The Beady Eyed Craftster is our (mostly) weekly round-up of shiny (mostly) art, design, craft and illus­tra­tion related links from across the internets.

This week: wooden topo­graphy, poly­gons, anim­ated archi­tec­ture, pho­to­graphy and insults.

• Below the Boat make won­der­ful depth maps of lakes and coast­lines from lay­ers of laser cut wood. I’m a big fan of maps in gen­eral, and the three dimen­sional nature of these works is really appeal­ing. [Via Colossal]

• Staying with wooden con­tours, check out these sculp­tures made from sand­ing hun­dreds of pen­cils. Artist Jessica Drenk starts by glu­ing lots and lots of pen­cils together, then takes a sander to them. The res­ults are really cool. [Again via Colossal]

• Also sculp­tural, but far smal­ler, are these geo­met­ric­ally styled salt and pep­per shakers from Von Tundra. They look like rock form­a­tions or the maybe the fort­ress of a bad guy from an 80’s fantasy movie! [Via DesignSponge]

• Video time: The ABC of Architects is an anim­ated whistle-stop tour through an A-Z of fam­ous archi­tects and their best known build­ings. It’s a fun little video whether your an archi­tec­ture fan or not.

• Photography now: the win­ners for National Geographic’s 2012 Photography com­pet­i­tion have been announced. There is some abso­lutely stun­ning stuff. If you’ve got a couple of hours to spare there are worst things you could do than look through all the sub­mis­sions, oth­er­wise just browse through the edit­ors picks.

• And finally: insults. Illustrator Mr. Bingo sends pro­fan­ity laden illus­trated post­card insults to ran­domly selec­ted Twitter volun­teers.  It sounds a bit mean-spirited (if con­sen­su­ally so), but the insults are so dead­pan that the res­ults are kind of charm­ing in an odd sort of way. [Via Fast Co. Design]