Wanted to try out another portrait framed by hair and including splatters and drips, this time going with a cute anime style or 'Moe' anime style. Sometimes it's good just to focus on a head rather than feeling the need to produce full body posing images every time- It gives me a chance to play around with facial styles which is a lot of fun, and without needing to pour in 100s of hours every time I create a new bit of work. Having said that, making some nice, neat line art and smooth colouring still stakes a few days compared to messier painterly styles. I think I did this one over the course of 3 or 4 days?

At the moment I'm using a Wacom Cintiq 27QHD graphics tablet to work on, which is also a lot of fun.

Also thought I'd experiment with a few different colour variations- Dark skinned anime girl with red lily and light hair anime girl with pink lily. Any Preference? Let me know which version you like best :)

Here's a few sketches I doodled recently. I originally posted them on Instagram, but I'm aware of the fact a lot of people don't use it, so thought I'd add them to my main website blog. I kinda like Instagram as a platform for posting sketches. Final works would probably be better off on Tumblr. I share all my Instagram stuff to Tumblr anyway by default, just to cover all the bases although since having had my own domain for probably around 15 years, I still prefer sharing work on my own blog and web site :)

I decided to replace the benkrefta.com home page slider images with more recent work and I ended up removing these two pics:

As I continue to improve my level and standard of artwork, it becomes a case out 'out with the old, in with the new' :)

I'd been wanting to create a new series of girl face artworks featuring a monochrome+single accent colour palettes- these are the results. Please with out they turned out. Not sure about the Pikachu one though, but perhaps still an idea worth testing? They gave me an excuse to use Photoshop a little differently that I usually do- to effectively paint digitally using a variety or brushes rather than produce my more typical digital airbrush colour effects with a generic low-flow round brush.

See below for 'Hand print', 'Spidey', 'Hannya', 'Skull', 'Biohazard' and 'Butterfly'.

It had been a while since I drew any fanart. I did the pencil line art for this Death Note pic a few years ago, but only recently got around to inking and colouring it. Time permitting I'd love to draw up artwork for dozens more of my favourite anime :)

New How-To Manga book in the works!

For those that don't know, I'm currently working on a new How-to-Draw Tutorial book relating to manga and character art. 113 pages down with another 15 to get done by the end of the year!

My first book 'The Art of Drawing Manga' came out 12 years ago. I still have people come up to me or message to say how much it helped them when they were starting along their artistic journey. Even though back in 2003 I didn't feel I was at an artistic level to be teaching how to draw, I always hoped that it might at least inspire a few beginners to give it a go and I could provide a few words of wisdom and tips and I'd picked up along the way. I'm glad it could help so many :)

For 2016 I'd like 'The Artist's Guide to Drawing Manga' (TAGTDM) to help a new generation of fans learn some useful techniques to create their own manga inspired artwork. Unlike with Youtube tutorials or tutorial web pages in general, my latest book provides the opportunity to detach from the internet and take some time to read through a dedicated resource housing several key learning guides or chapters all in a single package. TAGTDM allows users to either flick through, dip into, or follow from start to finish.

It's better to read a book than browse online

While researching parts of the book via the internet I found a lot of free manga art content online, some of it totally awesome! Although there's also a far more poor quality information which isn't very concise, well written or explained, and so much is scattered throughout the web at different locations. I might find a great tutorial on how to draw a manga eye, but then might need to spend a fair while looking for a tutorial which shows how create a full manga page, then more time finding tips on how to ink or colour my work digitally, or answers certain questions I might have.

Web tutorials are often given by different artists who have different approaches to their work, making things confusing for newbies. And they may not have the time to be particularly concise, or have their words copy-edited by someone else.

Along with my near 30 years of love for games, comics and animation, I'd expect that if any beginner were to follow TAGTDM from start to finish they'd definitely level up and increase their skills and knowledge. I'd imaging even artists with some experience would be able to gain a few insights also.

Even if people already own a how-to-draw book, or 10, a fresh reminder of how it can be done or reading a different professional artist's take on it can always help :)

Recently finished a 2 day comic con stint at the NEC. People stopping by at my table and taking an interest in my work is always very much appreciated. It was interesting to see what artworks fans were interested in- with 20+ different prints, there weren't many that didn't get either a positive comment or purchased, so not sure how I might better cater for shoppers in the future. For now I'll just continue offering as much variety as I can :) A good experience sampling both this and the London Con last month, and expect to attend some more shows in 2016.

This Photoshop character composite features artwork from my next How-To guide currently in progress.

The book will give readers the chance to draw their own versions in 10 simple steps. As these will be from the 'How to draw figures' section, I deliberately gave them figure-hugging outfits to help make things a little easier to understand without baggy clothing or too many drapes and folds interfering with the body shape.

You can check out Digital Manga if you'd like to learn in-depth Photoshop techniques for achieving the same colour results :)

Here's another selection of some of my older manga, game or anime inspired artworks (originally posted on my Instagram and cropped). Let me know if you have a favourite out of these :)

Check out Art Dump #1 for more.

[gallery type="rectangular" size="medium" link="file" ids="2760,2761,2762,2764,2763,2765,2766,2759,2768"]

Here's another selection of some of my older manga, game or anime inspired artworks (originally posted on my Instagram and cropped). Let me know if you have a favourite out of these :)

[gallery size="medium" link="file" type="rectangular" ids="2776,2775,2774,2773,2772,2771,2770,2769,2767"]