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Do you use Painter and any other software together? I use Painter with a few things. When doing work for movie posters I will illustrate in Painter and submit to the client. I can talk about a project for Ghostbusters because it wasn’t used, but I drew all the people in the movie and waited for approvals. It is nice not to have to draw in a sketchbook and to just paint digitally and submit the file. Through my partnership with Wacom I obtained a 32 inch Cintiq that I can paint right on the screen and switch from Painter to Adobe Photoshop. There I’ll do some transformations and distortions. When I’m doing likenesses I hop from Painter to Photoshop and use the liquify tool to get the likeness really dialed in and then I’ll pop back over to Painter and paint over what I’ve done to make it look nice and clean. That is for movie posters. When doing work for package design for somebody like Hasbro, they need stuff fast. I started using Pixologic Zbrush to sculpt characters. I’ll sculpt somebody from G.I. Joe and then go into Painter and draw over the sculpt. Then I will light it in 3D and use that as my reference to paint from. I do this a lot because the turn time is really fast. Sometimes they provide me the digital file of the toy and I get it into an action pose and use that as reference and it is a life saver. How has COVID impacted being a full-time freelance artist? A lot of my friends who are illustrators, sculptors and designers have been hit really hard. Last year I was blessed in that I was not knocked back too far. I did have a couple projects at the beginning of the year that were cancelled because of shutdown but overall I was able to keep busy and had a pretty good year. This year is starting off slow. It is tough when you have to support your kids. I’m fortunate that my kids are older and I don’t have to watch after them and work. Anybody that has younger kids and is working from home it has to be tough. As an artist unless you are really accomplished you are probably not making a whole lot. It is especially hard for artists at this time. MORE ON MIKE THOMPSON Mike Thompson is a Professional Illustrator and Digital Sculptor with more than two decades of experience. working with the television, print, toy, film and gaming industries. For more info visit http://miketartworks.com/