The computer side of drawing/colouring manga

S

ssxpro

Completely Average High School Student
Hi! Thanks again to those who helped me select the right pencils for drawing manga. I've now created my first picture (just a face) and have scanned it onto PC. It isn't really "inked" enough to start colouring I think, but to be honest, I don't know where to start for that anyway, which is why I started this topic.

I have a program called "Photostudio". I'm not sure which version, but it's "2000" or higher. I remember this having some layer handling capabilities, but I'm not sure if it'll do sufficient mustard cutting.

I have looked around at:

- Paintshop Pro 9 and 10
- Photoshop Elements 2
- Adobe Photoshop 5 Limited Edition

These are relatively cheap (when compared with the full versions) but I wondered if these programs would have sufficient power to create decent manga art. If they do have enough of the necessary tools, which of the above would you recommend, or do you know of another (cheapish) option?

Many thanks in advance!
________
Honda S2000 history
 
If it helps, the kind of thing I am trying to accomplish is something of similar quality to Siobhan's very impressive:

http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/31580686/

At the moment I have only one line drawing:

http://www.maths.bath.ac.uk/~ma0pnt/manga/firstmangapice.html

I've put my initials on it, but to be honest, I was working from the design in Ben Krefta's book "The Art of Drawing Manga".

My aim is to draw pictures, based on other people's designs for a while, until I get the hang of the style. Then I'll gradually adapt it to my own ideas and designs and start drawing my own pictures from scratch. The aim then is to colour them in a similar way to Siobhan's picture above.
________
VF1000
 
I have Paint Shop Pro 8 and its fine for what I need to do , which is mainly colour line art. It was fairly cheap, £25 I think, but probaly even cheaper because that was a year ago. You could always try downloading GIMP which is absoluteley free:

http://www.gimp.org/

I've never tried it myself but know a few people who have, they say it takes a while to get used to but works perfectly fine. I would try either GIMP or a cheap Photoshop alternative, you don't want to be spending loads of money and then finding out you don't like the program.
 
Many thanks! That's good to know. Does Paint Shop Pro 8 have the ability to do things like extracting objects from their backgrounds, or creating transparencies somehow.

I'm told that to colour manga pics, the best thing to seperate the line drawing from it's background. Is that all possible in PSP8?

Thanks also for the other link, I'll check that out too - particularly since it's free!
________
Video review
 
Ha! Brilliant! No joke - I just literally went to that exact tutorial about two minutes ago. I was just searching on google and it came up near the top. Thanks muchly though for pointing it out - it reassures me that it's a tutorial worth reading.

Thanks also for the PSP reassurance. If the photostudio I have doesn't do it, then I'll consider buying PSP.

One last thing - does PSP have some sort of "airbrush" that seems to be used a lot in photoshop?
________
Neon
 
It does but it's really hard to use with a mouse. So I bought a small graphics tablet for about £20 which makes everything so much easier. There are a ton of tutorials on the web which can be hard to find sometimes, if I find any other good ones I'll post them.
 
Many thanks once again!

For now, I've just been continuing with sketch work, creating a few more pics based on existing art. but hopefully this weekend will allow more time to start fiddling with the computer side of manga drawing.
________
Lsd rehab forum
 
I use Photoshop CS1 and it's quality stuff definetly recommended.

and err you don't have to "pay" for it, i mainly steal my software i've been downloading new photoshop, illistrator, painter for years, obviously this is very illegal, theres a good chance of getting virsus/spyware/trojans/etc and the biggest point being that it funds terrorisim but still it's the cheapest way.
 
mr-brett said:
and err you don't have to "pay" for it, i mainly steal my software i've been downloading new photoshop, illistrator, painter for years, obviously this is very illegal, theres a good chance of getting virsus/spyware/trojans/etc and the biggest point being that it funds terrorisim but still it's the cheapest way.
Click to expand...
The police are on their way to your house.
 
ive downloaded 'some' software, but at the prices that they sell for online and in shops is a little to much imo.

BTW, Love the avatar Dave. :D
 
WTFDaveMustaine said:
mr-brett said:
and err you don't have to "pay" for it, i mainly steal my software i've been downloading new photoshop, illistrator, painter for years, obviously this is very illegal, theres a good chance of getting virsus/spyware/trojans/etc and the biggest point being that it funds terrorisim but still it's the cheapest way.
Click to expand...
The police are on their way to your house.
Click to expand...

and i would have gotten away with it too if it wasn't for me blubbing it all over the internet, no seriously i expect them any day now.
 
Update

In the end, I went for Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0. I read excellent reviews about it and have been told that it'll do everything I need it to. It seemed to me to be a decent, relatively cheap, legal alternative to the full version. If it can't cut it, then I'll probably have to go for the gimp idea suggested above. Thanks again for all the help. However, one more question, has anybody here had any experience with Photoshop Elements 2.0? I got this instead of 4.0 because apparently 4.0 is very slow and cumbersome as well as being more expensive. Hopefully 2.0 will now be a good tool to use to create nice manga pics.
________
Mercedes-Benz R170
 
I use GIMP, so if Photoshop Elements doesn't work out i would say it's a good idea to try that as others have said. It took me a little while to get used to it, but i doubt it's any harder than any other program (i'm just a bit rubbish at that type of stuff, and got Necromancer to tell me how to do it). So if you decide to download that in the future i would be happy to help you with any of of the basics, plus the GIMP website has some fairly easy tutorials
 
Thanks for saying my pic is impressive. :oops:

I currently use Photoshop 6, though I'm planning on upgrading to CS2 soon.

Since Photoshop Elements is a cut down version of Photoshop, and appears to be geared more towards the photo editing side of things, it may not have all the tools you need for painting etc. If this is the case, then an option would be to combine it with openCanvas (at http://www.portalgraphics.net/en/), which is used by some amazing anime artists on deviantart (for example, http://lasaro.deviantart.com/), and is very affordable. There are quite a few artists who use both programs together, since they have complimentary features.

I'm planning on giving it a go myself once I have the new graphics tablet for my laptop.
 
Thanks all! I'll see how it goes with Elements (as you say, a cut down version of photoshop). I've been told elsewhere that it'll do what I need, but the guy telling me, despite being very intelligent, may not know all that much about manga drawing. Who knows? He might be right, I'll wait and see. If it fails, I'll check out gimp... and if that doesn't work out, I'll try open canvas.

On the graphics tablet idea, what do you guys recommend for (very much) an amateur. I will only be doing this as a gentle hobby, nothing more.
________
ENTOURAGE FORUM
 
A good graphics tablet is quite expensive, I've just ordered myself a Wacom Intuos3 A5, costing £230 odd from Amazon. It's very much a case of you get what you pay for though, and always worth buying the best you can afford.

I don't know about other brands, but Wacom are very good (they have excellent build quality, which is key), and some of the smaller, more basic graphics tablets seem to be very affordable.

Whilst a larger tablet is always better, I know people who can do wonderful drawings using an A6 tablet, so don't be put off by the smaller sizes either.

Hope this is of some help.

Siobhan.
 
Back
Top