'Made In China' Is A Soldier's Portrait Created With Over 5500 Plastic Toy Soldiers.

Artist Joe Black's Made In China was created using using more than 5,500 toy soldiers. The portrait is of a Chinese soldier boy taken by well-known photojournalist Robert Capa and appeared on the May, 1938 cover of LIFE magazine. The colored, molded plastic toy soldiers used in the project were manufactured in China, hence the title “Made in China”.



A closer look.
The portrait in full:

and as it appears when zooming in further and further:





Robert Capa's original photo:


And as it appeared on the cover of LIFE magazine in 1938:


Made In China:


Joe Black

New York People, Places and Things Made With Cut Up Metro Cards by Nina Boesch.

As the name suggests, these "Metro Card Collages" are made from cut up pieces of used and expired MetroCards® (MTA cards or New York City subway tickets).


above: A New York Metro Card in use

Artist Nina Boesch uses the front of MetroCards® for color collages (yellow, orange, blue and black), and the back for grayscale collages (black and white). All artworks are one-of-a-kind and vary in size ranging from 5"x7" to 40"x30".




The collages depict anything from landmarks and objects to portraits and typography, and are almost always New York related.










While Nina tries to offer originals for sale on her website, Nina creates a lot of commissioned pieces and has little time to work on her own portfolio of collages. So if you are interested in a collage, please don't hesitate to contact Nina and ask her to create one for you!



About The Artist
Nina Boesch is a New York based interaction designer and artist from Germany. She graduated with honors from Rhode Island School of Design and is now a senior interaction designer at Ralph Appelbaum Associates, an exhibit design firm located in the financial district of Manhattan. Nina's work has been honored by the Art Directors Club, the Type Directors Club, Adobe, AIGA and others and has been featured in various publications such as the NY Times and HOW Magazine.

Nina has been creating collages from MetroCards® for over 10 years. Initially just for friends and family, and recently for a broader audience with exhibits in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Laguna Beach, California. While Nina sells her collages in New York only, some of her pieces have found new homes as far away as Scotland, France and Australia.

Nina Boesch

all images and info courtesy of Nina Boesch.

Planet Of The Apes Portraits Created With 57,000 Stainless Steel Ball Bearings.

Artist Joe Black doesn't monkey around when it comes to interesting mosaics. Known for his assemblages crafted from vintage badges, Lego bricks and plastic toy soldiers, he's used ball bearings to recreate two portraits of Cornelius and one of Zira, the monkeys played by Roddy McDowell and Kim Hunter, respectively from Escape From Planet Of The Apes the third movie in the original movie franchise.





Mr. Black used 57,000 stainless steel ball bearings on black rubber mounted on aluminum to create his series of three portraits title "We Never Left":



Joe Black

Dream Big - Martin Luther King Jr. Mosaic Made With 4,242 Rubik's Cubes.

In honor of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Birthday, I'd like to share with you this mosaic montage of MLK created with solved rubik's cubes.




Created by Pete Fecteau, shown below in front of his work, the mural is titled Dream Big.



The mosaic is made of 4,242 officially licensed Rubik’s Cubes and measures just shy of 20 feet wide.

details:




above detail photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/bitsorf/

Pete at work on the mural:




Technical info:
It measures 19′ x 8’6″ x 2.25″ (5.8m x 2.6m x 5.7cm ). It weighs roughly 1000 pounds (454kg). Each cube has been “reversed solved” or twisted so that one of the faces maps it’s nine stickers into the total image, 38,178 stickers total.

The construction process took a little over 40 hours and the final installation to about five and a half hours with 6 volunteers helping. The cubes were rented through the You Can Do The Cube organization. The mosaic was on display during the 2010 ArtPrize competition in Grand Rapids, Michigan USA from September 22nd to October 10th. There were roughly 30,000 people who came to view the mosaic during that time. “Dream Big” placed in the top 50 out of 1,700+ entries. The mosaic was left intact for a month after the competition in an attempt to sell it. The pending sale did not materialize and the mosaic was disassembled in late November and the cubes were shipped back to their originating points.

Costs:
The cubes themselves were rented for roughly $8,000 however the total cost of the project was approximately $9,000. A private donation was made for $4,000 and fundraising through special events and Kickstarter.com helped to raise the remainder.



About the Artist:
Pete Fecteau is a designer by day. He attended Kendall College of Art & Design in Grand Rapids, Michigan and attained his BFA in Digital Media Design in 2007. His design portfolio can be seen at http://buttonpresser.com. He mainly works as an interactive designer and helps build online and mobile experiences. Pete also loves illustration, painting, and sculpture and finds time between work to create more traditional art aside for his Rubik’s Cube mosaics. His wife Caitlin and he were married on August 27th, 2011 in Brighton, Michigan they both relocated to San Francisco in January, 2011 were Pete had been awarded a fellowship with Code for America.

images courtesy of Pete Fecteau and additional photos courtesy of Uthink media