1-Who are you?

Dude from Estonia (but I have also lived in Spain for a couple of years). I like chess, nature walks, photography, making music and of course drawing. I used to work in advertising, design, game making offices but I love freedom more than steady income, so I’ve been a freelance artist for years now.

2-What do you do for a living? How does making art fit in your life?

Because of my background as an art director in advertising and design, I make graphic design for very different projects and clients. It can be a logo for a political party, or motion graphics for a classical concert, or characters for a mobile app. In this sense not having a certain own style or niche is useful.

But most of all I enjoy illustrating - it tends to not pay so well, but the process of reading for example a book and finding the style and painting the cover image is hard to beat as an experience.

3-How would you describe your art style? What do you think helped you develop it?

As I mentioned, I develop a style depending on the brief. In general though I think my process has often been being as loose and random as possible, and finding ideas for details in the mess of sketchiness. It probably comes from the love of nature - it’s like when you see faces in the messy patterns of a tree bark. Kind of like all the ideas are aleady out there - you just have to find them and bring them forward.

4-What helps you find inspiration personally?

Muses/inspiration come when you make room for them. You need to have uninterrupted time and place. Music has also a really helpful quality of clearing the mind of everyday noise and helping to get in a creative zone. And a nice walk in nature is unrivaled in clearing the mind and finding ideas.

5-Name a couple or three artists that you admire, and that made an influence in your own art.

My art heroes when I was young were very different in style, but all exceptionally good - Salvador Dalí, H. R. Giger and William Bouguereau. They have always been in the background of my mind. Of course there are many, many more artists, I always look at what and how others are creating.

6-When did you discover digital art? How was your first ever experience with Procreate? What role plays Procreate in your everyday life?

I’m 40. When I was a boy, computers weren't getting any graphics at all, and I was fascinated by that from the very early steps in this world. I watched the evolution of graphics, and have always been experimenting with it. I was drawing in a really early version of photoshop since before it was a thing to use it for painting. I remember first online communities in the modern sense for digital artists, like Sijun forums, and how exciting and fun they were.

Procreate is just awesome, thanks to procreate I’m 100% working on iPad and have forsaken pc and graphic tablets. Basically if I need to draw something, Procreate is the only choice for me. Together with some other apps for vector graphics, music making and video editing, I can do everything and anywhere. It’s almost unbelievable.

7-What would you tell someone approaching Procreate for the first time?

First of all have fun, and it doesn’t matter if it’s the first time or the 10000th time. Also as it is so easy to draw, to zoom, to make tiny details, to choose from thousands of brushes, etc. it’s easy to get lost and make a mess, so I’d always suggest keeping big shapes and composition in mind. Everything else will fall into place.

8-What is your favorite Procreate Manero brush set and why?

Now that’s a question I honestly can’t answer. Like for my recent project I have picked 5-6 brushes that I use on these series of pictures, and they are picked from like 5-6 different Manero brush sets each. But if there was a gun to my head, then I’d say the Epic Pastels set is really awesome and I’m just beginning to wrap my head around all the possibilities this set provides.

9-Where can people check out your art?

I really should get myself a decent page or a store somewhere. I post some stuff on Instagram.

🎨👉 Check out Ed Labetski's Instagram!

Artist Spotlight is a place where I'm interviewing artists that I personally admire, who's art I find very inspiring, and that also happen to use Procreate and my brushes as part of their artistic routine. Watch this space for more interviews in the future, and make sure to check each artist's links to show your support!

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Cheers!

Ittai

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