Sets and scenes from the Harry Potter series are reimagined as miniature cardboard models by architecture students from the Melbourne School of Design. Created as part of a summer intensive called Smoke and Mirrors, the project brings Gringotts, The Burrow, the Shrieking Shack, the Chamber of Secrets and other key buildings and interiors to life, each one appropriately a little off-kilter, its details rendered in the monochrome of the material.

Teams of students selected characters from J.K. Rowling’s series of books and researched their choice in all available source materials, including the movies and the author’s interactive website, Pottermore. The idea is that this character is their “client,” and rather than reproducing associated locations according to how they were seen on film, the students had to reinterpret them in a fun way, as if the client had commissioned the design based on a wacky Pinterest board.

Led by architect Jannette Le and tutors Michael Mack, Mond Qu and Denis Vieghe, the students used 1mm and .6mm cardboard along with tracing paper for windows, LED lights and motors connected to Arduinos to create their models. They only had 11 days to design, build and fabricate the models using hand modeling, digital fabrication techniques and laser cutting. They used in-camera effects like forced perspective to give each set its cinematic feel.

Born in Karbala during the Iraq-Iran War while his father was imprisioned by Saddam Hussein as a dissident, Ali Alamedy turned to books as a means of escape, wishing he could transport himself into the fictional settings between the pages. Later, as an adult, he began to bring those scenes to life – along with places from his own memories, and recreations of places that only exist in his imagination – in finely rendered miniature. In Arabic, the word ‘miniature’ translates to ‘a small painting on paper,’ so he didn’t find out about the existence of dioramas outside of his own art until he started searching for these words in English on the internet.

“When a budding artist has a burning desire to create a vignette, they don’t let the lack of building materials stop them,” he writes on Bored Panda. “This was exactly what happened to me when I started to make miniatures. I used any resource I could scrounge: aluminum foil, paper clips, plastic rods, foam board, coffee for weathering, anything that held possibilities.”

He began posting his work on Facebook, attracting fans all over the world, and his work has grown more and more meticulous. His largest project to date is the 1900s photo studio he built in honor of an old photographer. He spent 9 months building more than 100 miniature objects from scratch based on historical photographs of real studios, which, he notes, was a particular challenge due to the fact that all the photos were in black and white.

“The hardest part was how to recall the spirit of such a place in a small scale,” he says.

The New York Times gets a deeper look into both Alamedy’s work and his past in a new video, and you can see lots more detailed images on his Instagram.

Are plain old LEGO bricks gonna be ruined for you forever now that you’ve seen this flexible, cuttable, reusable LEGO-compatible adhesive tape? ‘Nimuno Loops’ is a crowdfunded creation that comes in rolls so you can stick it onto all kinds of surfaces – including verticals and diagonals – and then use them as a base for your creations. As shown in the product’s promo video, that means you can build gravity-defying structures and cities that practically double back on themselves in the style of the movie Inception.

Devised by South Africa-based designers Anine Kirsten and Max Basler, Nimuno Loops starts at just $11 plus shipping for two rolls or $50 for ten rolls, and it’s available in red, blue, gray and green. Not only can you cut it to size, you can create custom shapes with it You can even stick it to your shoes, bikes, water bottles, strollers and anywhere else that might help you distract your kids for two seconds while you try to brush their hair or check your email.

People are clearly excited about this innovation, obliterating the original Indiegogo funding goal of $8,000 to raise $743,000 and counting with a full month left on the campaign. It’ll be interesting to see what LEGO artists do with this stuff. How could Nimuno Loops revolutionize your own LEGO creations?

Assemble a miniature model of the iconic Volkswagen Beetle with a new kit from LEGO, reproducing the car in minuscule detail from a surfboard-holding roof rack to a four-cylinder air-cooled engine and fuel tank. The VW Beetle Creator Expert Kit comes with 1,167 pieces including the car’s characteristic round headlights, curved fenders and a body painted vivid sky blue.

On the outside, you’ll find front and rear bumpers, license plates, flat windshields, exhaust pipes, side mirrors and virtually every other feature you’d see on a full-sized version of the car, down to a couple logos and the kind of bumper stickers you see on surfers’ cars in Malibu. Open the front lid to reveal the spare tire, or the rear to access the engine bay.

The beige interior forward-tilting seats, a dashboard and steering wheels, and if you tilt the rear seat forward, you’ll find a storage space hiding a fabric beach towel. The top of the car can also be removed to access the inside, and included accessories like a cooler and surfboard can be mounted to the roof rack.

The kit is available for $99.99 USD on July 14th for Lego VIPs, with everybody else getting access on August 1st. This release comes on the heels of a similarly detailed Porsche ‘911 GT3 RS’, a Technic kit of 1:8 scale with 2,704 pieces costing three times as much. That kit is still sold out, so LEGO fans who want the Beetle kit for their own collections will have to act fast.

It only took 100 manila folders, 50 X-Acto blades, a bottle of glue and 1,000 hours of time to create one 1:60 scale model of a Singapore Airlines A380 airplane featuring fully operational sliding doors and properly folding landing gear. This isn’t Luca Iaconi-Stewart’s first model airplane – the 23-year-old, New York-based designer is known for a series of paper planes with amazingly complex parts.

The artist first started building his own miniatures after finding a highly detailed diagram of an Air India 777-300ER online. He replicated the forms in Adobe Illustrator, printed them onto manila and sliced them out with his X-Acto knife. It took Iaconi-Stewart five years to complete a scale model of a Boeing 777, with an entire summer dedicated to perfecting the seats. While economy seats can be finished in a mere 20 minutes, first class seats take eight hours each.

The new Singapore Airlines model consists of 3,000 pieces of folded and cut paper, the smallest being a 2.5 x 1mm pin used to hold each business class seat together. The artist notes that manila folders are surprisingly strong when engineered correctly.

Considering that Iaconi-Stewart spent a month designing the engines and fourth months assembling them, perhaps it’s no surprise that his classes at Vassar soon started getting in the way, and he ultimately dropped out to focus on full time model-making. He’s now known as the world’s best paper airplane maker. You can follow his creations on Flickr.