IanDSharman on DeviantArthttps://www.deviantart.com/iandsharman/art/Inking-Mike-Collins-pencils-130766316IanDSharman

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Inking Mike Collins pencils

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Soooo...I thought I'd give Manga Studio EX a try...and the above is my first attempt at inking a page using it. The pencils for the above page, featuring everyone favourite Time Lord, are by the legendary Mike Collins.

I thought I'd also add a little mini-review of Manga Studio EX here, just my first thoughts on using it, as several people have asked me about it.

First up, I'd like you to forget the name. Ignore that it's called Manga Studio...because "manga" is simply the Japanese word for "comic", so this program should really be called Comic Studio. This is an important point to make, I feel, because I'm sure a lot of Western comic artists have been put off using it because they think it's just for manga. It's not, it's a program specifically designed for creating comic art...and that's another important aspect.

Many of us use the likes of Photoshop and Illustrator to create comics. These are both great programs, but unlike Manga Studio, they're not specifically designed for creating comics. What struck me when first using Manga Studio was that unlike Illustrator, I could just start inking right away, I didn't have to spend time fiddling with the settings of the tools, or creating custom brushes. Everything was just there, and it worked perfectly.

For digital inking, you're probably going to be using the Pen tool most of the time, which works much like the Brush tool in Illustrator. The big difference being that the Pen tool here is already perfectly set up for inking, whereas Illustrator's Brush tool took some considerable tweaking before it came close to working correctly for inking comics.

Manga Studio's line and curve tools take some getting used to, as unlike Illustrator's Pen tool they do not use Bezier curves. However, they do work in a very intuitive manner and you will soon get used to them and, indeed, find that they allow you to be a lot more expressive when using lines than you can be in Illustrator. Hatching and feathering are certainly a lot less time consuming in Manga Studio.

The Brush tool produces a wonderful dry brush like effect, which enabled me to create far more organic textures when inking hair and clouds than I could easily achieve in Illustrator. Hair was always one of my favourite things to ink using traditional media, but I found it hard to achieve that same feel when digitally inking. However, a combination of the Brush and Pen tools has meant that I can produce a far more "believable" look for the hair on this page.

Lastly, I couldn't resist adding some zip-a-tone (or letratone for us old school British inkers) to the page, as it really is a feature that Manga Studio excels at...and it's an effect that's almost impossible to achieve in Illustrator. In Manga Studio it's a simple matter of creating a marquee around the area you want to add your tone to and clicking a button. There are some incredibly powerful tools here for getting exactly the tone effect you want. Also, when you create a solid area of tone, it appears in its own layer, and anything drawn on that layer will be in that tone, rather than solid black. So drawing free hand, abstract areas of tone is made incredibly simple. All aspects of the tone on that layer can then be universally changed by clicking on that layer in the layer palette, so if you decide that you want all of your 20% tone to be 30% instead...you can do it with one or two clicks, and instantly change all the tone on that layer (I hope I'm explaining this well...).

Overall I feel that inking in Manga Studio feels a lot more like inking with a real brush and pens than inking in Illustrator does, and the end result is a lot closer to what you'd achieve using natural media, while still retaining all the advantages of inking digitally. Considering this was my first attempt at using Manga Studio, so I was still figuring out what all the tools were and how to use them as I went along, I'm certain that inking in Manga Studio is considerably quicker than inking in Illustrator.

In conclusion, I am, so far, very impressed with Manga Studio, and am looking forward to further exploring its capabilities.
Image size
3508x4961px 4.6 MB
© 2009 - 2024 IanDSharman
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renzomonero's avatar
Great work Ian!!!
It's amazing how the techniques
changes and progress year after year, I remember back on 1992
when I meet the pen and Indian ink (here in Mexico is Chinese Ink, but wathever), I was a shock 12 years old boy, then come Photoshop, and everything changes!!!
Its a world full of surprises!!!
Great work as usual, dude!!!