I’m turning *ahem* 50 on October 2nd, and I just made hotel reservations for a birthday road trip to Santa Fe—somewhere I keep trying to visit, but haven’t yet. In the spirit of the celebration to come, here’s a birthday cake generator from ImageChef that lets you write your sentiment and choose numbered candles. Probably not an art tool, but a good toy to bookmark for Facebook friend birthdays.

Oh, how I love the brilliant robots made by New York artist David Lipson!

I follow the Dallas Museum of Art (as well as several other local museums) on Twitter, and yesterday, they tweeted a link to The Mourners, an exhibit that will be arriving here in Dallas in October. I love this site, because you can few each statue from several angles, and rotate them 360 degrees. Also, I just started working on a book for a dark round robin, and these creepy little guys fit right into that world.

If you aren’t following your local museums on Facebook or Twitter, you might be missing out. Not only do you hear about what’s coming, special discount days and events, but if your museum’s web staff is very clever, you may end up getting all sorts of nifty art links from them.

I like the simple graphic layouts in this book by Wisconsin artist Jesse Draxler:

Someone sent me a link to SendSomething.net, a site where you can sign up to send someone mail art items through the mail, and have things sent to you. If any of you have participated in PostCrossing or the old PostcardX site that inspired it, SendSomething is similar—you click to request a random address, and in turn, your address is put into the random rotation.

There’s no guarantee you’ll ever hear from the person to whom you’ve sent things, or that you’ll ever receive something, but that’s not the point. The point is to send some goodness to a stranger, just because you feel like it.

Go. Send. Be happy.

Another large collection of artist trading cards:

I spent endless time playing with the Faces & Places generator at the National Gallery of Art web site. Pieces and parts from various menus can be combined to create your own folk art portrait (Faces) or landscape (Places). Be sure to animate your portrait when you’re finished for an extra giggle!

Mail art refers to any art that is designed to travel through the mail, including faux postage, envelope art and postcards.

Learn more about mail art in this recently updated article, What On Earth Is Mail Art?

Here’s an enormous set of artist trading cards made by Arizona artist Mary Watkin:

I like these books from London artist Cathy Cullis. Clean and simple, but so visually interesting!