The Brushes

I’ve been using Manga Studio for comic style work since the app was localized and brought to American audiences by SmithMicro in 2006. I’ve always pushed the boundaries of what was primarily an inking app, creating brushes that took the limitations of Manga Studio’s brush engine and smacked them against the wall. I like to make art apps bleed and Manga Studio has been my target of choice.

This set was created over seven years of obsessive iteration. Included are ten custom inking tools and seven natural media tools.

The Work

I’ve used the inking tools on work for clients like Nickelodeon, Burton, and Nike. My Photoshop and Manga Studio brushes are in use by industry professionals such as Dave Gibbons, Cameron Stewart, Bryan Lee O’Malley, and Mike “Gabe” Krahulik, and I suspect you’ll dig them too!

The below videos and accompanying images (and virtually all of the illustrations on my over 2,000 image deep Flickr account) were all created using my custom inking presets.

And the digital painting below was painted entirely in Manga Studio on a full color layer at 600 dpi using the natural media brushes in this set (The primary brushes used were the “Oil” and “Bristle” brush variants included in the download and the initial sketch was drawn with the “Sketching Pencil.”)

Buy my brushes here! Reblog for a chance to win art!

What You Get

The brushes include tools for pencilling, inking, and coloring work.

NOTE: The brushes are compatible with Manga Studio 5 only.

The Story

I’ve been using Manga Studio for comic style work since the app was localized and brought to American audiences by SmithMicro in 2006. I’ve always pushed the boundaries of what was primarily an inking app, creating brushes that took the limitations of Manga Studio’s brush engine and smacked them against the wall. I like to make art apps bleed and Manga Studio has been my target of choice.

I’ve taken lessons learned from creating brushes in Painter, Manga Studio, Photoshop, and SAI and applied them to this set for Manga Studio 5. These newest brushes reflect seven years of obsessive, masochistic iteration on making the best drawing tools possible.

They’re easily the best brushes I’ve ever made and I can’t wait for you to get hands on them.

How They’re Different

The Painterly brushes are great for mass work or for coloring underneath comic style lineart. They create soft edged, blending strokes with light pressure and totally opaque, dense areas of hard edged color with hard strokes. Creating soft or hard edges to create emphasis in a painting is as easy as varying pressure with your stylus. One tool to do it all – no separate blenders.

Detail of an image painted entirely with the Painterly brush tool.

The pencilling tools include shading brushes, layout pencils, and sketching tools of varying hardness replicating analog style effects and workflows.

The inking tools include a brush that iterates upon my Manga Studio 4 organic inking brush to make the most clean, but analog-looking, inking marks I’ve achieved digitally. Two additional inking nibs of varied firmness round out the toolset.

An image inked with the tools in this set.

The Important Part – the Art Giveaway

To thank y’all for promoting this post, I’m giving away two large, interlocking canvas prints created for iam8bit featuring Earthworm Jim.

There’s only one set of the diptych ever printed to canvas and there will only ever be one. I’d guess they’ve got a value of $500–1000 (I’m a terrible capitalist and almost never sell art, so I have no real clue, but it did cost a pretty penny to print), and I’ll be giving it away to one person who reblogs this post or retweets this tweet.

Don’t Have Manga Studio 5?

There are many who’ve yet to try Manga Studio 5. As a long time Manga Studio user, allow me to explain what Manga Studio 5 is, and isn’t, by way of comparing it to what has come before.

Do you use Paint Tool SAI? Do you like its lightweight, snappy brush system that outstrips Photoshop’s but lament SAI’s lack of updates and general state of abandonware or lack of Mac support? Do you use Painter but curse the gods whenever it crashes to desktop during your tenth iterative save? Does Painter’s general buginess lead you to Photoshop only to remind you of how limited Photoshop is when it comes to painting and blending colors naturally?

Manga Studio 5 takes the already best-in-class inking engine found in 4 and pairs it with painting tools that rival Painter and SAI’s with stability akin to Photoshop.

It’s 64bit and native on OSX and Windows, unlike SAI. It’s stable, unlike Painter. It inks and paints well out of the box, unlike Photoshop.

Long story made slightly less long – it’s my favorite app of the bunch. I can pencil, ink, and paint in a single app instead of the Frankensteinian hodge-podge I resorted to before. No longer do I need to pencil and ink in Manga Studio and color in Photoshop or Painter as a second step.

If you use any of the above apps on a daily basis, you should really try it out. I seldom fire up any of those other apps after. The kicker? It’s a fraction of the cost of the big players.

But I digress. Buy my Manga Studio 5 brushes here!

Introductory Sale!

Buy my Photoshop inking and pencilling brush tool presets here.

How These Tools Are Different

Photoshop doesn’t do well at interpreting light tablet pressure. Making thick-to-thin strokes requires a lot more care and deliberate line control than would even be necessary with an analog sable brush and real ink. It blows out pressure at the low end leaving feathered lines difficult to create.

BLOB. Line. Line. Line. BLOB.

You get the idea. Since around the time of the Photoshop CS6 Beta, I’ve attempted to create a brush that combats these shortcomings by dropping out some of the lowest pressure mark-making with a combination of flow and texture settings.

The result is a brush that, while not 100% opaque at the lightest marks, provides a hell of a lot more fidelity and control. To my knowledge, no one else has used this technique to create inking tools. The response from peers who’ve tested the set has been unanimously positive.

Pointy tip. Line. Line. Line. Pointy tip.

Here’s a short video showing an early version of just one of the tool presets included in this set.

In addition to several inking tool presets, there are robust pencil tools for blue-and-red-line-roughs and general sketching.

Feedback from other Artists

These are, by far, the best set of PS brushes I’ve come across. The pencil tools are excellent. I love the Sumi Brush and the rest of the ink pens are fantastic. – Eric Merced

I’ve been using Frenden’s…inker for awhile and I absolutely love it!…I have a hard time using Photoshop’s default brushes now. – Kory Bing of Skin Deep

‘Been waiting on these longer than a stripper trying to pick up a quarter with no hands! Inking brush is the tits dude! - Eric Brock

Note: These Tool Presets are only compatible with Photoshop CS5 & CS6.

I’ve been trying to figure out the easiest way to make my painterly work into screenprints, and I think I’ve settled on the best workflow for it. This’s a quick and dirty proof of concept/client sketch video.

I paint each spot indepently on a spot-channel layer with 100% solidity in Photoshop. It allows me to change and tweak colors on the fly (very similar to working with spot layers in Manga Studio) and use a full range of value gradation on each layer.

With smart, conservative hue selection, one can make really intricate images that can be screenprinted just as easily as the lineart based spot-color illustration that most tees use these days.

The end result’ll likely end up like these older movie posters which feature painterly, mass based imagery that was screen printed with a full value range for each hue.

I’ve been blogging more there than here of late. I’ll still be making the more formal posts both spots, but if you want my day-to-day and more candid stuff, add me on Tumblr.

Photoshop doesn’t do well with light pressure recognition. Making thick-to-thin strokes requires a lot more fidelity than would even be necessary with a proper sable brush and ink in meatspace. It blows out pressure at the low end and makes soft lines blobby as hell.

You can combat this by turning off the lowest pressure settings of your tablet at the driver level, but you shouldn’t have to. I want a brush engine that senses those slight variances and accurately translates them.

It’s possible. Manga Studio, which I’ve used for inking since about 2006, does a stellar job at light pressure translation. Getting feathered strokes that look like they came from my Raphael 8404 #4 sable brush is no harder than inking in the real world. Painter does a pretty good job of this too. At the very least, both allow you to tweak how the brush engine interprets your strokes on a per-brush-setting basis instead of using a sledgehammer on a finishing nail by leaving you with an only recourse of neutering your full range of pressure sensitivity at the driver level.

Photoshop, Illustrator, and Flash all exhibit this problem. I don’t know if it’s an interpolation/smoothing issue or something larger, but I do know that the result is shitty lines.

Since around the time of the Photoshop CS6 Beta, I’ve been attempting to create a brush that combats these shortcomings by dropping out some of the lowest pressure mark-making with a combination of flow and texture settings. The result is a brush that, while not 100% opaque at the lightest marks, provides a hell of a lot more fidelity and control.

EDIT: Here is a short article and download link for a finalized set of brushes made after this post was published.

The tee is a mashup of the demonic cat and haunted mountain-top home from the Japanese, cult-classic House.

I’ll be accepting commissions at my Shopify store for one week, or 50 commissions, whichever comes first.

Your commission helps support my independent, creator owned efforts. I’d like to make comics and games. I can’t do that without income to keep me afloat in the interim. You make the difference! It’s like Kickstarter, except, uh, more instantaneous.

You get a signed, one to three color sketch, inked or painted in gouache, on 11″x14″ bristol board or similar. Subject matter of your choosing. Tube shipped.

Example requests

Wolverine smoking a cigar.
The Wolfman attacking a vampire in a forest.
Jeff Goldblum wearing a cowboy hat, riding a velociraptor with saddle, firing sixguns in the air with a smug look on his face.

Example commission

There’s a higher quality image linked from my Twitter account. Flickr still butchers on resize.

CLICK HERE FOR AN UPDATED ARTICLE.

Monoprice makes graphics tablets? I thought they were just an outlet for cheap cables. It was news to me that they sell all sorts of audio, video, and computer accessories.

Their studio monitor headphones are highly rated by customers. As are their monitor arms. And their capacitive iPad styli. Hell, they even have USB powered portable speakers that are far better than they have any right to be given the price. I’ve bought, and liked, all of the above. And Monoprice’s fans are justifiably earned. They make good stuff, cheap, including graphics tablets. But, on those, I never bit.

When reviewing the Yiynova Cintiq alternative, I researched all of Wacom’s competition, learning that Yiynova uses a Waltop digitizer (digitizers being the flat hardware panel that interprets pen movement and translates it onscreen). I decided to buy a Monoprice stylus to see if it would work on a Waltop digitizer. It didn’t. This roused my curiosity. If the Monoprice wasn’t a Waltop based tablet, what was it?

My guess then was the Monoprice tablets used a Hanvon digitizer. Hanvon creates a full range of graphics tablets, most of which claim feature parity with their Wacom equivalents. Prices also tend to match their Wacom counterparts closely, so I see little reason most would take the leap of faith required to spend money on the less known brand, opting instead for the known quantity of Wacom tablets. [Edit: I've found, thanks to Gez in the comments on this article, that the Monoprice tablets use UC Logic digitizers, a brand I hadn't found during my prior research.]

The Monoprice tablets are available at a price that doesn’t scare one away. Less than $50 nets you a 6.25“x10” tablet and around $80 will get you a larger 9“x12”. With those prices, and my inclination to try any tools I can, I ordered the 6.25“x10” tablet with low expectations. Something so cheap can’t possibly be good, right?

After spending a week with the 6.25“x10” Monoprice, my Yiynova and Cintiq remain unplugged and I gave my Intuos away to a friend. The Monoprice tracks subtle pressure variances and small movements with less lag and more crisp fidelity than any of the others. It is, put crudely, fucking awesome, in both OSX Lion and Windows 7 x64.

It holds accuracy at obscenely small levels even when zoomed way out, which is where most tablets falter. The following screen recording in OSX shows how stable the Monoprice tablet is in both pressure variance and fine detail.

The Monoprice performed flawlessly in OSX. This is welcome news. With most tablets, Wacom included, OSX has long felt a second class citizen with slightly less accuracy and more lag present in the drivers.

I’ve found that some apps, in both Windows and OSX, enable tablet specific features only if they detect Wacom drivers present and running on a system. I recommend installing Wacom’s Intuos 3 drivers alongside the Monoprice ones. They do nothing for the tablet, but trick uncooperative apps into operating with the Monoprice.

In the product description, on some of the tablets, the following is stated, “Note that the included software is not compatible with Mac OSX at all, while some are only compatible with Windows 2000/XP.” That statement is misleading. That text applies to the bonus software, not the drivers. You don’t want their Windows-only handwriting recognition shovelware anyhow. The drivers included on the CD installed without a hitch and the process to get the tablet running in OSX and Windows was painless. I suspect the above verbiage has scared off a few prospective purchasers and it’s a shame it’s worded so murkily on their site.

Hardware-wise, the stylus is a bit shorter and narrower than Wacom’s and is about the same weight. It rests comfortably in my oversized meat-paw. The pen requires a battery, but has no on-off switch. It turns on when you use it and off when idle. The battery has lasted over a week with constant use and shows no signs of giving up. The battery slot inside of the pen feels a bit cheap, but is soon forgotten after closing the pen back up and represents the singular negative aspect of the hardware. An aftermarket stylus is available for around $8. I found myself using the pack-in stylus more. Ten replacement nib packs are available for less than a dollar.

The tablet has a slightly textured surface and drawing feels tactile and a bit toothy. The hardware buttons worked fine and were fully customizable. Eight buttons is a lot to keep track of and I found myself using my keyboard more often than not when jamming on hot keys.

All the following images were drawn on the Monoprice in Manga Studio or the Photoshop CS6 beta. Included is a short video, sped up 2x, drawing in OSX with Manga Studio.

I was afraid revealing my secret love for the Monoprice to you jackals would lead to a run on them and, subsequently, an inability to buy one. I bought a second 6.25“x10” for home before writing this review. I suspect the 9“x12” is a future purchase. [EDIT: I bought the 9x12 shortly after. See my updated review here.]

Drawing on the Monoprice leaves me feeling a bit punk rock. It’s better than it has any right to be – better than any of the other hardware I own. Its drivers outperform Wacom’s in OSX and I found myself making excuses to sit down and draw with it.

An off-brand graphics tablet by Monoprice out-performs tablets ten times more costly and replaced my Cintiq and Intuos tablets for daily use. Who would’a thunk it?

Surely Wacom has to have some competition? If not, why not? Is the art market so small that no one sees profit in trying? Wacom’s earnings reports suggest there’s money to be made. Doesn’t the success of apps like Draw Something drag digital art into the mainstream at least peripherally? Why, in this dawning, post-pc age of touch-everything, can’t I find an easy, accurate way to draw digitally? Digital drawing tools have made sluggish, incremental, trivial leaps generationally. There’s no impetus for prices to drop or technology to get better. Wacom has the whole market. And Apple doesn’t seem to care about artists much. I don’t want to use a dead stylus with a rubber duplo-block ball-end and lack of pressure sensitivity and like it.

First, some tough-talk about Cintiqs. The last generation of Cintiqs based on Intuos 3 tech had some significant issues with display quality. They used cheap TN panels. They looked muddy and washed out. An anti-glare coating on the back of the plastic screens worsened an already low contrast ratio and robbed the colors of what little vibrancy they had. The newer Cintiqs, like the 24HD, have IPS panels similar to the Apple Cinema Displays. Others have said the display quality is a vast improvement over the last-gen models. That said, the new 24HD has a lower PPI than even my older 20WSX, so I’m healthily skeptical.

There’s cursor parallax caused by the gap between the drawing surface and the LCD screen and lag no matter which generation of Cintiq you buy. If you expect where the tip of your stylus meets your screen to be where a line will be drawn, you’re going to be disappointed. An old Nintendo DS has a truer 1:1 ratio of pen input to line result. You’re going to be watching a cursor trail behind your pen, you’re going to be less accurate than if you were drawing with analog materials because of parallax, and you’ll be several thousand dollars poorer in the process. In many ways, drawing with an Intuos tablet was a more satisfying experience. The cognitive disonnance of drawing down on the tablet while looking up at a monitor shielded you from the flaws and limitations inherent to Wacom’s digitizer technology. You notice input lag less when a cursor isn’t chasing after your pen in front of you. The Cintiq brings that flaw into sharp relief. Your pen tip is just pulling the cursor along, trailing like a fat kid chasing an ice cream truck.

I’d be less harsh on the Cintiqs if Wacom weren’t demanding such a hefty price for what amounts to little more than an Intuos digitizer with a cheap LCD slapped atop. I didn’t want to spend $3200 on the 24HD after having spent $2500 on the 20WSX only to be disappointed by the value again. I felt I should at least look into other options when buying a new tablet monitor for a second machine.

There are a few overseas manufacturers. Bosto makes tablet monitors, but few have bought them stateside and even fewer offered their thoughts on the experience. Ordering direct from China seems the only option for purchase and shipping drastically increases the cost, making the risk to reward higher than I’d feel comfortable.

Yiynova offers several different displays and sizes. These tablet monitors are available on Amazon via their U.S. distributor, The Panda City.

The Yiynova 10.1“ DP10 has a battery-driven pen with 1024 levels of pressure, an LED backlit 10.1” display, and uses only two USB ports for operation for $299.

The barrier of entry was low enough that I ordered it out of intellectual curiosity if nothing else. It arrived a few days later.

The drivers supplied with the DP10 were out of date. A bit of research showed that Waltop makes the tablet digitizer and that DisplayLink provides the tech for the USB powered display. I downloaded the newest drivers but had some issues with OS X Lion. The DP10 only worked in Mirror Mode and lacked the calibration button that the driver settings should have offered. Panda City says others have gotten the display running fine in Lion and that it may be an issue specific to my MacPro, but I was unable to verify those claims.

In Windows, everything ran fine. The LED-backlit display quality was superior to the TFT display of the Cintiq 20WSX and Cintiq 12WX. The USB only conncection was super portable and convenient, and, were I pairing it with a laptop, a better alternative than a Cintiq which requires a USB, DVI, and separate power source for operation. I did experience some viewing angle annoyances, but the low price of $299 softened the hard edges.

The issues I was having in Lion made the display less useable for me, so I contacted Panda City and asked if I could exchange the DP10 towards their 19″ monitor, the MSP19. They complied, even offering to send me the MSP19 before the DP10 had arrived back.

Even if the MSP19 had to be run as a single monitor, it was large enough to be a primary display whereas the 10.1″ as an only display felt restrictive.

The 19″ MSP19 arrived and was much lighter than my Cintiq. I was surprised with the quality of the fit and finish. The build quality got my hopes up.

The MSP19’s LED backlit display was a welcome relief after the soupy, muddy TN panel of the Cintiq in brightness and clarity, with a slightly worse viewing angle, but the good news ended there. It had significant issues in OSX. Drawing straight lines proved difficult. There was large cursor jitter. The pen dropped connection after a few minutes requiring the system to be rebooted. The color temperature of the monitor wavered between warm and cool, flickering at random intervals.

Panda City’s support offered to send me a second MSP19 while I held on to the first. If I didn’t like either, they would ship them both back at no charge. If the Yiynova displays weren’t meeting my expectations, Panda City was exceeding them. They were helpful and kind throughout the process.

The replacement monitor arrived. The pen stopped dropping its connection. The color flickering disappeared. The jittery cursor remained. Browsing Waltop’s digitizer support site and searching on the topic lead me to believe OSX was a secondary concern for the company. OSX and the Yiynova didn’t want to cooperate and I was getting tired with trying to force them to cohabitate.

I’d been planning on putting together a Windows box for a few 3D apps with no Mac equivalent, so I gave the MSP19 a shot on Win7x64.

Performance was night and day, though still not fantastic. There was still jitter, but nothing like when it was used in OSX. At one third the price of my Cintiq, with a better display and lighter form factor, I’ve decided to keep the MSP19 for use on my second machine.

I can’t recommend it for OSX users just yet, but, if you’re running Windows and are looking for a cheap tablet monitor, the Yiynova is a competitive, if somewhat flawed, alternative. I’m glad Yiynova is in the space. Lack of competition breeds complacency, stalling innovation. And the value proposition on Cintiqs is way out of whack.

My Jack Burton study is now for sale on INPRNT.

I was commissioned to make a simple Cougar Skull illustration. It was a brief enough task to put to video, and I haven’t done that in a long while, so I recorded it. Each video is sped up to only be a few minutes long. Actual illustration time sat between twenty and thirty minutes. Software used was Manga Studio.

Recording the screencast was fun. I decided to record a few doodles and throw them online after. All can be found on my Youtube account.

I made an iPad comic template. It’s grid based and is suitable for digital or analog work (just print it onto bristol if you’re working analog).

It has top and bottom margins set to the same size as potential panel gutter widths. I don’t see the need for them to be any larger. The iPad’s bezel is all margin.

I spent some time in the yard today collecting our rescued/rehabbed chickens’ fallen feathers to make into quills.

One of the things I liked about digital tools was the authorship I felt over the custom brushes I would make. That opportunity exists with analog and I haven’t taken advantage of it as much. I think by making tools we better learn how to use them to the fullest.

Figuring out the angle of the cut for the nib, the type of cut it to retain a good amount of ink, and the sensitivity level I’m looking for (and having direct control over it) is pretty fantastic. After a half dozen or so attempts, I’m starting to figure out what it is I’m looking for in a nib. It beats buying nibs in the store!

Feathers have more give and less snag than metal nibs. It’s akin to a brush. Good thick to thin. A light touch. I like them more than their metal counterparts.

I drew these, and a few more, last night in about an hour. Just for fun. It started as a personal logo exercise and ended up being a series of cartoony self portraits where I reminded myself that there’s an endless variety to the ways we can approach an assignment or character design. (There’s more than one way to skin a fat, bald, zombified illustrator with a penchant for the macabre.)

A while back, and long enough ago that I think I can show it, I got a shot at designing the logo for the Nickelodeon TMNT reboot. I called back to the red headbands of the comics and the mutagenic ooze that created them with a fully hand-drawn, custom-made set of letters. The only thing I didn’t draw here is the (very) placeholder nickelodeon logo.

I didn’t win out, but I’m proud of my entry.

They understand and appreciate my weird sensibility for things that are monstrous, retro, campy, creepy, and sometimes borderline-inappropriately-sexual. I can’t help it. I make what I make. I’m not good at clever concepts. I’m just trying to make something personal and interesting.

Below is my first concept, the revision, and the subsequent completion of the image.

(As usual, bigger and more images available on my Flickr page.)

I used these brushes for the following pieces among many others.

Ray Frenden the Artist. I think it’s necessary to put this all in context with a brief overview of the insane force of nature that is your work. What is it that you do, how did you carve out a name for yourself, and what are you currently up to?

The usual spiel I trot out for these sorts of occasions is that I’m a self-taught illustrator with a penchant for monsters and the macabre who draws things for money and likes to write. I was weaned on old horror comics, pulp fiction, and sci-fi. I’m a bit of an anachronistic fella. I’m not big on current pop culture and I’ve always felt a bit out of place and disjointed from it. That separation started as a default state when I was a kid and became a conscious choice as an adult when I moved to rural Illinois after having grown up in Chicago proper. I like seclusion and am most creative when I’m alone and distractions are at a minimum.

Here’s a few pieces of Ray’s art to help with context:

Outside of your work, what do you like to do, what causes are you interested in, and what do you think defines you as a person? Basically just, who is Ray Frenden?

I spend the majority of my free time working with animals. My wife operates a trap, neuter, return service for feral cats – we catch cats and get them fixed and put them back in their natural environment. She runs a cat shelter too. More info on that, if you’re curious about cat overpopulation and the difference between a feral and a house cat, can be found at my wife’s site, http://cattaxi.org.

Our rural shelter developed a relationship with several city shelters. They get a lot of farm animals that either are gotten as pets and abandoned or escape from live markets and are caught stray in Chicago. They have neither the capacity or resources for farm animals in the city so my wife and I snag them. Whatever we can’t place on local farms ends up being an addition to our motley crew of misfit animals.

I’ve currently got a couple dozen chickens (reformed fighting birds and rescued laying hens), five ducks, four dogs, a gaggle of barn cats too feral to be placed into homes, fourteen house cats, three sheep, a piglet (and not some pot belly pig, a real pig that’ll weigh a veritable ton eventually), and a horse.

Our latest addition, the aforementioned piglet, fell off a hog truck on a busy interstate. The little fella is barely four pounds and is covered with road rash. We’ve got him on piglet milk replacer and he’s living in my home office. The animals make for a lot of responsibility, but I dare say they’re a more rewarding part of my life than commercial illustration. If rescuing made money (rather than sucked it out of my pocket), I’d devote myself to it full time.

Current art. What currently holds your interest? What techniques are you enjoying using? What subject matter really gets your gears turning?

Inspiration-wise, I just got back from a trip to D.C. The National Gallery had an exhibit featuring the masterworks of German artists. Lots of great charcoal, wash, and ink drawings. Those fellas really appreciated preliminary work. Seeing those studies reminded me that the drawings which are important are the twenty you cut your teeth on. It’s hours spent gesture drawing and drawing from life that most will never see that separate the good from the great. I’m still learning that myself. I get impatient and want to rush ahead and forego the preliminary work. Whenever I spend the time to do studies, make a maquette or take photo reference, and really plan a drawing, things go smoother. I’m continually inspired by illustrators from the golden age of illustration such as Noel Sickles, Milton Caniff, Mort Drucker, Johnny Craig (perhaps my first exposure to the sort of work I do and easily my first inspiration and biggest early influence), Alfredo Alcala, Pete Hawley, N.C. Wyeth, Howard Pyle, and Frank Frazetta. Everyone loves Frank’s paintings, and rightfully so, but it’s his brush and ink work that floors me. Most of these guys can be seen on the inimitable Leif Peng’s Flickr account here if curious:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/leifpeng/

Materially, I’ve been mixing up my usual Rosemary and Co. sable brush and ink work with some Japanese manga nibs from JetPens. Using the techniques in the Famous Artists Course, I’ve used transparent layout paper as one puts separate elements of a piece on different layers in Photoshop. If you sketch the primary elements on a transparent paper, you can arrange them for the most pleasing composition, scan them or tape them together, and print them or transfer them onto your final substrate for inking. I’ve been doing my spot colors this way and will have a 100% traditional process soon aside from the scanning and bundling of the file for clients. It’s not too dissimilar to what the proto-illustrators of yore did to prepare “camera ready” artwork.

My work has been moving to a more realist, painterly style for some time. I’ve been practicing that style digitally as I’ve not got the ideal setup in my home office for busting out oil paintings. I’m hoping to change that and start working with real paints soon. In the meantime, I practice mass drawings and am interested in seeing where mass drawings and lineart intersect. I’ve done some experimentation marrying the two to varying degrees of success.

I want to be trying new things constantly. I get bored easily. If I’m bored, I create boring work. I’m not worried about confusing art directors by displaying a myriad of styles. That may be a good rule of thumb for most situations, but I can’t adhere to it. It’s not in me to be comfortable with, and willing to stay true to, one style.

You are the go-to guy when it comes to questions about Art Programs. Any suggestions for budding artists as to how they should approach the topic? Personally, I feel like it’s better to develop the skills on paper and then find a program that helps you to more easily convey your own personal style. I know that you really explored your art mainly through the tip of a Stylus early on though. What are your thoughts on the matter?

This is tricky. I’ve seen both sides. I drew a bit as a kid traditionally, but I really learned most of what I know on a tablet. If you watch some of my old tutorial videos, you’ll hear me wax poetic about my love of digital art.

I started to hit a few semi-local art meet ups hosted by my friend Charlie Athanas featuring the likes of traditional heavy weights like Dave Dorman. I asked questions about traditional art supplies and the same curiosity that urged me to learn more about digital art kicked in. I didn’t even know what the gradations of pencils meant. Asking Dave Dorman what a 4B pencil is is sort of like asking Lance Armstrong what a pedal is. To he and Charlie’s credit, they fielded some pretty obvious questions and never made me feel stupid for asking. Dave recommend I read George Bridgman and Charlie really helped me on the art supply side of things. About that same time, I started a dialog with Coop of all people about traditional inking. Those guys are passionate about their methods and that sort of thing rubs off. I was hooked.

I learned that a five dollar synthetic brush and a two dollar bottle of ink was more accurate than my $5400 worth of MacPro and $2000 Cintiq. (http://frenden.com/buyers-remorse/) I was making prettier lines traditionally in a week. I felt good about my progress when Michael Cho (a fantastic illustrator and kindred spirit when it comes to all things linework) told me that most guys take years to get that level of traditional control. I was flattered. The digital practice carried over towards traditional skills. That’s my only explanation. Muscle memory is muscle memory. A stroke is a stroke, be it via stylus or brush.

I cut my teeth on digital. I see its uses. I still employ it here and there. It’s fast. But I’m pretty sold on traditional art. More accuracy, more life in the lines. They’re both tools. Learn both. Each has strengths.

You’re releasing some brush settings, which is very cool of you. Do you have any reservations about this at all? I remember when you first released your Manga brushes on Emptees and about 9 million people started aping you. I’ve met lots of artists who are very insecure about releasing their process and techniques. How do you feel about it?

I had a very open policy about that sort of thing. Before I became a full time commercial illustrator, I toyed with the idea of releasing all my works into the public domain. I’m a reluctant capitalist at best.

I offered a lot of tutorial videos (http://frenden.com/category/video/) and brush settings and developed a bit of renown (insofar as an illustrator can – we’re talking about a pretty small niche of interest here). I was surprised at how closely some of the derived works were to my own.

I need to be in a constant state of evolving and it’s petty to be threatened by those who want to learn from you. If they catch up to you, so what? Great, I say. Being scared of that is like admitting you have no more room for personal growth. I’m no advocate for finding a style and sticking to it come hell or high water. That sounds like a boring existence to court.

I’m self taught (http://frenden.com/hindsight-is-2010/). If it weren’t for other artists sharing their trade, I’d be nowhere. My favorite sources of instruction are Harold Speed, Bridgman, Hogarth, Vilppu, Loomis, Will Eisner, Preston Blair, James Gurney, and, grouped together, the Famous Artists Illustration and Cartoon Course crews. With their examples of spreading vast wealths of knowledge, I’d feel pretty small for not spreading what little I do have. There’s a tradition of shared knowledge that is bigger than any commercial concern or personal insecurity that one might have.

Ray Frenden the Future. What’s on the horizon for you as far as work and plans? What are your future aspirations and goals? I’ve heard you have a large interest in designing for 2d gaming, can you tell us a little about that?

I originally got my Wacom to make pixel art. I worked in the games industry making 2D, sprite based art and UIs for a casino games company for about a year. I still love games and enjoy thinking up game systems be they for video games, collectible card games, or even board games. My two areas of intense interest have almost always been comic books and video games. Comics were more of my focus as a kid and games more so as an adult.

I want to move away from making art for other people and start working on my own ideas in both those areas. I hope I can do that.

Any Final thoughts, tips and suggestions for aspiring artists, or general tomfoolery?

I got asked this on Formspring the other day. I’m regurgitating part of that answer here because I think it encapsulated my feelings on the topic in a more pointed way than I’m typically able.

As far as getting into the market is concerned, be patient, work hard. Put your work in everyone’s face and be an aggressive advocate for yourself. Be your harshest critic but also your biggest fan. Otherwise your insecurity will eat you for lunch. You owe it to your potential to not beat yourself up and stifle your growth.

Style wise, try not to think about it. If you’re drawing all the time, that will come naturally. You will make the marks that feel right to you. The ones your muscle memory has absorbed and saved and cataloged are the ones that add up to a style.

If you want to spread across the tubes and get attention, being memeful helps. Make images that are loaded in advance to appeal to one demographic or another. If you make art about video game characters, video game blogs might talk about it, etc. It’s a cynical stab at self marketing at its worst, but a genuine expression of interest in a given topic at its best. I see peers having great success with jumping on the story of the moment and making art to match.

“I’M WITH COCO.” That image was everywhere a few months ago.

More importantly than anything else mentioned above: do what you love. It shows in the work. That will get you more attention, more deserved attention, in the long run. We live in a plastic world that places a high value on moments of fleeting authenticity. Being yourself is the best way to stand above the pack. Knowing who you are in the first place is the hard part.