My first published composite had a shadow going the wrong direction.

Nobody noticed except me. It still haunts me. That’s probably everything you need to know about how my brain works — I’m the kind of person who will stare at a shadow angle for an hour and still second-guess it at 2am.

I’m Frank, 38, a composite artist and digital painter based in Brooklyn. I grew up in Jersey City — my parents owned a deli, so my childhood was more cold cuts than cameras. But I fell in love with building images that don’t exist in the real world, went to art school in New York for my MFA in digital arts, and never looked back. These days I work on movie posters, book covers, and album art, and I sketch every composite on paper before I even open Photoshop.

I once spent six months studying how light behaves on water for a single album cover project. I keep a folder on my desktop called “failures” that I review every month to track my growth. I’ve recreated famous movie posters shot-for-shot just to reverse-engineer the compositing decisions. I listen to film scores while I work because they help me think cinematically, and my collection of reference images could fill a library. I ran into a retoucher named Maya Chen at a workshop a few years ago, and we ended up in an intense debate about frequency separation that I’m still not sure either of us won.

When I’m not working, I’m usually with my fiancee — she’s a video editor, so we speak the same creative language — or wandering Brooklyn looking for light and textures that might end up in a future composite. I write here at Pixel Monkey because compositing is an art form that deserves to be taken seriously, and the craft behind a great composite is worth breaking down and sharing.

If you’re into compositing, digital painting, or making things in Photoshop that make people wonder how you did it — you’re in the right place.

Want to get in touch? Drop me a line at frank@pixel-monkey.com.