To start off, can you explain what Art Pizza is and how you guys got started?
Brian Manning
It's a podcast where we give tips, tricks, and industry advice to artists of all experience levels.
Edward Frayna
We started as a Facebook group called the Jurassic Mouse Claw, where we would do weekly art challenges and invite different artists. Vegas has a lot of artists in the casino game industry and the tattoo world, so we had dozens of artists that we all loosely knew through mutual friends.
Brian Manning
We launched an audio podcast when we wanted to spread out from just that Facebook group. And then after 70 episodes, we realized no one knows what the name means. So we evolved into Art Pizza, where we switched to the YouTube video format. That's when Ed said that we need to present artwork in some way. And that ended up leading us to Magma.
Edward Frayna
On a typical stream, you might catch us drawing or talking art. We're all super friendly people, and I think we just wanted to build on that vibe and that community, bringing in more artists who had that same mindset. I almost look at it as a weekly hangout with some friends.
Brian Manning
We're trying to make an art community that's very supportive. We saw how competitive social media was and it was stressful for a lot of us, and we wanted to get away from that. We wanted to celebrate wins with other artists and build this community where we're all helping each other.
Ed is very good at providing lots of support and critiques, and I'm too afraid to do that. So, if you want a mom who hangs your art up on her refrigerator, that's me. But if you want to improve your art, that's Ed. And I feel like Elisa's somewhere in between.
Why did you decide to use Magma as your platform?
Edward Frayna
Because we used to just talk for, like, 3 hours, we wanted to bring in a visual element. Not just four heads in a box with a little background animation. That's not really an art podcast. So [using Magma] shows what we can do and also invites other people to come join and hang out and draw with us.
Brian Manning
Yeah, that was the biggest thing. We didn't just want to show us drawing. We wanted people to join us. Magma is where we're getting a lot of great engagement from other artists. People join our drawings that inspire us! Like, they fill the canvas when we're not there.
Elisa Bleakmore
Even for my job, we all work from home and during the pandemic, Magma was just a perfect program to draw on. There were collaborative drawing programs in the past that some people had dabbled with. But Magma was the first one that was on par with the levels of programs like Photoshop. It was so exciting.
During lunch, my coworkers and I would just draw on Magma because we used to draw in person at the office. We would do the game where you pass a drawing around to each other. [Because of Magma] we were able to continue that during the pandemic, and it was just such a cool program to be using at the time.
Brian Manning
Yeah. Until then all the other platforms I had seen looked like MS Paint, with the super pixelated brushes. And then with Magma we see these airbrushes and soft brushes and layers. We thought, “Let's do this. Let's go here.”
Edward Frayna
When drawing in Magma once a week with these guys, I always look forward to it just because it always fills up my energy levels as far as creativity, just hanging out and drawing with other artists. Even in real life, we do it once a month. We'll meet at the coffee shop with a whole bunch of local artists, and it's almost the same thing.
Elisa Bleakmore
But with that, everyone has their own sketchbook. With Magma, it’s the collaborativeness that is just so cool.
Brian Manning
Yeah, I also love the fact that since everyone is drawing on the same canvas, I can zoom out a little bit and copy what other people are doing. For example, I can use the Eyedropper for color choices because one of my weak areas is color selection.
Some weeks, I don't do any art until that Monday night when we do Art Pizza, and I feel like I finally get to draw. When we're all together, it's easier to draw because I don't have to think of what to draw. We just have crazy prompts.
How do you pick prompts that your community would be interested in?
Brian Manning
We started just by just shouting random stuff out, like let's just draw Star Wars. Then we switched to a random wheel that we had to populate ourselves, but during the holidays, it got very repetitive. It was just a bunch of Christmas or Halloween stuff on the wheel. Now, Ed found that card game.
Edward Frayna
Chaotic Draw Along. Artist Anthony Wheeler came up with this game. So it's a bunch of random prompts, and we just pull from it and say, all right, these are the three words we're drawing from. The prompts are great, they’re fun and challenging and make it a fun game to play with whoever is watching.
How do you promote Art Pizza and get new artists to join?
Brian Manning
Through our Discord server, which started again with the mostly local artists. It's word of mouth now, essentially. We have an Instagram account, and thankfully, Ed is driving all that because he has the biggest following of all of us and he's able to bring people into the Discord server and onto the show.
Edward Frayna
We also livestream through Twitch and YouTube and get a lot of people joining from there.
Brian Manning
Yeah. Like, other streams will raid us and we'll pick up new followers that way. And it's stressful when that happens.
Edward Frayna
We'll be sitting in a small stream, with a few people in the chat, and then someone will raid us with like 50 people. Like, “Oh, I guess we have to turn it on now.”
Elisa Bleakmore
The three of us are older, so the idea of the Twitch community and how to engage with people means you're constantly learning about how to interact with this new generation of people. There's etiquette and these rules and all this other stuff. It's definitely interesting.
Brian Manning
Everything we're doing on the show is outside of my comfort zone, and I think that's why I enjoy it.
You have artists of all levels joining your streams. How do you support artists who are just starting out?
Brian Manning
Well, we invite everyone to our Discord where we have resources and a channel for requesting critiques. But a lot of our weekly topics are very beginner-friendly, and we usually boil it down to how [what we talk about] would help an up-and-coming artist or beginner.
Elisa Bleakmore
When we have artists coming into the stream, these two guys are always so quick to be like, “Hey, throw out all your usernames, let us support you.” The self-promotion within the chat is always really strong and everybody's so encouraging.
Brian Manning
We're always open about people posting their links and their socials on the chat for Twitch and YouTube because we're trying to help artists get a following. Like I said, we're trying to celebrate wins with everyone else. We're not trying to gatekeep art. People think you have to be at a certain level or have a certain number of followers or go to like art school or something, but you don’t.
Edward Frayna
As far as critiques and giving feedback go, I'm on our Discord, I'm more than happy to just go through and review artwork and help someone. I had mentors who helped me achieve my goals, so I feel like it's my duty to help as many people as I can and pass it forward.
To find out how to join an Art Pizza drawing session and to see more of the group’s artwork, check out their Instagram! You can also follow Edward, Brian, and Eliza to keep up with their latest creations.
