Roger Langridge's Blog, page 193
March 6, 2016
Sticky Chicken
No Manga Studio experiments today because I've got stuff to do and I'm not fluent enough with MS to do anything quickly in it. Back to the lab tomorrow.
March 5, 2016
My Fair Animal
Manga Studio Hothouse Orientation Day Five. I'm going to go out on a limb and say I've cracked the line weight problem by choosing one size of brush and sticking to it, at least for all the figure work (a smaller line weight for backgrounds isn't so much of an issue). Sort of getting there, I think?
The lettering, on the other hand, is driving me insane. PJ Holden has a very good tutorial on lettering where he says you can save your font and size settings as pre-saved settings, or "sub tools" (?), but doesn't say how you go about doing that. So I looked it up (I forget if it was in a book or on the web now) and I tried saving a few settings, but I haven't been able to make them work – except the very first one, which I'm pretty sure I did exactly the same as the others, but the others didn't work and this one did. Why? I don't know! Answers on a postcard please (or just point me at some tutorial that spells it out for us slow ones at the back of the class).
March 4, 2016
Chaplin Summer
The Manga Studio experiment continues. Today I tried using the Armin Nelsyn brushes I mentioned yesterday. I like them quite a bit! They've got a nice toothy, slightly random quality to them that makes it feel less like you're dragging a marble over a sheet of greased glass.
Still struggling with the line weight - the small figures are too thinly-rendered, they don't look all of a piece with the larger ones. I think maybe not zooming in at all might be the solution? I might try that tomorrow. One weight of brush throughout, just like when I draw on paper, and see how that goes.
March 3, 2016
Fido the Cat
More footling in Manga Studio. I'm beginning to like the lettering - not quite as flexible as Illustrator for the actual text, but the balloon shapes are very organic and easy to fiddle with (in Illustrator I have a folder full of templates I dip in and out of, but in MS I can draw each balloon on the fly, and it comes out looking roughly like what I would do by hand).
The inking was done with Frenden's "Inker - Nib Stiff", which I like better than the one I used yesterday, though still not there. I will continue to try out other tools and/or tweak existing ones. I picked up a set of brushes from Armin Nelsyn (the Natural Media Inkers set) which looks promising.
March 1, 2016
Plenty of It
Day Two of the Manga Studio experiments. Found a brush I don't hate, but still not great for drawing quickly. Persevering.
The Saddest Man In the World
I've decided to go back to putting the dailies on the blog – mainly because I'm not using it for anything else right now, and also because it's sometimes appropriate to add a few notes.
Today's strip, for example, is the first one I've done 100% digitally. I drew and lettered it in Manga Studio (actually Clip Studio Paint, which is the same software with a different name, but I'll persevere with calling it Manga Studio for now) and coloured it in Photoshop (I know MS can do colour now, but, you know, one battle at a time). I've used Manga Studio a few times in the past to ink an illustration, but this is the first time I've ever generated a page of comic art with it from beginning to end.
My God, it was a battle. It took me a couple of hours to figure out the most basic stuff, like how to do panel borders with a normal-sized gutter and save my daily strip layout as a template (the out-of-the-box defaults give you different gutters for horizontal and vertical borders, and they're unbelievably small; presumably that's a manga thing), and how to save the lettering font as a, what do they call it, "material"? A pre-saved setting, anyway. I wanted to get these things saved as defaults to save me time in the future, so it was time well-spent, but it was a palaver just figuring out how to do it, the "how-to" books I bought being very little help in this regard.
Then the actual drawing. I'm not happy with the final result, struggling to get anything out of the software that looks like it was drawn by a human being. I have some of Ray Frenden's Manga Studio brushes which were a big help here, and some Kyle T Webster Photoshop brushes for the colouring which went a long way towards saving it, but I'm still a long way from anything I would go so far as to call "good". In the past I've got results I'm happy with by working incredibly slowly; but that's not desirable with the dailies, which are supposed to be a dashed-off warm-up before starting my actual day's work.
Given my druthers, I would never go near it again, but I'm going to be travelling in a few weeks and won't have access to a scanner, so I want to get to grips with it in order to be able to produce strips digitally and keep updating regularly. So... I'll persevere for a few more days. If my one-hour strips keep taking me six hours, obviously this won't be a feasible arrangement, and I'll have to figure out something else.
Things I hear are helpful, which I don't have: a Cintiq tablet (still plugging away with my venerable Intuos 3); years of practice working with the software; blistering raw-hot drawing talent. So I'd love to hear any suggestions that don't involve any of the above.
