Brenton E. McKenna, Author/Illustrator, Broome, Western Australia
Describe your illustration style in ten words or fewer.
Manga, Marvel and Disney meet Kimberley kid bush graffiti.
What items are an essential part of your creative space?
My blue graphite pen, an empty scrapbook and heaps of random reference material.
Do you have a favourite artistic medium?
Pencil and paper
Name three artists whose work inspires you.
Mike Mignola, Eric Powell and Mitch Byrd.
1961 to 1992 – from the Marvel ‘Silver Age of Comics’ through to the 90’s Image Age. It’s when the ‘Kings of Comics’ Jack Kirby, Steve Dikto and Stan Lee created the founding Marvel characters and rewrote the rules for comic storytelling, through to when rebel comic creators like Jim Lee and Tod McFarlane created Image Comics to rival Marvel and DC.
Comic series like X-Men: Age of Apocalypse, GEN 13 and Crimson. Magazines like Heavy Metal and Wizard. Animations from Manga Entertainment and Disney.
Share a photo of your creative workspace or part of the area where you work most often. Talk us through it.
This is me at my Cintiq. I have already hand-drawn the image. I then scan it into my computer to display on my Cintiq, where I use a program called CLIP studio to digitally colour and sometimes digitally ink.
What is your favourite part of the illustration process?
The pencilling stage. Other than the thumbnails, all my artwork ripples from the pencil work. The inking stage is also one of my favourite parts because I get to see the contrast in my work.
What advice would you give to an aspiring illustrator?
Just get started and don’t stop! There's always mess before the masterpiece, so don’t get caught up in trying to do your absolute best every time. That will only tire you out. Just treat it all like a warm-up for another warm-up until you’re happy with what you’ve made.
Everyone starts off the same and we all make the same mistakes regardless of how talented or talentless we think we are.
Brenton E. McKenna is an Indigenous author/illustrator from Broome, Western Australia. A Yawuru/Bunuba descendant, Brenton is Australia’s first Indigenous published graphic novelist and is the creator of Ubby’s Underdogs, Hairy Holes and the Ole Champ daily cartoon.
Brenton has illustrated for several publishers and is frequently the special guest at book festivals, both nationally and internationally. Of note was Brenton’s invitation from the U.S. Library of Congress to speak at the U.S. National Book Festival in Washington D.C. in 2019. Brenton now works full time as a graphic novelist/cartoonist and runs his cartooning workshops online as well during in-person school visits.
