For future reference, here's my ad for local art tuition in Kent:

One to One Tuition using Adobe Photoshop to create and colour character artwork by experienced anime and manga style artist and author Ben Krefta.

Ideal for art university students, anyone interested in digital art, video game art, manga, comics and traditional media illustrators. Students are expected to have a minimum basic understanding of computers and Photoshop. Students will also need to have their own computer or laptop with software and a graphic tablet. To practice techniques in their own time.

Location: At his private art studio in the centre of Chatham, Kent (or can travel to student at an additional pence per mile rate).

Cost: Lessons are £60 per 3 hour session. There are 3 sessions to complete the 9 hours worth of demonstrations. Students are expected to take notes during these demos.

For further information, please contact Ben Krefta. You can Google him, to see further examples of his artwork, or visit benkrefta.com

Selection of screen shots featuring some of my web things...

'About me' https://about.me/benkrefta also covers most of my web presence.

She’s an original character based on the EMIEW Bot.

Finished coloring Hitachi Girl in a anime cel style.

Anime Girl based on Hitachi’s EMIEW 2 robot: http://youtu.be/6Jb9oJY0Fe8

This has been a W.I.P for months and no doubt will continue to be for a few months more >_< Can’t wait to get through my to do list and finish these drawings.

Death Note fan art Work in Progress. Still need to ink and then colour. Might tweak a few bits also.

Cintiq Girl finally finished :)

In May I was working at the Wacom stand at the MCM comic expo in London. I created Cintiq girl especially for the event and spent most of my time there demonstrating the new Cintiq 13HD graphics tablet screen combo, which was pretty cool!

On the Friday I tried out Manga Studio 4 to digital ink her getting inspiration from Kiss Anime. It seemed like an ok program, but not sure I’d use it again and I couldn’t figure out if there’s a way to create anti-aliased lines? I then spent the weekend working on the colours in Photoshop CS6 in between chatting to customers, but still needed a day to finish after I got back.

Also wanted to see how my new laptop handles large Photoshop files. This one is about 1.5GB! (this image is 6% actual size) and it seemed fine for everything other than smudge tool.

Thanks for checking it out!

It was my first time attending a convention-like event at the National Space Centre as an artist. I probably wouldn’t have considered it had I not been invited but ‘twas a cool experience and was really nice to meet fellow manga inspired artists and fans alike.

I spent most of my time in the Artists Alley along with talented artists: Chie Kutsuwada, Laura Watton-Davies, Jodie Azhar, Emma Vieceli and Dock, selling postcard prints of some of the character pin-ups I’d worked on and chatting to fans about what I do and art-related things.

I’ll probably attend a few more similar events in the future to get a greater feel for the whole con-going experience and see how they compare :)