About Ben Krefta...

Born in Kent , England in 1982. I've been a fan of comics and manga since the early 90s. Some of my early art influences include: the anime movie 'Akira' by Kasuhiro Otomo, the U.S. comic book 'Spawn' by Todd Mcfarlane and Super Nintendo! Having always enjoyed art and drawing, I've ended up progressing from fan to artist and currently work as a freelance illustrator and designer, specializing in manga and anime style artwork.

My story...

I've been drawing on and off for most of my life and got into cartoons and comic art when I was around 8. Like most youngsters, at that time I wasn't really aware of actual artists within the commercial field of comics and animation. I just enjoyed looking at the cool pictures and It made me want to do similar things. So I'd copy the pictures out of my brother's comics and gaming magazines. To start, copying helped out a lot. Not just for ideas, but helped my skill improve.

While I was in Junior School (up to the age of 10), my friends and I would draw our own creations frequently. We were interested in robots and monsters, so those are the sorts of things were drew! I think those sorts of influences came from movies, games and TV.

My family and I moved house to a new area when I was around 10 or 11. I made new friends, but none that enjoyed drawing as a hobby and unfortunately that's basically been the case up until now. However, I still kept drawing in my free time and at school. It was something I was good at and gained me respect among my peers.

In Secondary School (from when I was 11-18), I was still drawing the monsters and other demonic things! I suppose kids these days would have considered me a "Goth" for doodling decaying skulls and robots covered in spikes over my sketch books! Most people seemed to just think it was cool.

It was pretty cool to be able to impress people with my art skills, but kinda frustrating that no one else liked drawing or was any good at it. I found it very difficult to stay motivated to draw when there was never anyone I knew personally that would inspire me. My brother was pretty good at art, so we occasionally drew stuff at home. He gradually seemed to grow out of drawing and I ended up overtaking him ability-wise.

During my years in secondary school I picked up a lot of new drawing techniques and continued to improve. I wouldn't say I had a style of drawing. My teachers would always know "it was one of Bens" - but that was a case of content more than anything else, I think. Style was never an issue and I didn't even consider it, until my later years at school when I started buying more comics and anime. It was the art that drew me into comics, and not the stories like it should have been! When I started out buying comics on a regular basis, I was buying new U.S titles such as "YoungBlood", "Prophet" and "Spawn" published by "Image". When I got into comics, Image was a fairly new company, unlike "DC" and "Marvel" and at the time I felt they were producing the best comics art-wise and were setting high benchmarks in the computer colouring department.

Later, my brother and I discovered "Anime". Unlike normal TV cartoons, they contained: a high level of detail, a clean, slick art style, more mature content (before anime was on kid's TV) and were generally based around sci-fi, fantasy and similar themes which I've always found appealing since I was young

Comics and manga then began to strongly influence my drawings - both its style and content. It was similar to what I have always done, but more focused.

After that, I was introduced to the internet. I found amateur artists on the web, which were producing anime style art that was coloured like a professional anime cel or comic page. I researched how these amateurs were all achieving professional results with their colouring. I found out from "Julie Dillon's Anime and RPG site" (now called "Solace") it was down to computer software called "PhotoShop 4". The bad thing was, PS4 was something like $400 to buy. I wanted to own PS really bad, so that I could use it to make my pictures like the pros! I had to make do with Corel PhotoPaint 3- a far inferior program, but I was still able to achieve basic gradient pictures. By this time, gradient pictures weren't enough - pro and amateurs alike were putting effort into rendering their work by adding more tone, using realistic shadows and light sources etc. CGing had moved up another level.

In the end I did manage to get my hands on PhotoShop! Then it hit me... Still, all I can do is gradients! I saw other's works in comics, art books and on the web and although their styles of rendering differed, they were much nicer and more real looking. I realized a computer package, no mater how much it cost could never render a picture for you and that it was up to me to use PS as a tool (like a paint brush and paints) rather than a magic wand.

Those 'better pictures' I saw were so good, due to the artists knowing about colour, shadows and tone... I knew some of this due to my days of using traditional media, but it took me a few years to achieve 'better' results! My rendering knowledge, as well as skill has increased dramatically over the past few years, so colouring is much easier, and gets increasingly quicker as I produce more and more CG works.

I'm now at the level where I can compete against some of my early idols within the world of commercial art. I still have a long way to go before I'm truly happy with my art, but the more I draw and practice, the better I get. There's a lot of new comers getting into digital art early, so I wouldn't be surprised to see a lot of teenagers getting into the commercial art industry earlier and leaving the ‘old skoolers' behind!

There's more?..

More about me and my art, taken from 'Noise' Feb 2006...

Answers to dozens of random questions, from: How would you describe your work? To: What are your top 20 Video games?

Online journal type diary thing. Comments on various issues: My and other's art, web sites I've checked out, stuff happening...