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'.

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

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!