Source Colossal   In the winning video of Nikon’s Small World in Motion competition, Dr. Ning Xu captures the abnormal beating of airway cilia from a child with Primary Ciliary Dyskinesia (PCD)—a genetic disorder affecting respiratory function. “When people watch cilia beating, they immediately understand that something beautiful and important is happening inside us,” says the…

Source Design You Trust  Reza Afshar is an Iranian freelance environment concept artist and illustrator whose detailed digital paintings build vast science-fiction and fantasy worlds. He has worked professionally in video games, film, animation, and trading-card games since 2012, and is described in recent profiles as based in Istanbul. Afshar’s work centers on places rather…

Source Design You Trust  Jesse Manfre is a self-taught graphic designer and illustrator creating under the name J.WAV Design. His work combines bold graphic abstraction, surreal atmosphere, music-world visual language, and a distinctly eerie, dreamlike sense of place. J.WAV’s visual world sits somewhere between a late-night radio transmission, a vintage arcade screen, an abandoned beach…

Source Design You Trust  Sebas Velasco, a Spanish painter and muralist whose expressive oil paintings turn the ordinary streets, apartment blocks, aging cars, and anonymous residents of the Balkans into cinematic studies of memory, place, and time. Born in Burgos in 1988, he began in graffiti and later developed a practice spanning studio painting, illustration,…

Source Colossal   Vibrant, amorphous shapes intersect with squiggles and occasional geometric lettering in the murals of Chicago-based artist Emmy Star Brown. She describes her studio practice as a space where her inner child emerges, paring down her expressions to formal qualities of line, shape, and contrast. In her large-scale installations on urban buildings, which draw…

Source Colossal   It’s all things avian at Bird Photographer of the Year, the world’s largest contest dedicated to images of feathered creatures planet-wide. This year, the program welcomed more than 24,000 entries from photographers around the globe, capturing diving penguins, urban denizens, mating rituals, dramatic flights, and more. Highlighting birds of all kinds, the competition…

Source Artsy Shark  Featured artist Nancy Smyth creates delightfully whimsical pastel portraits of pets and wildlife. Enjoy her portfolio. The post Featured Artist Nancy Smyth appeared first on Artsy Shark.

Source Colossal   In our era of digital screens and virtually endless images and videos, it’s a challenge to imagine the time before photography existed. Two centuries ago this year, French inventor Nicéphore Niépce successfully captured the first known permanent image. He called his new process héliographie, or “sun writing,” employing light-sensitive bitumen dissolved in lavender oil,…