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British Artist Paints Using RC Cars As His Brushes
Posted by John Mahoney at 2:00 AM on July 26, 2008
And you thought Etch-a-Sketch was tough. Ian Cook made this portrait of a Chevy Camaro by soaking the wheels of remote controlled cars in paint and then painstakingly driving them around on his canvas. He also uses full-size tires to fill in large blocks of colour, but still, the results are pretty amazing--if you've ever tried to ambush your unsuspecting cat with an RC you know how tricky precision manoeuvring can be. He's currently camped out at the London Motor Show doing portraits of cars (meta!). The work is especially admirable when you see it coming together in this video, stroke by radio-controlled stroke.
Instead of turning it into a 
Over at 
A German inventor has developed a paint called AR 1 that can hide a vehicle from radar, and most importantly, "all militarily relevant frequencies." How it works is unclear, though one test researcher proposes it's either by reflecting radar waves in a pattern so they cancel on another out, or by utilising microscopic magnets to absorb radar radiation. And no, it won't get you out of speeding tickets. 
A handy little gadget for those of you who prefer to buy second-hand cars rather than brand spanking new models that smell of plastic, Westfalia's paint-thickness tester will let you know if the vehicle has had a paint job—which can often mean it's been involved in a crash somewhere down the line. Here's how it works:
Designer Stefan Rechsteiner has come up with the Couleur sur l'Objet concept as a modern way of applying "urban art" to walls in hard-to-reach places. Equipped with a can of spray paint, the little tyke would be like a badly-behaved roomba with a vacuum-suction mod to keep it in place. With its accompanying design software, you could presumably use to it create large-scale murals on walls that would previously have required some serious (and conspicuous) ladder-work. Town councils everywhere had better invest in new graffiti-cleaning tech of their own— we suspect this won't remain a concept for too long. [
Hammerite's new Metalmaster system speeds up the whole process of painting metal stuff by spraying all sides of an object at the same time. You just clip the gun to the object with a wire, and electrostatic charging means that the thing you're painting actually attracts the paint particles. This means no brush marks, as well as an even, all-over coat. It only works for metal things, and you need to use specially formulated paint, but it sounds so cool that I want to try it out, and I don't even have anything to paint! Available soon in the UK, for around US$80 for the gun and US$30 for a 750ml paint tin. 
Dulux's new PaintPod system is a labour-saver for decorators, pumping paint directly to its roller at the right rate to avoid splodges. In one swoop it eliminates those drips-on-floor and fussing with cans that painting usually involves (at least, in our house). Best of all: fill it with water when you're done, and it cleans itself for you in just 10 minutes. Its one drawback is that it takes drop-in five liter paint packs, for the specially formulated paint—US$40 for white and US$60 for colour. Available April in the UK, for around US$135. [
If Nissan has anything to say about it, soon all soccer mums will be James Bonds, changing the colour of their car with the flip of a switch. That's because Nissan is developing a paramagnetic iron oxide paint polymer. Using an electrical charge, the arrangement of iron oxide crystals can be tweaked, adjusting the car's color. (It just so happens that metal-bodied cars make for excellent conductive surfaces.) But we're really excited over Nissan's surely bogus but juicy claim to have the technology on the market extremely soon, by 2010 if possible. Oh...except there's one catch. 
Chroming is an expensive industrial process that requires resources that are beyond most of our time, budgets and attention spans. But what if you could just spray a coat of chrome onto you favorite object? Now. You. Can.
