New Artist Crush Mondays: Salina Trevino

Wow! You all have some great artist crush suggestions. I'm set for a few months at least! Thanks to everyone who gave me their suggestions.

This week's artist crush is the younger sister of previous artist crush Stephanie Rabbit. Just so you know that I have no problems with nepotism I guess. Anyways! On with the crush!

Stay in Touch by Salina Trevino

Salina is one of the many artist crushes I have done that I know in real life. She is one of my younger brother's friends, and I once lent her a swimsuit (that is so going to be my "I knew them before they were big" story for her). She is also one of the artists who's career I am somewhat jealous of because it is what I thought I wanted when I started pursuing the arts (and very much no longer what I want now). It is interesting to note that recently I have been meeting and thinking of people who's academic and professional careers are real world examples of something I once day-dreamed about.

I first came into contact with Salina's work when I was thinking about applying to MCAD. She was already a student there and offered to share her admissions portfolio with me as I started working to get mine together. This was a bad move on my part, because after seeing her portfolio I had major doubts about my own artistic abilities. Particularly after seeing this environmental study.

Fast forward to graduation. Salina is now working as a comic artist in Minnesota. (Is it me or does the Great Lakes area seem to produce a lot of comic artists? It seems like there are a lot both in the US and Canada in the area.) She recently completed a Graphic Novel Artist in residency in Florida, with some amazing results.

It's been fun watching Salina develop artistically, unlike most of the artists I know, I see her infrequently so it's not like watching a steady day-to-day growth, but instead viewing marked changes every time I see her. Many of us who start at art school rely heavily on the influences of Japanese comics and cartoons in our style, which is true of both myself and Ms. Trevino. We ended up going through the crisis of style at a similar time, where our professors (in all their infinite wisdom) told us it was time to develop our own drawing styles. When she came home for Christmas one year, it was fun to discuss this loss and growth of artistic identity with her.

While the influence of the Japanese comics and cartoons I think is still very present in both of our styles, Salina has developed it into something that is uniquely her own. Seeing her work now, it is so very her. Whimsical, dreamy and beautiful, Salina Trevino's art never fails to make me imagine a world less ugly.

Links!
Salina Trevino's Blog: http://salinatrevino.blogspot.com/
devianART: http://moonie-dreamer.deviantart.com/
Portfolio Site: http://yourprofolio.com/salinatrevino

On another note: I'm planning to do some posts that I've had stewing for awhile this week, so be on the lookout for them! Tomorrow's post: Rave Reviews for The Doom Patrol

Random Word Generated Friday: Concrete

Random Word: Concrete

Every Friday I do a random word generated post, the second thing I do (the first being getting a random word) is see what Google has to say about the word. That’s how I get things like the movie “Special” or writing about how the physics of bubbles proves they’re lazy, not efficient.

When this week’s word came up “Concrete”, I expected to be writing about the adjective meanings of the word rather than the noun. However, my Google search turned up the Wikipedia page’s Concrete-noun entry and like most Wikipedia pages about subjects I would never voluntarily read, I read the whole entry and several of the linked pages. Wikipedia, more than anything else in my life, has contributed to my long-held title as a “Source of Random and Useless Information”.

It turns out concrete is really interesting.

Most people know that the Romans in the construction of their empire used concrete, and analysis of the pyramids indicate that the Egyptians also made use of the material.  They also believe that the recipe was lost for 13 centuries until John Smeaton pioneered the use of hydraulic lime in 1756, however the Canal du Midi was constructed using concrete in 1670 and there are concrete structures in Finland that date back to the 16th century.

Modern concrete structures have a higher tensile strength due to the fact that we reinforce it with steel while the Romans relied on the properties of the concrete alone.

It is being billed as a very green construction material (what isn’t green these days? Does that word even have any meaning anymore?) because it has a 100-year service life, which means less material is used in making repairs. It also uses a fraction of the land required to extract materials that lumber does and is often manufactured within 100 miles of the building site, cutting down on the carbon cost of transportation.

The niftiest thing I learned about concrete is that over its lifetime it absorbs CO2, absorbing roughly 57% of the CO2 used in its construction over concrete’s lifetime.

Concrete as a building material also uses thermal mass to help regulate indoor temperatures by reducing thermal swings throughout the year. It also has much fewer air leaks than a traditional wooden structure, which is a large contributor to heat loss in the winter as anyone who’s live in an old Midwest house can tell you.

It also saves on fire insurance, as concrete does not burn or release toxic gasses when heated. Nor is it often damaged by the water used to put out fires, making insurance payouts on a concrete building fire roughly 50% lower than on a wooden structure. The non-combustible nature of concrete also helps prevent fires from spreading to surrounding buildings.

In conclusion: Concrete is pretty nifty.

Read more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete

Concrete in Art: http://www.scottsdalepublicart.org/collection/pimafreeway.php
http://www.concretenetwork.com/concrete/concrete-statuary/design-ideas/porsche.html
http://www.amazingonly.com/amazing/largest-concrete-keyboard-in-the-world/

*Edit*
One more concrete link:
http://www.concretenetwork.com/ugc/reuse.html

It's Been a Weird Week.

Hey, sorry my posts have been so sporadic lately. I've been dealing with some craziness here in real life that's eating up the time I usually use to research my posts.

So in lieu of a New Artist Crush this week, I thought I would share a You Tube video that we should all study so we all can have traffic-jam ending super powers:



Also, if you have any suggestions for a New Artist Crush, or would like to be featured yourself, drop me an e-mail and a link to your work: mintyandee [at ]gmail [dot] com. I would greatly appreciate your help in getting myself back in the groove.

New Artist Crush Mondays: Micheal Whelan

Back into Hell/ Bat Out of Hell 2 cover art by Micheal Whelan

One of the things I've learned since starting this series of articles of artists I'm inspired by is that I've been collecting Micheal Whelan's work for a long time without even realizing it.

He's done an number of book and album covers that I have picked up more because I like the pictures than any interest in the content (this is largely due to the number of pulp-fantasy novels he's done covers for, there are only so many times you can read pulp writing of fantasy tropes). He's also done work for some much better written stuff as well, and well known musicians.

Link:
http://www.michaelwhelan.com/

You know you're an Artist when...

You know you're an artist when:

You keep your table salt with your watercolors

All your clothes, from your grubbies to your Sunday best, are paint clothes

You don't even know how paint got on your Sunday clothes

2/3 of your household budget goes to art supplies

Given a choice between groceries and art supplies, you pick art supplies every time

Same can be said about medication

You're a vegan. For budget reasons.

When asked about your work, you most often say "I like the image to speak for itself." This is because you're more comfortable expressing yourself visually rather than verbally.

You have 17 pens you love an care for like children. And if someone ever wanted to use them to write a cheque, you would end them.

You love color, but most of your wardrobe is black

Random Word Generated Friday: Special

Random Word: Special

I watch a lot of horror movies, which means I end up watching a lot of indie (and in this case, foreign, but there's a large cross over in audience) movies because there are really only two types of indie film when you get down to it: Horror and Drama.

Watching the previews for one of the many horror movies (I think it was "Let the Right One In") I came across the preview for "Special". My brother and I thought it looked like the kind of move that was right up our ally. It is, a darkly humorous look on everyday life as viewed through a man going through a drug induced psychotic episode.

It's one of those movies that makes you laugh, then you stop because you realize what happened is far more sad than it is funny.

"Special" reminds you that the world in your head is, and always will be, better than reality.

Correction

I must apologize for yesterdays post and how it was taken (particularly by my loved ones). Yes, events in my life right now have been chaotic and hectic and generally not good.

That is not to say I am not doing well. I am happy and healthy, a little unmotivated because too much free time tends to do that to me. When there are too many "laters" and not enough "deadlines" I get really unfocused.

I wrote about yesterday in third person to try and make light of the situation, however after hearing people's reactions to it, it was a failed attempt. I also thought it might sound a little less whiny if I wrote about what happened yesterday in third person. It was also kind of a fun writing experiment, I felt like a character in a nior story.

In short, thank you for your concern and I'm sorry I worried you.

The Third Person

She sat alone in the dark, hands folded in front of her staring off into space, contemplating the next move. Today had pretty much been a wash at work, the question was if it was worth salvaging. This would make two wasted days in a row...Yesterday had played like a bad country song so she had been looking forward to starting over today.

It had begun promising enough, she had realized halfway through her first cuppa that she wasn't going to be late as the gallery was opening at noon this week instead of eleven. That was about the only thing that had gone right today. Arriving at work landed her in the middle of a storm that had brewed over the weekend. One of the artists had called it quites and there had been a hurricane of activity trying to fill the hole they left. Being the first one back left her to deal with the raw ends of things, people wanted answers, they wanted to know what was going on. Unfortunately, the people who wanted these things were the ones who were supposed to know in the first place and no one wanted to step up and wing it. Today had been spent diverting calls and e-mails, her had spent her time at work trying to not do things that were not her job. This had left little actual time for the things that were.

The stress of the day had left her craving junk food and she had stopped for a burger and fries on the way home. She knew it was stress eating, but after dodging bullets all day she didn't have the stamina left to tell herself no. The guy behind the counter must have been having a better day. He had snuck an extra meat patty on her bun, a nice gesture but she probably shouldn't have eaten it. The burger sat in her stomach like some sort of malevolent stone, she was going to regret it tomorrow. She was regretting it right now.

Shifting in her seat, the springs creaked and she slowly sipped what was left of her sugar-free caffeine-free why-bother soda. She knew she needed to move, to do something. Action begets action. She had been stopped for too long. Stopped writing, stopped image making, stopped cleaning, stopped going out. All this stopping had left her doing nothing. Nothing but sitting in the dark wondering what she should do.

If she could just do one thing, one thing that would get everything else going again. The straw in the soda sounded like a distressed gosling as she absentmindedly sucked up the last of the liquid. She reached for her laptop and punched the button to turn it on. The button made a satisfying snapping sound, like popping a particularly good chewing gum bubble with your tongue, and the cheery cord greeted her as her hard-drive whined into life.

She opened up the page to her blog and started typing. Maybe today wasn't a total wash after all.