Tag: Manga Studio

BookViewer

BookViewer
This isn’t an actual title that I’m working on. I’ve pasted existing artwork and roughs into a booklet template.

This looks like a real life booklet but it’s actually a 3D mock-up generated in BookViewer, a feature included in the comic book program Manga Studio EX5 (but not available in the standard version of the program, Manga Studio 5). That’s going to be so useful to me. You can scroll through your virtual publication and tilt it to almost any angle.

I’ve made the most of a rainy weekend to explore the booklet producing capabilities of the program. As far as I can tell, you can’t easily print a booklet using Manga Studio, so I’m also reading up on the booklet design and printing capabilities of Adobe InDesign, which is specifically designed to paginate and print booklets, plus a whole lot more, of course. I’ll export the individual pages of the booklet as Photoshop image files from Manga Studio then paste them individually onto the page templates in InDesign.

Pencil and Paper

a4 paper trimmedI can get so far with the manuals, online help and video tutorials but to understand what the finished booklet would look like I’ve gone back to pencil, paper and ruler.

I’m printing at home on A4 paper but, like most printers, my Oki colour HD printer and my everyday HP Laserjet don’t print right to the edges of the paper, so I need to allow a 5 millimetre margin all around.

Bleed Area

I want to allow the artwork to bleed off the edges of the page so I’m allowing for a 3 millimetre bleed along the outside edges. Even so, I don’t want the text or anything else vital to the design of the booklet to go right to the edge of the page, so I’m keeping my main design area 10 millimetres in from the edges of the page and from the gutter.

Link; YouTube video Fanzine Export, Manga Studio Guide Episode 14 by Doug Hills.

In Search of Sea Monsters

sea monsters comicMy first attempt at putting together a comic strip using Manga Studio EX5. Still a lot to learn, but I’ve managed the basics. On a short trip to Hornsea last September, we’d taken Map Art Lab with us for some crafty inspiration and the project that we had in mind was to design our own version of the sea monsters that were drawn as decorations on maps during the age of exploration.

Panels Made Easy

An early comic strip of mine from the 1970s. I can see the influence of Frank Bellamy. The border was drawn with a ruling pen.

I FIND Manga Studio EX 4 is a like a cross between Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, combining vector lines (as in Illustrator) with Photoshop style layers and colouring but it includes additional features intended to make life easier for the comic strip artist, helping you out with speech bubbles, screen tones . . . and panels.

I like to use simple panels in a comic strip as a formal framework for my hand-drawn artwork. I used to draw these with a ruling pen (below) but now I draw a grid in a desktop publishing program and print it out, a third up from what will be the printed size, for my drawings.

The ruling pen that I used for the borders in my Romans v. Brigantes comic strip was this, part of a Jakar Universal Giant Bow 2001 set which features an extendable compass for drawing extra large circles. I bought it at the Eagle Press, Wakefield, in 1975, price £5.26 (the sticker is still on the box).
Queen Cartimandua hands King Caracatus over the to Romans. Castle Hill, Almondbury, Huddersfield, which may have been an Iron Age hill fort, rises from the mist in the background. The comic strip featured in my first book, A Sketchbook of the Natural History of the Country Round Wakefield (1978).

There’s a certain pleasure in drawing with a ruling pen but when I’ve got a deadline to meet anything that allows me more time for drawing the illustrations would be welcome. I’ve been watching some YouTube videos by Doug Hills, author of Manga Studio for Dummies, to familiarise myself with the process but for it to sink in I need to go through the stages for myself.

So here’s my ridiculously simple guide to the concept – I won’t go into every single detail – of getting a comic strip from rough to final printed version in Manga Studio EX4.

This isn’t the only way to do it but it should give you an idea. And please excuse my scrappy doodles.

  1. Draw your rough
  2. Scan it in grayscale (150dpi will be fine)
  3. Open a new document in Manga Studio (I went for A6 portrait, 1200dpi)
  4. Open your scanned rough and adjust it to fit the page. It is added as a new layer, which I set to grayscale (black and white makes it look like a pen drawing). In the Layer Properties panel, select ‘Sketch’ as the Output Attribute.
  5. Create another new layer, selecting the Panel Ruler Layer option. Initially this puts one big panel, a blue rectangle, around your page so you now need to use the Panel Ruler Cutter to slice it into panels then the Object Selector to adjust the dimensions of each panel to fit your rough.
  6. When you’re happy with the dimensions, with the Panel Ruler Layer still selected, from the layer menu choose Rasterise Layer. That’s the panels drawn! Give this layer a descriptive name, such as ‘panels’.
  7. Drag your ‘panels’ layer to the top of the pile in the Layer Palette (right) and, as you can see by comparing the two stages above, it now masks any stray lines between the panels, leaving white spaces between them. When you start inking, any stray lines that go over the panel edges will also be masked.
  8. To make inking easier you can switch the colour of your scanned rough to blue. Press the Switch Colour button in the top left of the Layer Palette to toggle from gray to blue (this only works if your sketch layer is in grayscale, it won’t work in colour or black and white).
  9. Create a New Layer, (1200dpi, black 1bit, output attributes ‘finish’) for inking. I used my pen tablet and selected the G pen, a basic pen, from the Manga Studio draw tools palette.
  10. When you’ve finished drawing you can export your page for print or for the web.

Two mysteries that I still need to solve; the line around the panels came out too thick and when I exported the image it was in negative, white on black instead of vice versa, so I had to reverse it in Photoshop. I’m missing a couple of options somewhere.

Manga Meadow

I’M ENJOYING my comics drawing course but I don’t want to forget the program that sparked this off, Manga Studio 4EX, so as I settled down at the end of the day I drew a familiar scene, the meadow and the wood beyond, in the unfamiliar medium of Manga Studio using my Intuous 4 pen tablet. It’s an awkward way to draw but it’s a good way to familiarise myself with the basic commands of the program such as selecting tool and colours, working with layers and exporting an image.

It’s never going to replace pen and watercolour but that isn’t the aim.

Sketchy Intervals

Mirfield from Charlotte’s ice cream parlour, Tuesday.
Old butcher’s shop, now a beauty salon, drawn from the opticians when we took my mum on Thursday.

I FEEL out of practice with drawing. I’ve spent my spare time this week learning a drawing program, Manga Studio EX4, but that isn’t the same as getting out and drawing for several hours. We’ve had a couple of mornings of appointments/coffee with my mum, which effectively breaks my rhythm especially as, partly as a result, I’m getting around to tracing one of the branches of our family tree.

I’m finding that addictively interesting, like a puzzle or a detective story.

Manga Studio

My attempt at the ‘Creating Your First Manga Page: A Quick-Start Guide’ in Doug Hills’ ‘Manga Studio for Dummies’.

As I enjoy drawing in a sketchbook, why should I go through the rather technical process of learning Manga Studio, a computer assisted drawing program?

  • It’s good to have a change occasionally and work in a different medium; I want to use it with my pen tablet, although you can simply scan in your line drawings
  • There’s a possibility that it could save me a lot of time on the structural side of drawing a comic strip

I had about 100 individual panels to draw for my Walks in Robin Hood’s Yorkshire so I’m looking forward to exploring the possibilities that the program offers to draw panels around each frame. As you can see, I haven’t quite got into that; Doug Hills’ Quick-Start guide in Manga Studio for Dummies shows a figure bursting out of a frame but the explanation of how to do that must come in a later chapter. Manga Studio is also intended to mask the parts of a drawing which overlap the frame, so that you get white borders between the frames, a feature that didn’t work with the method that I used to set up this page.

Dots and Stipples

It offers a lot of help with speech and thought bubbles and comic book sound effects but the feature that really attracts me is the ability to add tones and textures, which I’ve made a start with here.

It’s going to be especially useful in print as I can produce artwork for newspapers or magazines that is pure line; even the tone will be pure black and white, made up of tiny stipples or dots. Pen lines should be crisper as they’re not converted to half tones during the printing process.

That’s probably enough technical stuff!

Links; Manga Studio, PNH Comics; Doug Hills’ website