Outdoor location painting with Manga Studio

 

 

Here's some recent Manga Studio EX4 painting studies of outdoor subjects. These had to be done from inside 2 coffee shops and a library because I had to use my laptop power adapter (dead battery). Although with the sun reflecting off of my aluminum Powerbook much of the time, it felt like I was outdoors anyway. The goals were to gain milage with various pencil compositing modes, geometric rulers, temporary layers and color palettes.

Remove paint.. Recall drawing

Last week while a neighbor spray painted his building, overspray settled on a car I was borrowing. As I was removing this paint, I realized that my cleaning set-up looked like this Infiniti comp that I drew 15 year ago. While the similarity did include some Q-tips and micro cleaning, it didn't include a luxury car or bottled water.. (liberties with scale were directed for first read)

Painting with Manga Studio

These studies were painted using Manga Studio EX4 based on the ballpoint sketches of a pick-up basketball game from my previous post. I mostly used various Pencils on these.

Coloring without exporting to Photoshop seems more and more feasible.

• update: some storyboards drawn and colored with MS only

• more studies (including rendering with rulers and 32-bit color vectors)

Grainy Manga Studio Pencils: work-around C

A) Pattern Brushes            B) Bitmap           C) Convert to Tone

Continuing my experiments from my previous post, I stumbled upon a third work-around to simulate grainy pencils in Manga Studio (and probably the best). What I tried this time was drawing on a raster layer with the Color Reduction Method set to Convert to Tone on Noise. Why is this the best? —because this way saves the steps of applying any filters (B) and of setting rulers for any necessary shapes (A).

Grainy Manga Studio Pencils

Recently, a colleague (who I had introduced Manga Studio to) told me that a client insisted on a natural pencil look. He therefore used Alias Sketchbook Pro instead. Since I prefer the MS interface, I wondered if there are any work-arounds to satisfy such a client. 
     First, I tried to copy various old pencil sketches (traditional) using only Pattern Brushes. Surprisingly, the linework reminded me of those I was able to draw using Corel Painter.

Although the sketches above were the closest that I could get to a natural look, using any shape tool added extra steps because the rulers had to be set first. So, below, I further experimented by applying Random Dither Bitmap filters instead, some to the lines only and some to the tones too.

Conclusion:
A) It's very possible to simulate grainy pencils in MS.  B) Although the Pattern Brush gives the better results, the compromise for speed by using the Bitmap filter is instead the best work-around.

Painting with Manga Studio's Pencils

Because the Pattern Brush in Manga Studio stresses my computer's processor, I'm exploring the tonal potential of the simpler Pencil Tool.  Here's a "painterly" studio version of a location pen sketch from my previous post, of a mother showing a photo she just took with her smartphone to her 2 boys. Since one can't pencil lighter values over darker ones (unlike Photoshop's misnamed "Pencil"), they were erased rather than painted over opaquely, as the screenshot in transparent mode over a green background shows. Revealing lighter values instead of applying them was a brain-twisting exercise though.