Emil Petrinic

Emil Petrinic is an illustrator, designer, photographer, and writer.
 
Emil made an early, but valiant effort to join productive (as in well-paid) society by going to and graduating from vocational school for Marine Engineering. This didn’t work out as planned. While he retains his interest in engineering and ships of all kinds (submarine, surface, and airships), he instead turned to artistic pursuits. Safe in the knowledge he’d never get accepted, he submitted a portfolio of computer graphics creations to a pilot program called the Academy of Entertainment and Technology. Much to his shock, he was accepted and then had to go through with it, learning animation, new media, computer graphics, and related subjects.
 
Instead of graduating like he was supposed to, he started getting hired regularly by his instructors and so ran off to work in a small animation studio, where he had opportunities to work in various roles, including game and online activity programming, animation, sound design, and others. He was even the network administrator for a while. Engineering inclinations came in handy there. After this he worked on an animated feature as technical director, another novel experience.
 
He then went freelance, and expanded into other work, among which are book and magazine illustration, product design and development, feature film art department work, 3D modeling and animation, and building websites.
 
Emil also worked in comics, which included Christian Gossett’s critically acclaimed and internationally published The Red Star where he performed various duties, among them compositor, 3D artist, colorist, book designer, graphic designer (he designed the first Red Star set of Collectible Cards, among other materials), and others as needed. During his time with The Red Star, it won the Gold Medal for Best Graphic Novel from the 2009 Independent Publisher Book Awards.
 
In recent years, Emil has devoted much more attention to his photography work, which other than personal projects and fine art photography has involved photojournalism, theater, events, music, and unit still photography on movie sets.
 
He is currently the Director of Special Projects at USVAA, the United States Veterans’ Artists Alliance, which is a 501(c)(3), nonprofit, multi-disciplinary arts organization. Founded in 2004, it provides opportunities for military veterans in the arts by networking with veterans, artists, supportive individuals and organizations within the arts and veterans’ communities to find funding and support for individual artistic projects in theater, film, television and the visual/fine arts, and a wide variety of crafts.
 
Among his many other interests are history, especially aviation and aerospace history, space exploration, technology, science, art, computer graphics technology, animation, gaming, storytelling, nature, the aquarium hobby, anthropology, and paleontology.