New Zealand Journal Day 4

New Zealand Journal Day 3

New Zealand Journal Day 2

New Zealand Journal Day 1

 

I'm currently in New Zealand for some time with my family, so for the next couple of weeks I'll be running sketchbook strips drawn on the trip.

Iron Duchess update

Another page of Fredness at ZCO.MX for you...

The Best Cat Names

A Few of My Disreputable Ancestors

Still plugging away at the Clip Studio toys. The first two of these reprobates were drawn from photographs of the gentlemen themselves; the last two are based on photographs of myself, fiddled with to varying degrees. I threw a bunch of the crosshatching brushes at this one, and used the Parallel Lines ruler to assist me with a lot of the shading on the faces.

William Kirby Johnson Langridge drank a bottle of brandy a day, I've been told. He died by walking off the edge of the White Cliffs of Dover.

I should cop to the fact that I'm not sure if it was my great-great-great-grandfather or my great-great-great-great-grandfather who shot the smuggler ("Digby the Pirate", according to family legend). And he only did smuggling on the side; by day he was a magistrate. So that's all right then.

Burn the Witch

Our Animal Pals

Today's strip is drawn traditionally (and very quickly).

Fargle Bargle

After a couple of days of sticking with what I know (and just trying to get better at it), I thought it was time to try out laying down flat colours ("flats") in Clip Studio (must get used to calling it that) and exporting the file to Photoshop for finishing off; I keep hearing about how Manga Studio/Clip Studio is brilliant for this because it has a feature that ignores line breaks and just fills in the bit you want filled in. My natural style is chock-full of shapes not completely closed, so this sounded like an ideal feature for me.

I (perhaps unwisely) tried drawing this one with a vector-layer pencil tool, to try and get a more organic look, which I think might have complicated the experiment a little. The fills seemed to have very arbitrary cut-off points, either stopping way before the break in the shape or going beyond it and stopping a little way outside it. Really peculiar. I might have a go with something drawn in a more traditional clean-line style to really get a sense of how it works.

Anyway, as first attempts go, not a total disaster, though I'm not convinced it was actually faster than my usual Photoshop method with all the fiddly corrections I had to make along the way.

Look Upon These Mistakes of Science... And Tremble!

Iron Duchess update

Another page uploaded to ZCO.MX in the steady drip-drip-drip that is The Iron Duchess.

The Death of Ambition

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

Iron Duchess update

Another page up at ZCO.MX. Daylight returns!

Some Comics I Pitched That Never Got Made

These are all real, by the way. I keep on knocking...

Further experiments with John Allison's Manga Studio brush. I'll say this for it, it's great for drawing fast, which makes a lot of sense when you consider John's astonishing productivity. The quickie dailies aren't the time or place to test it on something more deliberate and considered, but it's going in my permanent tool arsenal, for sure.

Piggy Wiggy 1-2-3

 No digital drawing today, I needed to do a quick strip. Back to the software tomorrow.

Jet-Pack Jetlag

Today's strip was drawn with John Allison's Manga Studio brush, which he very kindly allowed me to use. It's good! Apart from a beginner's error in panel 1 when I had it set to a much finer width than I really wanted, I think it's got possibilities. I'll continue to play with it. Many thanks to John, and do read his wonderful comics. (Giant Days by John, Lissa Treiman and Max Sarin is easily my favourite current monthly; it's absolutely delightful.)

Purple Ronald

Today I finally summoned up the nerve to try Manga Studio's perspective tools (see panel 1). Yow! I get why people make a fuss about them. I haven't figured out how to make the lines go at regular intervals yet (the windows there are spaced by eye) but as a first attempt I was well pleased, oh yes I was.

The inking continues to be a source of frustration; I'm trying a different Frenden brush every day but none of them feel right or look natural to me. I will persevere. The plan is to see out the month with these experiments before going back to good ol' paper and ink in April.

I can see a possible future in which I pencil in MS5 and ink on paper. Those perspective tools. Again, I say yow.

The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye

First thing: please buy Sonny Liew's latest book. It's really, really good.

I'm pleased to say this is the first time I managed to do the entire strip, including colour, in Manga Studio (even yesterday's had a bit of Photoshop tweaking). I opened it in Photoshop and was about to start fiddling with a few things, and I thought no, sod it, just let it stand.

Tried adding screentones in MS for the first time (now that I finally figured out how to install the "Materials" folder - I'd been getting it wrong for months and wondering why nothing happened). While adding tones is far from intuitive, I got there in the end.

I should probably be writing all this stuff down as I work it out, I'll forget it all in a week otherwise...

The Baker Street Peculiars

 New today at your comic book store: The Baker Street Peculiars, a comic written by me and drawn by Andy Hirsch, with colours by Fred Stresing. I'm very happy with it – all of the all-ages hijinks, Sherlock Holmes references, supernatural shenanigans and frankly fabulous cartooning you could wish for. Pick one up if you're so inclined.

From our friends at Boom! Studios, as is so often the case.

Wanted

Today's experiment was twofold: trying out some Frenden brushes I'd neglected to load into Manga Studio, which I found in a folder and had forgotten I had; and using MS to colour the thing, which I've been a bit scared to tackle until now, though it turned out to be relatively painless. I used a pencil tool for drawing it, which didn't feel very pencilly (possibly I was using too coarse a brush size, although I prefer the fat lines to the gossamer spider-threads I've been falling into); then some watercolour effect brushes for colouring, on a different layer (set on Multiply, so it was transparent). I'll live with it for a first attempt.

The Presentation

Guest word-strangler Andrew Langridge supplied the pithy texth today.

On the one hand, today's strip took me way too long to do. On the other, I figured out how Manga Studio's basic ruler tools worked, so overall a win I feel (the perspective tools are Advanced Manual at this stage; I just needed to make a few straight lines and a couple of circles). Haven't worked out how you get rid of the rulers once you've used them yet – for now I'm just dragging them to a dedicated "Rulers" layer once I'm done with them, which works well enough.

The anti-aliasing brushes issue is still annoying me. I wonder if it's specific to the brush I was using. I switched to a Frenden brush ("Bob's Big Belly") when it happened again today, and that was fine. Something to test tomorrow.

Iron Duchess update

Another page at ZCO.MX for you. All drawn by hand, with only the tints added via digital trickery; keeping the bastard machines in their place.

Pie in the Sky

More Manga Studio experiments. I ran into a problem with the brushes today in that I couldn't switch off the anti-aliasing. I did the usual thing of shifting it down to a hard outline in the settings, but the brush remained blurred. Most perplexing. I fixed it in Photoshop before colouring, but still. I think I might just be a Settings Idiot, as this is becoming a recurring theme.

Also found today that knowing how to use the rulers might be really useful. All the long curves here were done freehand, which I don't recommend on a Wacom Intuos 3. So that will be a task to tackle this week.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.