short trip could take all day to complete. On the plus side, there will be plenty of coffee and bathroom breaks.

via

We cannot go back

Maybe art, maybe some art, maybe this art, maybe some of this art, serves turning the absence opaque, that is, making it at once palpable and impenetrable, so we cannot go back, so we are stuck in the appreciation of this strange, utopic now, and any attempt to overcome it, to look for the actual empty space, meets the opacity of an object, an image, a substitute, substitute not of a reality, but of what ceased to be, of the void that hence remains beyond us, happily or unhappily, hard to say, replaced by the fundamentally meager and helplessly sublime moment of a hesitant, aesthetic, experience, too private to be credible, too credible to be intimate, and yet ours, because we want it to be, because we claim it as such, because we know we inherited it from the silence that came before.

The picture - entitled (...) - is by Marek Wykowski. (Found by Gocha)