Pentel Creator Collective Featured Creator: Owen Freeman – Digital Integration Pro Kit

Pentel
3 days ago
3 min read

Hi! My name is Owen Freeman, I am an illustrator, visual development artist, and illustration instructor. I'm excited to share about some of my all-time favorite drawing tools and how becoming an illustrator may just be a cover for collecting pens, rather than the other way around. I am a longtime Pentel fan and thrilled to be the of curator of the Pentel Arts Digital Integration Professional Kit.

As a teacher and lifelong student of illustration, I've found it crucial to have drawing tools that are exciting to work with. Learning the strengths and personalities of different pens and pencils can help us express ideas with clarity and hopefully, over time, fluency between our ideas and the ways our favorite pens deliver them.

My career to date has been deeply inspired by reading comics as a kid, absorbing storytelling through hand-drawn artwork. Storytelling is what led me to study my favorite artists and their work, read interviews with them, and discover their tools and process. I began art school and found my awareness of illustration expanding exponentially but I always zeroed in on the drawing fellows, such as Noel Sickles, Gustave Doré or Katsushika Hokusai. Drawing had my full attention.

I adopted a version of the traditional western comic pipeline (pencils, inks, colors, lettering) as a foundation for my own picture making: drawing and value first, then color for enrichment and mood.

I came across my first Pentel Pocket Brush Pen in the student store around 2006 and immediately took to the portable, versatile line quality. I had been reading about artists working with ink directly (no pencil lay-ins) as a way to improve confidence and line quality, and this serendipitous introduction to the Pocket Brush immediately provided the responsiveness and range that I had only really felt with watercolor brushes and bottled ink. Shortly, thereafter, I added the Color Brush Pen to my daily tools.

These Pentel tools kept coming through for everything from observational cafe sketches to figure drawing to full illustration. Once I began working full-time for illustration for editorial and publishing clients, I had short deadlines to research and create unexpected narratives. Efficiency became critical, and I realized this comics pipeline from rough pencil sketches to value drawings did not appear by accident but rather necessity. The tools I used for work became my trusted companions, with my favorite Pentel brush pens at the fore.

As I worked with more clients in different fields, I found they all hinged on drawing, and solid observational sketching was the best way for me to continue to improve. I began to incorporate more digital tablets and software into my work, and the "personality" of the brush pen became the model for my digital brushes, and the classic pencil-line-color of comics remained the foundation to my digital work.

The growth of the iPad, Cintiq and Movink tablets into my work have become an ongoing extension of the line drawing and shape design to support visual storytelling for clients at Marvel, Warner Bros., Paramount, Wizards of the Coast, Image and more. This is why I've included them in my Pentel Arts Digital Integration Professional Kit. I've also included a breakdown of my process showing how I use each tool and the ways that digital painting can enrich the drawings, no matter the software that you use.

As a lifelong student of illustration, I will continuing to play with new ways to combine traditional and hand-drawn digital approaches. I hope you enjoy experimenting with these drawing tools as much as I do.