Your grandmother is clearly smarter than most people.

Have any of you illustration types ever experimented with Manga Studio? It's specifically designed for comic illustrators (paging Simon), but I'm finding it really intriguing. I've never really been deep into Photoshop as an illustration platform. I'm interested in refining those skills, so I hope I'm not wasting my time with this, but this seems like a pretty intuitive and powerful package. I'm going to toy around with it some more, but I think I could see myself sketching and inking in here. It can draw vectors too, but I haven't figured out if you can export those without rendering them as raster first.

And just to reiterate: Yeah It's a brill program. It works well for illustrating/inking images in a way that I can see would be benificial to the stuff you're doing, too. Colouring is, as stated, very basic though so you'll still want to export stuff in a high dpi, import in photoshop or whatever app you use for colouring.

This is a bit rushed, but done in mangastudio and then coloured in photoshop. It gives a fairly good idea of how smoothly it handles inking/lineart. Every line is done in one stroke with pressure sensitivity, and the sensation is impressively close to real inking. Just.. less messy when you cock up:



EDIT: Also, biggest issue with Manga Studio? In japan it's called Comic Studio (traces of which are still find in the naming of some internal files) but here we have to admit to using "manga studio". :( Why didn't they just get the license and called it Naruto Studio while they were at it, I wonder.

Cool/useful impressions Simon. Thanks. I started messing around with it a bit more and I'm pretty pleased. I still have a lot to learn about the basics, UI, layout, etc. That's the biggest hurdle when it comes to using or learning something new. It's so easy to just say, "Oh fuck this!" and move back into a more comfortable application. That sorta happened yesterday, as I'm back in Illustrator finishing an older piece. But it's not like I ever planned on making MSEX my main squeeze. I'm just really intrigued (and pleased) by the sketching/inking in this program.

The one thing I do not like about it: It allows you to draw in vectors (which seem more accurate than Illustrators brushes! If it weren't, I probably wouldn't even be here), but it does not allow you to save or export those vectors for use in other applications. It's a bummer that if I want my work to go from MSEX -> Adobe Illustrator (and I do), I have to trace it in Illustrator! That's sorta nonsense.

It's called Comic Studio in Japan? What the fuck? I think they uh.. got their regions backwards :P

Oh and if you know of any good newbie resources for this program, let me know!

I was just watching some of this: http://frenden.com/electric-zombie-tee-and-video/

In an ideal world, Adobe will perfect vector brushes and I'd never have to leave illustrator again. We already got phenomenal bristle brushes in CS5, and we have the insanely awesome blob brush, but I just wish they were more accurate. Sometimes you draw a line in AI and it renders something completely different. I also like the editing tools in MSEX quite a bit.

I do hear this though. I think part of the attraction I have to MSEX is that I've never really adjusted to drawing and inking in Photoshop. Prior to going 100% digital, I'd work on a light box and then trace everything manually in Illustrator. My exposure to Photoshop is mostly in photo-manipulation, and I don't really know how to set up my brushes in a satisfactory way. Another thing I like about MSEX: You can set a layer independently to 1-bit/b&w, which is pretty helpful when you're chasing solid colors and working in 1-6 color palettes. I've never been able to get "smooth" strokes out of PS without some amount of unacceptable softness. I'm probably just doing it wrong though.

I really hate how difficult halftones are too. They're not complicated to set up in photoshop, but it's a more lengthy process than it really needs to be. They're completely absent in Illustrator (without Phantasm CS). Come on Adobe! With all of that black magic you can surely throw us screen printers a bone!

Also: How is the HP Slate 500 shipping and not a single person has tried sketching on the damn thing? I know it's an nTrig digitizer (ew) and it's a pretty low end spec, but the thing could make a great portable sketch pad. It's definitely got enough horsepower to run Photoshop on the low end. It's overpriced anyway, since the TouchSmart TM2 has a Core i5 (instead of an Atom), 4-6 gigs of ram (instead of 2), a Radeon HD5450 (instead of the GMA500), and a 500gb HDD (instead of 64gb) @ the same price.. oh.. and a Wacom digitizer. But still.. the portability! It's like an iPad that can actually do things!

Aye, but what about settings for working in one color? I don't want any grays, ever, anywhere. That's when I run into problems getting "smooth" results. It's easier for me (not knowing any better), to do really-really-really-rough sketches in Photoshop and then just to trace everything by hand in Illustrator. And again, just with Manga Studio EX, it comes back to that whole comfort zone issue. When I'm trying something new or different, even if it seems like it will be highly beneficial in the long haul, it's so tempting to fall back on what I know.

I guess I could watch some digital illustration videos for Photoshop too, which might aid me a little. I'm still intrigued by this program but it's not like I need another application in my pipeline.

I'm still going to keep using it for a week or two and see what I think though :)

Belive me Megido, the vector handling of lines in mangastudio is an ENORMOUS improvement over using a round brush in Photoshop. On my way out now, but I'll explain when I get back.

Now if it were only that good in Illustrator. Direct drawing in AI has improved so significantly in the last two versions, but it still has a ways to go before it's perfect.

Annnd I'm back.

Alright, so, inking, yes.

The thing about inking irl and inking in a computer program is that pressure sensitivity is far from the only factor. Sure, you can use



...things like this for your inking to get a more "predictable" and mechanical feel, but even then you have the flow of the ink and the support of the metal both partially determining how lines come out.

But where things get *really* dynamic and lovely is when you learn how to ink with a brush. It's a mean bitch of a task I tell you, and even though I've been doing it for years I still rarely get my contours just the way I want them. I think it's largely a psychological thing though, because the moment I know something is essentially irreversible - be it a ball tip pen even - I freak out and fall out of my chair doing something.

Anyhoo, a brush will have a lot of say in how things ultimately look. It's like a "tail" that adds a few quirks to how an inked line finishes, and in turn it alters how you yourself behave. You may be less inclined to force lines to connect, less inclined to have a solid line on smaller details and stuff like that. This can be emulated with a lot of work in photoshop, but the nice thing with Manga Studio is how much control you have over the behaviour of the lines themselves.

Especially useful is the "correction" that allows a line to alter itself after it's drawn to become fluid. With a brush or a steel nib, it's nearly impossible to get "jittery", because of the follow through on both. In photoshop, the most minimal of jitter on your part will give you an ever so slightly rugged line, which simply does not happen in reality. Also, you can control the lead-in and lead-out of a line, so that it always considers the fact that the first and last thing that'll touch a paper is the very tip of the brush/nib.

Another absolutely magical thing is the ability to completely control the width of lines after the fact. There's a brush that you set to either enlarge or shrink whatever you paint with it. This is useful for when you ink something too dramatically, and you want to give it less priority in an image. It also works great for when you decide to enlarge a portion of an image - made possible because it's all vector graphics, so no pixelation - and then you want to alter the line width to blend with the areas of the image that are still in their original size.

I really had to pinch myself repeatedly when Manga Studio was shown off to me (hastily in an airport of all places!) because it really is an amazing piece of software. The only bummer is that it'll inevitably be a bit of a hassle to go back and alter something once you've exported it as a flattened pic and you're colorising it in photoshop. Minor changes are of course always easy enough, but if you at that point decide to alter a whole panel, or to use the aforementioned line width tool, you have to go back quite a few steps.

It's still NOTHING compared to inking something and scanning it though, where you never really had the ability to change *anything* you cocked up on.

Beyond these things there is of course a plethora of great features that specifically help when you're making a comic. Handling pages, "stories" and panels, slicing each of them up into sensible, editable "documents" of their own within the same "project". There's tons of stuff for speech bubbles and determining measurements and stuff like that that I find extremely useful.

And as for Manga/Comic; in japan there's really no distinction made between "comics" and "manga". Manga IS comics in the broadest possible sense, so it's more like they named it Manga Studio here because that was hot stuff when the software was first brought out. It's really too bad because it gives off a pretty lame first impression simply based on the name.

Well, yeah, that's why it's especially confusing.

I'm finally getting around to buying a new computer. Nothing super, mega fancy. I've a prel list of things that'll go in it that looks like...


This:

INTEL CORE I5 655K 3.20GHZ 4MB S-1156
ASUS P7P55D PRO P55 S-1156 ATX
CORSAIR 4GB DDR3 XMS3 INTEL I5/I7 PC12800 1600MHZ CL8 (2X2GB)
XFX RADEON HD6870 1GB GDDR5 PCI-E DVI/HDMI/DP
WESTERN DIGITAL CAVIAR BLUE 1TB 7200RPM SATA/300 32MB


And I'm coming up on case and monitor. Case isn't particularly related to the topic, but monitor is. I need one that isn't totally gung ho with colour, but one that isn't absolutely rediculously priced either. Any suggestions? Orbiting 200 bucks feels like a good rule of thumb, but make your case.

EDIT: Oh and I *need* to be able to tilt it back, otherwise I'll need a cybernetic spine replacement before long. And that'll be expensive. And also awesome.

I settled on one of these.

Image quality is supposedly fantastic, price considered.

I'm still rocking a first generation Dell 24" as one of my screens. I would actually love to replace it but it's still doing its job.

So stuff like Craig Mullins is mechanical and cold? Cause I mean, digital, right?

Come on...

And who doesn't sketch before they ink?