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- Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
Time is something that almost every artist doesn't have enough of. If you're an illustrator or comic creator you know just how much time and effort it can take to produce one great page. But the features in Manga Studio 5 can make this process a lot more streamlined and give you more time to create!
"Mastering Manga Studio 5" will teach you how to create more comics and illustrations in less time than you ever thought possible. By using the features of Manga Studio 5 like the Story Editor, Custom brushes, actions, materials, and 3D models, you'll learn how to make Manga Studio work for your style and workflow. Go from being a novice Manga Studio user to an expert using the tricks, techniques, and projects in this guide.
Learn how to make and share custom tools, set up left- and right-handed workspaces, make custom materials, alter 3D models, and create custom actions. By putting together a custom story project and making your own tools, automating redundant processes, and converting an inked art into a traditional comic art, you'll learn all about the advanced features of Manga Studio 5.
"Mastering Manga Studio 5" will teach you what you need to know to produce more work in less time.
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Seitenzahl: 299
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
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Table of Contents
Mastering Manga Studio 5
Mastering Manga Studio 5
Copyright © 2013 Packt Publishing
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.
Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.
Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.
First published: September 2013
Production Reference: 1170913
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
Livery Place
35 Livery Street
Birmingham B3 2PB, UK.
ISBN 978-1-84969-768-2
www.packtpub.com
Cover Image by Elizabeth Ann Staley (<[email protected]>)
Credits
Author
Liz Staley
Reviewers
Heldrad
Mark Egan
Carlos Naizir (Rizian Larc)
Mohammed Ali Vakil
Acquisition Editor
Saleem Ahmed
Lead Technical Editor
Balaji Naidu
Technical Editors
Vrinda Nitesh Bhosale
Anita Nayak
Rohit Kumar Singh
Project Coordinator
Kranti Berde
Proofreaders
Kelly Hutchinson
Bernadette Watkins
Indexers
Tejal Soni
Mariammal Chettiyar
Priya Subramani
Production Coordinator
Aparna Bhagat
Cover Work
Aparna Bhagat
About the Author
Liz Staley first started writing and illustrating stories when she was young. Her first novel was written by hand in a Marble composition book in middle school. In high school, she began to write another novel, the first book of that series was then published ten years later as The Hinomoto Rebellion. In 2010, she began her first long-form story webcomic, Adrastus. The giant robot love letter in comic form ignited a strong passion for comics as a story-telling form.
Aside from drawing and writing stories, Liz also loves to play role-playing games, read, watch cartoons from the 80s and 90s, and go for long walks. She lives in Western Pennsylvania with her very supportive husband, Byron.
Many special thanks to Smith Micro for their assistance with software and planning for this book. And to Julie Devin Minter for helping with proofreading and questions.
About the Reviewers
Heldrad is a freelance webcomic artist who has been posting her works online since 2004. She writes and draws her own stories, and lately, has begun self-publishing her comics in local conventions and participating in international Manga contests such as The Morning International Comic Competition and the Shounen Jump Manga Competition.
Mark Egan is a web cartoonist based in Oslo, Norway. He is an Irish expat, and originally comes from the Dublin region of Ireland, but has since lived in China as an English teacher before settling in Oslo.
He graduated from Griffith College, Dublin with a BSc degree in Computer Science in 2004, and following his time in China, began a career in the telecoms industry in Ireland, starting with work as a call center agent. He later progressed to technical roles prior to the economic downturn in Ireland, after which he migrated to Norway, where he continues to live and work.
Having been actively cartooning since 2003, he focuses on producing Manga-style webcomics. His main works of note are Back Office, an office comedy based in a call-center and Bata Neart, a 'magical girl' web-manga set in Ireland.
Both comics are published online at rawrtacular.com, which is the main portal of his studio "RAWRtacular Productions".
Carlos Naizir, also known by his pen name Rizian Larc, is a graphic designer, freelance illustrator, and comic book artist from Bogota, Colombia. He has been working in Manga-style illustrations and comics since the beginning of 2012, and one of his most significant works is the webcomic series Ereggia.
Mohammed Ali Vakil is the founder & creative director of Sufi Studios. Though an accountant by profession, in 2010 he found his soul work to be in drawing spiritual comics. He's the author of two comic books—40 Sufi Comics and The Wise Fool of Baghdad—both of which have been nominated for awards. You can get to know more about his works at www.suficomics.com. He lives with his family in Bangalore, India.
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Preface
Welcome to Mastering Manga Studio 5! You're probably wondering just what this book is going to be about, and what we mean when we say that this will help you master Manga Studio 5. Dictionary.com defines a master as "a person with the ability or power to use, control, or dispose of something". Well, by the end of this book, you are going to be able to use the features of Manga Studio 5. You're going to be able to take control of your workflow and your productivity so that you can make your comics and illustrations even faster than before. And you're going to be able to dispose of the features in the program that don't suit your needs so that they're no longer in your way.
It's my job to show you the best time-saving features of the best program that I have ever used for art. That is exactly how I feel about this software, by the way! I've used lots of drawing software in my life, and Manga Studio is, far and away, my favorite one. Especially Manga Studio 5, which has even made me like coloring my comics because of its easy to use brushes that mimic natural media.
If you illustrate, draw comics, or just like to draw in general, I think that you'll love Manga Studio just as much as I do. Especially once you see all the cool things that it can do. It's more intuitive than most graphics software out there, and is infinitely customizable for the way that you want to work. As you're going to discover in the chapters of this book, you can customize all of your drawing and painting tools, rearrange the workspace to fit the way that you draw, create and save custom page sizes and layouts for comic frames, make word balloons with ease, and run actions that will do multi-step, tedious processes for you at the touch of a button.
So if any of this sounds exciting and just what you need to get the most out of your drawing time, you're probably going to love this software. I can't stop singing its praises quite enough, and it was my passion for this software that brought you the book you are currently reading.
What this book covers
Chapter 1, Getting Familiar with the Story Features, deals with using the story editor to set up custom page sizes, multi-page setups, and two-page spreads.
Chapter 2, The Right Tools for the Job, deals with making custom pencils, inking pens, paint brushes, and importing and exporting tools.
Chapter 3, Palettes of a Different Color, deals with using color palettes and making your own palettes.
Chapter 4, Setting up Your Space, deals with setting up custom workspaces, saving those spaces, and switching between different setups for different tasks.
Chapter 5, Living in a Material World, deals with navigating and searching materials, editing and using existing materials, and making custom materials.
Chapter 6, It's Only a (3D) Model, deals with using the 3D options of Manga Studio, including pre-set poses, characters, creating custom poses, and importing models.
Chapter 7, Ready! Set! Action!, deals with playing and recording actions to speed up repetitive processes in your project, such as resizing batches of pages or setting up layers.
Chapter 8, Rulers and Speech Balloons, deals with using the ruler and speech balloon tools of Manga Studio. It includes the special rulers, such as perspective and concentric circles, as well as how to use the speech balloon tools to make custom balloons.
Chapter 9, Putting It All Together! Drawing and Inking,deals with making a multi-page comic file and making a custom material for the panel layouts. Then we'll be drawing using custom tools, and using 3D models to help with character poses.
Chapter 10, Finishing Touches, deals with using screentones and doing comic book style coloring using blending modes, the lasso selection tool, and the gradient tools. We will also explore a few special effects techniques, such as reflections and using patterns.
Appendix, Recommended Reading, provides a list of further references.
What you need for this book
In order to complete the exercises in this book, you will need:
Also recommended is a graphics tablet, such as a Wacom brand tablet.
Since this book is for intermediate Manga users, much of it assumes that you already have a graphics tablet. If you haven't heard of a graphics tablet before, I recommend that you pick one up! A tablet is an input device usually consisting of a board and a pen, called a stylus, which allows you to draw directly on the computer with a more natural feel. Wacom is the most popular brand, but there are many other brands out there. Most tablets do not have a screen in them so you do have to get used to some disconnect as you are not looking directly at your hand while drawing. However there are options out in the market today that do incorporate a screen, so that you can draw while looking directly at the tablet.
There are also some older tablet PC laptops that allow you to draw and have pressure sensitivity right on the laptop screen. Most of this book was written on one of those, actually. I currently use a Gateway C-141X Convertible Tablet PC that I purchased.
Who this book is for
This is not a book for beginning Manga Studio users. I'm going to show you some of the basic features and how to use them, but I'm going to assume that you have some familiarity with the program, especially where to find the basic features. If you have never ever opened a digital art program before, this book is going to be a great help to you once you get the basics down. It might even help you figure the basics out if you're one of those people who like to learn software by pressing the buttons and seeing what they do. (This is how I like to learn programs, for the most part.) But this book won't explain what a layer is, or what the pencil tool is.
This is also not a book about how to draw comics. There are a lot of those out there, and I'll recommend some of my favorite ones in Chapter 10, Finishing Touches. But this is not going to be a drawing instruction book itself. In Chapter 9, Putting It All Together! Drawing and Inking, and Chapter 10, Finishing Touches, I do give some general drawing and coloring insights that I've gathered over the years, as they pertain to the information being covered in that section. But this won't show you how to draw your favorite Manga character or teach you perspective drawing. Maybe one day I can write a book like that, but this one concentrates on the software and how it can help you save time on the illustrations you're currently doing. (Thus, giving you more time to further your skills by getting more practice in!)
Conventions
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "A save dialog box will come up, and by default our file name will be Sketching Pencil.sut."
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Click on the Add new settings button and a new entry will be created in our list of settings."
Note
Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.
Tip
Tips and tricks appear like this.
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To send us general feedback, simply send an e-mail to <[email protected]>, and mention the book title via the subject of your message.
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Downloading the color images of this book
We also provide you a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots used in
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Chapter 1. Getting Familiar with the Story Features
Manga Studio 5 is a great all-around drawing software. But it's primarily a comic creation software, and as such the Multiple Pages feature is its bread and butter. The Page Manager tab functions like a book, allowing you to see zoomed-out versions of all the pages in your comic at once, open them individually, drag-and-drop them to new locations, and add or delete pages from your story at will. It's the thumbnail view of your story—the digital equivalent of having your pages laid out on index cards and shuffling them around as you please. It's a CMC file that points to individual image files of your pages in one convenient location so that you no longer have to keep track of separate files, like in other graphics programs.
In this chapter we are going to learn the following:
Let's get started!
Creating a new file
In order to make a new story, navigate to File | New (or press Ctrl+N), or click on the new icon on your toolbar.
Once you've done that, the New dialog box will open. Make sure that the Manga draft settings(O) and Multiple pages checkboxes are selected. As you can see, we have quite a lot of options to play with here, so let's go over them.
The Preset drop-down menu has common paper sizes used in the production of comics. It also has some other sizes, such as postcard and common web resolution sizes. What size and dpi setting you use is up to you and the specifications of your book printer.
My rule is to always plan to print, even if you're just thinking of doing a webcomic and have no ambitions to do so when you first start off. You never know when you might have a huge hit on your hands and suddenly get thousands of people screaming for you to make books. Or you might just decide that you really want to see your work in print! Set up correctly from the start and you'll save yourself a lot of work—and headaches later.
Print resolution is at least 300 dpi. The higher you can go on the dpi though, the crisper your work will look when it's printed. Most of the preset sizes in Manga Studio are already set to 350 dpi. If your computer can handle going higher, to about 600 dpi or so, then it's suggested that you do so, especially if you will be printing your work in black and white. High resolution is great for black-and-white work and produces nice, crisp lines.
Creating and saving a custom page template
The standard size for a newspaper strip is 4 1/16 by 13 inches (34.29 cm x 11.43 cm). We're making the width and height slightly larger than our finished size because we want our active drawing area to be 4 1/16 by 13 inches, and we need to account for the binding size and default border.
Want to have a long strip down instead of across? Or set a regular page size to landscape format instead of portrait? Simply click on the arrows to the left of the Width and Height fields to flip them!
The Binding (finish) size is the final size of our page once the bleed is accounted for.
A bleed in printing is when the image goes off the page. In order to achieve this bleed, you must produce your artwork at a size larger than the final printed size, and draw to the edge of the canvas. When your work is printed, the excess at the edge will then be cut off, so don't put anything important near the bleed area!
Most printers require a bleed of at least one-eighth of an inch all the way around. So if you're going to be printing your comics in a 6 by 9 inch format, you will want to set your page size to 6.25 by 9.25 inches to compensate for the bleed. If you already have a printer in mind, be sure to get their printing specifications before you start drawing so that you can set your pages up correctly. It will save you time and a lot of headache in the end!
The Default border (inner) is the interior margin of the page. For most printers you should leave at least a quarter of an inch all the way around the edge inside which the important elements (such as text) stay, so that they're not cut off in the printing process.
The X offset and Y offset options for the basic frame will move the guides horizontally when the X offset value is adjusted and vertically for the Y offset value. Handy if you need a larger margin in the center of pages to account for a book's gutter, or if you wish to have a larger margin at the bottom or top of a page—say for text at the bottom or top with the comic title and author information.
Since we wanted our finished paper size to be 13 by 4 1/16 inches, under the Binding (finish) size field we're going to enter 13 and 4.06 inches (33.02 cm x 10.31 cm). The bleed will be an eighth of an inch on each side, so 16 should be close enough. Now, to achieve a bit of a gutter between the finished edges of our pages and the sides of our panels, set the basic frame to 12.5 by 3.75 inches (31.75 by 9.53 cm) and we have the dimensions of our drawing all set up. There are still a few more options on this screen to address though.
The Basic expression color option allows you to set the color mode for your entire file. It defaults to Color, but you can also select Monochrome and Gray from the drop-down menu. If you are creating a comic that will be in color, leave the setting on Color. For grayscale comics, use the Gray option. If you are creating a pure black-and-white comic, with no shades of gray included, then select the Monochrome option.
The Paper color option allows you to change the color of your base canvas. Since this can also be changed any time during the drawing process, I usually leave this white when I'm doing basic sketching, and then change it when I'm coloring. The drawing and coloring processes will be covered in Chapter 9, Putting It All Together! Drawing and Inking, and Chapter 10, Finishing Touches.
The Template checkbox allows you to pick a frame template material from the Materials library (covered more thoroughly in Chapter 5, Living in a Material World) to automatically place in your new file. There are many pre-set templates to choose from in Manga Studio 5. Checking this box will bring up the Template dialog box, where you can scroll through the options or do keywords search.
Up at the top of our dialog box, underneath the OK and Cancel buttons, there is a button for Register to preset. This will allow us to save the dimensions that we have just created and use them later on in other files. Click on the Register to preset button and then enter a descriptive name. We'll call our current settings Comic Strip—easy to remember and to the point.
You can choose what options will be saved in your preset. Resolution is automatically checked. You can also save the template, if you are using one. This is handy if you are creating a strip, or something that usually has the same number and layout of panels. Page settings will save anything under the Multiple pages options, which is very handy if you have a comic that is always the same number of pages per chapter or storyline. And of course the Default expression color option can also be saved, so that your saved preset will always be whichever option you selected.
Now, click on OK in the dialog box and our Comic Strip template will be saved in to the Preset drop-down menu for us to use at any time.
At the bottom of our New dialog box are the Multiple pages options. This allows us to create many page files all at once and be able to organize them. The Number of pages dropdown gives some common number of pages, but you can also enter a custom number simply by clicking in the box and typing a number. The Spread corresponding page(M) option makes it possible to create two-page spreads with our files.
Binding point is the option for what side of the finished book the spine will be located on. I'm an English speaker, so I click on the Left binding option. If your book will be bound with the spine on the right, click on Right binding.
The Start page indicates which side the first page will be on. In books that are bound on the left, this is usually the right-hand page (because the back of the cover is usually blank, or filled with an advertisement in the case of mainstream comics publishing in the U.S.).
The Save folder is the folder on your hard drive where this file will be stored. The Reference... button beneath it allows you to change the folder by browsing your hard drive. Click on Reference… and choose where you want to store your file. Then the Management folder text is the new folder that Manga Studio will create to store the image files. This can be a storyline name, an issue number, anything that you desire, so long as you know what it is. Let's name our Management folder Chapter One for these exercises. The Management file text under the Management folder name changes as we change the folder name, to show us how our file is going to be set up on our hard drive.
Now, click on the OK button to create your new file.
Navigating and rearranging pages
Once you click on OK and Manga Studio creates the pages, the Page Manager window will open. This window is the command center for our story file. We can see thumbnails of our pages, zoom in and out on them, and open pages to work on.
As you can see, in this view we can see thumbnails of all of our files in this story. This is great for a number of things, including being able to check the flow of your story. I often catch myself putting too many splash pages in a chapter of my comic, and I see that when I look over the pages in story mode. We can also rearrange pages in this tab.
To rearrange the pages, simply left-click on a page and drag-and-drop it in its new position. A red line will appear where the page will be dropped so that you can be sure you have it in the spot where you want it.
When you let go of the page in its new spot in the story, Manga Studio will need a moment to update all of the page information. Once that's done, you can continue working on your project.
At the bottom of your Manga Studio window, there are several options for zooming in and out of your page thumbnails. Three of these are the same options that are in your bottom toolbar when working on a canvas.
The first option is a slider that allows you to zoom in and out by dragging the light gray rectangle to the left or right. Click on it and drag to the right to zoom in. Dragging to the left will zoom back out on the thumbnails. If you're having trouble telling what pages in your story are what, you can zoom in to see them better, and then zoom out again to get a look at the visual flow of the entire chapter or a section of it all at once.
The next two icons in the lower bar are also for zooming in and out, but they do so by pre-set percentages. The right-most icon is the Fitting control, which can be toggled back and forth between the pages being laid out horizontally or vertically. Click on it and the pages will rearrange so that they're two across on the screen and fit inside the Manga Studio workspace.
Alright, now you know how to zoom in and out of your page thumbnails, so we can explore some of the other things you can do in the story mode of Manga Studio.
The Story management menu
In the main menu bar of Manga Studio, click on the Story section and let's take a look at the options for navigating and changing our pages.
The first section of the menu options is incredibly useful if you're working on a longer comic project, say a full issue or a graphic novel. In our current project we have the first page selected, so the To first page and To previous page options are grayed out. On pages other than the first one, those options would be available, as would the other options in the menu that are not active on the first page.
As you can see, the first five options are for navigation. Say that you're on page 100 of your graphic novel and you need to go back to page 1, use the To first page option to get there quickly and without wasting time scrolling. You can also jump to the last page, to previous or next pages, or to a specific page. If you want to see page 32 of that 100 page story, just select the To specified page... option and enter the number of the page you want to jump to.
The second section of this menu allows us to add and otherwise change pages in our story. There are two options for adding pages. Add page (N) adds a page with the same settings as the pages already in the story file. Add page (detail)... will give us the same New options that we had when we made our comic strip template at the beginning of the chapter. Click on this now and add an A4-sized page from the drop-down menu to your story.
You can also use this as a shortcut to add more than one page to your file. Let's say that we wanted to take our file that now has 6 pages in it and make it 10 pages instead. Click on the Add page (detail)… option under Story Management. Make sure that the Comic Strip template is selected in the drop-down menu. Then, under the Multiple pages option, enter 4.
Click on OK, and Manga Studio adds four pages to the file, bringing our page count total to ten (one A4 size and nine Comic Strip size).
The next item in the menu is to import a page. Click on the Import page… option and navigate to a Manga Studio file, or an other graphic file on your computer and click on the Open button. Import page will bring the file in as a page on its own, so you can even take the previous images that you have drawn and compile them as individual pages, all in one file. Perhaps you need to include a previous scene in a chapter of your comic story as a flashback and you don't wish to redraw it. Import the pages and arrange them as needed and you're done!
Let's say we want to duplicate page 2 of our file. Click on it so that it is highlighted with a blue box. Then go to the Duplicate page option under Story and select it. Now we have a copy of page 2, which is our A4-sized page.
Finally in this section we have the Delete page option. Stay on the copy of Page 2 and use Delete page to get rid of it. Manga Studio will show you the following warning:
You won't have to worry about deleting a page that you don't actually want gone. Since our copy of page 2 is empty, we'll go ahead and click on OK. Our file is now back down to 11 pages, one of which is an imported page with an image on it and the other ten are blank.
For the next two options under the Story
