Don your favorite bathrobe, cream that coffee, and get comfortable with this week’s SolidSmack Weekend Reader. The Weekend Reader features a handful of the most interesting articles featured on the ‘Smack over the past week ranging from tips and tricks to inspirational designs, processes, and more. So lay back, relax and take a load off while reading the top ten stories on SolidSmack this past week. Oh and uh…don’t forget to shed some much-needed sunlight on your face, too. This Polymer Skateboard Deck Pops Higher and Lasts a Lifetime Though skateboarders have been blessed with a variety of upgrades to the traditional skateboard (such as a smart electric skateboard with…

The bottles opened on their own. Not like you might think. The caps peeled themselves off slowly, cracking and grinding, the bottle content overflowing. Then the veins. Oh, the veins. Barely visible through the glass at first, but pressing, spreading up and out, forming the flapping tentacles of these links. Elijah McNeal – Oh, how I love this style. Those lines. And the detail! Loads of it in mechs, ships, weapons and more. Interview here. Kunstglaser – The life of a glasscutter, not as an artist, but as a outlet for artists to explore their work in the medium of glass. Isle of Dogs – Could this be the new…

Stella, a “Polyhedron Navigator” provides a way to very quickly view and generate almost any type of 3D polyhedron you can imagine. What’s a 3D polyhedron? While you may bump into them in real life constantly, it’s a geometric concept that encompasses a broad set of possible objects. Wikipedia defines them as: In geometry, a polyhedron (plural polyhedra or polyhedrons) is a solid in three dimensions with flat polygonal faces, straight edges and sharp corners or vertices. The word polyhedron comes from the Classical Greek πολύεδρον, as poly- (stem of πολύς, “many”) + -hedron (form of ἕδρα, “base” or “seat”). A convex polyhedron is the convex hull of finitely many points, not…

Even with the numerous advantages of mechanical pencils, there are still those who love the old school feel of wooden pencils. And Andrew Pyza’s love for traditional pencils spurred him to create Pencil+, a pencil holder which extends the life of your pencil while providing a built-in sharpener. The origin story of the Pencil+ is too funny not to share. “[While] drawing in my sketchbook, my pencil breaks. I honestly looked for a sharpener for twenty minutes, I could not find one, even though I knew I owned three. So I resorted to sharpening my pencil with a knife. By that point though, I had lost my focus on what…

With over two decades of experience teaching how to design, draw, and render at the highest college level, concept designer Scott Robertson knows a thing or two about what it takes to make concepts ‘stick’ for his students. And as one of the most widely-recognized design sketching masters, he’s proven these concepts in his own practice through and through. In How to Draw: drawing and sketching objects and environments from your imagination, the Art Center educator consolidates years of design sketching knowledge—from thumbnail sketches and perspective grids to shaded renderings—into a digestible self-study program that can take anybody’s sketching ability to the next level. Frankly, if you’re even remotely serious…

Code. You don’t have to be a computer science hotshot to take the deep dive—heck, some people are up and running with their first project in a matter of weeks. But knowing where and how to enter can be half of the battle. The Learn How to Code 2017 Bundle is the perfect entry point and includes over 156 Hours of premium coding instruction, from Python to Ruby & everything in between. Consisting of ten courses in total, the ‘Pay What You Want’ bundle covers not just specific code languages, but also how and why you may decide to choose one over another depending on the project at hand. Pay…