Vertical & Carved Concrete

Rich Verdone is an Army Ranger veteran with five tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, but his devotion to duty and his fellow soldiers marches on here at home. He’s now on a mission to build a construction company on a foundation of the skills and dedication of U.S. military veterans.

Beginning painters get so excited by the smorgasbord of shapes, colors and textures they have been learning that they often try to put every trick they know into each of their paintings. This leads to a hodge-podge with no focus.

If you are stenciling fresh-poured concrete there may be vertical surfaces you also want to stencil, such as step fronts or the lips around the edge of a patio where you may want the pattern to roll over the edge. Various contractors use different techniques to tackle these challenging surfaces.

With initial experience as a concrete contractor, ironworker and plasterer, an artistic streak found ready expression using skills that were learned in the trades.

Sisters Cindee Lundin and Chenoa Pickrain were raised on a dairy farm near Perham, Minnesota. Lundin is an expert in faux finishing and horizontal and vertical carved concrete. Pickrain is a graphic designer and photographer.

Anyone visiting the Bosch Tool outdoor booth at World of Concrete 2011 could not have missed this tool-carved decorative concrete work created by Steven Ochs and Gerald Taylor.

Owners of commercial and retail establishments are discovering the benefits of beautiful, easy-to-clean concrete walls.

Structurally unbeatable, decorative forms and form-liners are creating a timely and profitable advantage on more and more jobsites, big and small.

With more than 30 years of experience as a professional artist — and a darn good one at that — Thom Hunt has worked his magic at more happy places on Earth than even Walt Disney could have imagined.

The language barrier was the least of the obstacles a team of two professors and a student from Southern Arkansas University had to overcome during a weeklong trip to Cuba last November for an art project with the University of Artemisa. The saga began with a lack of supplies and ended with the death of Fidel Castro the night before the Americans left.

Florida’s Miami Beach is a part of the country known for its high real estate prices, but the penthouse condominium sales price of $60 million for the Faena House Saxony Condo set a new high.

We here at Concrete Decor always welcome submissions of photos from concrete artisans around the world. When we received a particularly attractive batch from an artist in Argentina, we decided to share them with you.

Protective coatings may not deter graffiti artists, but they’ll make cleanup a lot easier.

I’ve always been curious why certain decorative systems and finishes take hold only in certain regions of the country, while others are universal in their appeal and demand. The answer lies somewhere between perception, demand and what the market is offering.

CTS Cement Manufacturing Corp. sent us a story about an enormous waterscape at Cypress Breeze Plantation, a private gated development in north Florida. The job was done by Muud Concrete Design (Multiple Use Unlimited Design), a Los Angeles outfit formed by artisans Adrian Gascon and Neil Hughes.

Nolan King, owner of King Architectural Concrete and Construction LLC in River Falls, Wisconsin, started his own construction business at the age of 23 after graduating from college in 2001 with an engineering degree. His business focused primarily on home remodeling work.

Check in and check out three examples of decorative concrete at its finest, in Georgia, Tennessee and California.

These murals are the work of David Seils, an Asheville, N.C.-based designer, artist and relief sculptor. He applies an overlay to the walls to create these intricate, one-of-a-kind pieces.

Ellie Ellis of Elite Artistry LLC in Happy Valley, Oregon, and Eva Gallant of Y-Knot Creations LLC in Hurst, Texas, share a bond stronger than the one-ton concrete art piece they produced together in Indianapolis at the Concrete Decor Show.

American Patriot Getaways in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, is one of the companies that rents cabins to vacationers who want to stay in “tree houses” in the Smoky Mountains.

Everything about the Brawl in the Fall at the 2016 Concrete Decor Show in San Diego was hot, hot, hot— from the record-breaking 100+ degree heat to the sizzling entries that shaped up in the outside lot during show time.

David Seils’ master craft, wall relief sculpture, is an art form that dates back to ancient times, when civilizations carved designs into stone walls, buildings and columns. But instead of chiseling away material, the Asheville, N.C.-based Seils builds up his wall sculptures in layers using mortar, a mason’s hawk and a trowel.

What’s old often becomes new again, and in the case of ICF (insulated concrete forms) construction, many people feel it’s not only ready for a rebirth but a healthy adolescence, as well.