Saturday, February 24, 2007

An introduction and some art.



My name is Ray Frenden and I draw things for a living. I'd be drawing something anyway, so this works out pretty well. I've worked on games, comics, editorial images, and the like.

There's not much I won't make a picture of for money.

I've been drawing for about two and a half years. I doodled a lot in high school, but I shelved all that sort of frivilous stuff and set out to earn a living in a variety of mundane jobs that never really lead anywhere. I fell into graphic design and that brought me full circle back to drawing. As soon as I got my hands on a Wacom tablet, I started to draw and haven't stopped. All of my work is digital. I never use analog drawing materials because, well, I didn't learn with them and they don't suit my method.

I met the gang of blokes, here, via mutually occupied forums, and Aeron was nice enough to toss an invite my way. I hope you'll dig my illustrations as much as I like making them. With all that blathering out of the way, hope to see you around.



11 comments:

Human Mollusk said...

Welcome aboard, Ray!
Your illustartions are great. Don't worry, you don't need to draw with traditional means - pretty soon we'll directly attach our brains to the computer and draw simply by force of will anyway.

Human Mollusk said...

BTW what program are you drawing in? Just good ol' photoshop?
Im currently working on some digitally inked comic pages which I'll probably post here in the close future.

Robert Adam Gilmour said...

I love your stuff and I'm glad you're here.

SEAN said...

I was just thinking about this the other day, the learning to draw using only digital stuff. It's totally insane to me... i can't imagine it, i mean i can, but it just seems... wrong? That said, i really like the first picture alot. Hilarious.

Paleo said...

Welcome Ray, i'm a big fan of your B&W creatures!

Demian Johnston said...

the self protrait is wonderful. truly.

Anonymous said...

Glad to have you on, Ray. Always dig seeing your distinct digital drawing style. And I'm continually impressed with your ability to use flat blacks so often in so many places yet retain such an amount of depth in your imagery. Love the turtle beast.

- aeron (always comin in here signed out!)

Ray Frenden said...

"BTW what program are you drawing in? Just good ol' photoshop?"

Manga Studio/Painter/Opencanvas all are better than PS for linework.

"And I'm continually impressed with your ability to use flat blacks so often in so many places yet retain such an amount of depth in your imagery."

Thanks, man. I struggle with that constantly. I always think there needs to be more black.

"i can't imagine it, i mean i can, but it just seems... wrong?"

Why?

Thanks for the welcome!

SEAN said...

I'm old fashioned most of the time! But i'm also futuristic so... you can obviously do awesome drawings with it, so i'm not bagging on it, even if it does seem wrong to me.

Human Mollusk said...

"Manga Studio/Painter/Opencanvas all are better than PS for linework"

Why is that? I'm sometimes work with painter but apart from the rotating canvas feature and a few others I ultimately feely it doesn't add a lot to what PS already offers.
Haven't used Manga Studio or OpenCanvas though.

Ray Frenden said...

The brush algorithims for lineart are a thousand times better. Photoshop makes a fluid line into a shakey one.

I can do a screen cap of the programs performing similar tasks and post it at a later date. Seriously, I spend 14 hours a day using these programs at work and home, and Photoshop is, by far, the worst for lineart. Fine for painting, fine for pencils, fine for its other intended uses, but terrible for digital inking.