Written by Mikail Haroon (@mvkail) / Curated by the Welcome team
This is our seventh iteration of Monthly Discoveries, our recurring series where the Welcome team rounds up and shares what we discovered on the internet this past month.
Paid subscribers can revisit previous six editions here, here, here, here, here, and here.
August’s eclectic assortment includes a rare photograph, a highly customized firearm, a Minecraft experiment, incredible tattoos and short films, standout artworks, and more.
Happy discovering.
3-D Printed Miku animation by Sorao Sakimura
Sorao Sakimura is a Japanese artist whose devotion to anime informs his practice that synthesizes animation, live action, and 3DCGI. For the music video for Hatsune Miku and Saku’s track “Pure,” Sakumuru 3D printed Miku as a physical object, fabricating 332 distinct poses from 1,027 printed components, and then capturing the figure across urban settings in 4,352 stop-motion frames.
ear’s unconventional tour venues
ear are embarking on their U.S. tour this September, notably routing the tour through some of the country’s most unconventional venues. The itinerary includes a New York heliport where a man famously hijacked a helicopter in 1974, a converted armory, and a handful of churches and community art centers.
Sonic Note One by @dieslo999 and @xiaji2tsunagi2
This custom unconventional firearm is a collaboration between @dieslo999 and @xiaji2tsunagi2. Both are underground designers, with dieslo formerly focusing mostly on garments, and xiaji2 mostly focusing on physical objects. The product shoot for the gun was also great, with models styled as figurines on round bases holding the weapon.
Dolly Parton photo by Bryan Fuller
Bryan Fuller, creator of the television series Hannibal, shared this exceptional photograph of Dolly Parton performing at the Hollywood Bowl in 2016. A strange camera artifact caused Dolly’s silhouette to clip into pure white light, almost as though she were illuminated from within. Fuller described the accident as something that “perfectly captured her essence”.
Tattoos by Kim Daeo
Seoul based tattoo artist Kim Daeo conjures tattoos that blur the lines between common bruises and watercolor freeform art. His practice is defined by an avoidance of pre-planned palettes, instead favoring an intuitive process of mixing and layering colorful inks and water directly into the cartridge. This naturalistic approach produces spontaneous, blended creations.
T-shirts by Shunichi Iwata
Drawing from Utagawa Hiroshige’s famous ukiyo-e landscape series The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō, Japanese artist Shunichi Iwata recreated all 55 woodblock prints using monotype printmaking on a collection of t-shirts. Ukiyo-e, which translates to “pictures of the floating world,” was a popular Japanese art form during the Edo period. Traditional ukiyo-e woodblock printing was an early method of mass-producing fine art and later had a major influence on European modern artists such as Monet and Van Gogh in the 19th century.
Stopmotion Train video by Aarica North
Artist Aarica North shared a frame-by-frame stop-motion video this month of a figurine pirouetting and dancing through the course of a long train journey. Filmed over 15 hours, the piece beautifully captures the passage of time. Its opening sequence was directly inspired by St. Petersburg dancer Vlada Chepkasowa, while the remainder was improvised intuitively. Pay close attention to the minute details, particularly the expressiveness conveyed through the figurine’s shifting hand positions.
Excoriation by Tseng Chien-Ying
Chien-Ying’s Excoriation uses ink, color, and mineral pigments on paper to render a visceral, highly figurative depiction of a pair of very anxious hands. Many commenters felt deeply seen by the work, which depicts excoriation disorder, a psychiatric condition characterized by repetitive skin picking that results in tissue damage and emotional distress.
Furry Guntube Content by @dawgshot_official
@dawgshot_official, or Cooper Harley, is a self proclaimed Furry GunTuber whose most common form of content is a lateral shot of him in a fur suit firing some exotic or souped-up firearm. The breadth of his arsenal is impressive, and he’s quite knowledgeable. One is also naturally interested in the seeming ideological incongruity of his two hobbies.
Flex Decks by Hurt Abdu
Hurt Abdu is a conceptual product designer, and a Monthly Discoveries favorite. Here, he continues his practice of transforming the disposable materials into objects of cultural fetish, this time with a series of Tech Deck-inspired BIC lighter cases equipped with functional wheels. They come in five iterations: Cat, Towlie, Bitch, Raf, and Gaara. On Instagram, he previewed versions referencing cultural cornerstones such as Supreme, YVL, Asspizza, Che, Fakemink, Mowola, and many others. Conveniently, wired earbuds will wrap around the wheels. Also check out his glock stress toys, which he dropped in June.
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