(Portland, ME)
For today’s Friday Favorite I bring you art on the go, or more accurately, the Art-o-Mat! I stumbled across this site the other day and thought it was extremely fun.
(Winston-Salem, NC)
Category Archives: Art/Photography
Friday Favorites: Greg Spalenka
(Art Heart. All images copyright Greg Spalenka)
Spectrum 12
(Cover art by David Bowers)
Every year around November, Underwood Books releases the newest incarnation of their line of Spectrum art books. 2005 ended with the release of Spectrum 12. Every February Kathie and Arnie Fenner bring together a group of A-list artistic talent who converge on Kansas City to review submissions from artists well-known and unknown in the categories of Books, Comics, Advertising, Industrial, and Unpublished. Anyone can submit work for judging. The chosen ones are given the honor of having their work featured in the next Spectrum book. I may be biased because of the Kansas City connection but the Fenner’s and the folks at Underwood books put out the best quality art books I have seen. Their trio of books covering the life and art of Frank Frazetta are beyond compare and each year’s Spectrum title is better than the one before. The books are released in hardback and soft cover simultaneously and the quality of each is unmatched.
Friday Favorites: Chris Appelhans
(Cover to Flight Volume 2)
This second Friday of June finds me celebrating my continued post-6/6/06 existence with the art of Chris Appelhans. And seeing how today is the opening day for Pixar’s latest offering, Cars, it seems oddly apropos to feature the art of a Pixar employee. And believe me folks, it wasn’t planned this way…I picked Chris as today’s artist and then found out about the Pixar connection. That’s just the kind of serendipitous cowinkiedink you’ve come to expect here at Stainless Steel Droppings!
(Leaf Box)
Chris Appelhans did character design for the upcoming movie Monster House and word has it that he has done some of the same for Neil Gaiman’s story Coraline that is being brought to the big screen by director Henry Selick.
(Trent)
Friday Favorites: Kevin Dart
(Bikini Girls of Shark Island, copyright Kevin Dart)
Mood…it has a great deal to do the perception of art. I had prepared a couple of different artists for Friday Favorites this week and I just was not feeling it, you know what I mean? It just wasn’t clicking. And then I headed over to the Drawn website to see that artist Kevin Dart and another artist I featured recently, Chris Turnham, had finally opened an online store and BAM! there it was: inspiration…mooooooood! I was really craving something fun and the work of Kevin Dart satisfies that craving.
I am not certain what label to affix to the art style of Kevin Dart. There is an animated quality to it similar to artists like Shane Glines and Bruce Timm layered with an illustration vibe that really makes it stand out. In addition, like Turnham’s art, there is a 60’s flair that I really enjoy. It wasn’t surprising to me then that one of Kevin Dart’s inspirations is 60’s and 70’s paperback fantasy and science fiction books. Dart is an artist whose work makes retro cool.