Roger Langridge's Blog, page 191
March 22, 2016
March 21, 2016
March 20, 2016
I Met a Yeti
More Clip Studio Paint experiments (which is apparently what we're supposed to call Manga Studio now; good luck getting that to stick).
Today I tried a rougher panel border at the suggestion of Steve Blatchford (thanks!) to take off some of the digital-ness – don't look that up, it's not a word. I'm not totally convinced it makes a difference at screen resolution; possibly in print, I'm not sure.
And I played with the crosshatching brushes for the first time, thus burning any credit I might have gained in tweaking the borders with an effect that fairly screams, "I drew this on a computer!" Heavy sigh.
March 19, 2016
Abandoned First Drafts
No fancy new tricks today, just trying to consolidate what I've learned. And to work quickly, which I'm starting to get better at. One thing I used to find is that the faster I drew in a digital environment, the more digital it looked; if I wanted something to look similar to what I'd do by hand, it always meant slowing down a lot – and making it look hand-drawn is, was and always will be the goal around these parts. I'm finding the gap a bit less obvious now.
March 18, 2016
The Hotel Fred Daily anagram game
Today's Manga Studio experiment was drawing with vectors, instead of my usual "raster layer" default. I can see how this might be fantastically useful on those rare occasions when a client specifically requests something in vector format, but for my own purposes? Not so much. But it's nice to know it's there. (I do like the fact that it looks somewhat close to how I normally draw; previous efforts at drawing with vectors in Adobe Illustrator always looked really wonky.)
March 17, 2016
I Dreamed
Thank you to the kind people who offered me advice yesterday (you know who you are) – greatly indebted.
Today's main experiment in Manga Studio was crosshatching, at least a little bit (working against the clock and all) – it's always been a part of my style, so I would like to replicate the effect digitally if at all possible. An acceptable first attempt, I think.
A secondary experiment was working over a photo (in panel 4, as if it wasn't glaringly obvious) with a pencil tool. I rarely do that sort of thing, but it's always nice to have the option. That was fairly painless, I'm pleased to report.
March 16, 2016
Her Majesty's Agents 002-005 Inclusive
All very silly.
Took the step today to consolidate the (five, at this point) Manga Studio pencils and brushes I use the most into their own subtool group so I'm not having to look for them all the time. Between that and the nearly-a-day I took recently to figure out the perspective tools (and which I still managed to screw up!) I'm very nearly (not quite) feeling at home with the software, to the point where I'm actually thinking about buying a Cintiq tablet and wondering how much stuff I'll have to sell to raise the cash.
On which subject, if anybody has some rock-solid advice on Cintiq tablets (or similar) for the professional cartoonist, I'm all ears. The point of me learning digital at all is so I can work simply when travelling, so portability is a must. Apart from that, I'm not set on any particular way of going about it. I've read Jonathan Case's advice, which was just the sort of thing I'm looking for; anything of that nature anyone can point me towards is welcome.
Took the step today to consolidate the (five, at this point) Manga Studio pencils and brushes I use the most into their own subtool group so I'm not having to look for them all the time. Between that and the nearly-a-day I took recently to figure out the perspective tools (and which I still managed to screw up!) I'm very nearly (not quite) feeling at home with the software, to the point where I'm actually thinking about buying a Cintiq tablet and wondering how much stuff I'll have to sell to raise the cash.
On which subject, if anybody has some rock-solid advice on Cintiq tablets (or similar) for the professional cartoonist, I'm all ears. The point of me learning digital at all is so I can work simply when travelling, so portability is a must. Apart from that, I'm not set on any particular way of going about it. I've read Jonathan Case's advice, which was just the sort of thing I'm looking for; anything of that nature anyone can point me towards is welcome.
March 15, 2016
A Day in the Life of the Fez
More with the Allison brush.
I'm back to colouring in Photoshop, mainly for speed (it's what I'm used to), but also because Manga Studio doesn't do CMYK natively; it has some elaborate conversion thing it does when you export it, which substitutes RGB values for CMYK ones, but I prefer my colours not to contain any blacks (it's cleaner for print that way)... and that's not possible with the conversion method. So Photoshop gets to fight another day.
