Changed Earth Blog

Manga Studio EX Rocks!
Posted 2006-10-23 23:39:29

It's not that Manga Studio EX does that many things that Manga Studio Debut couldn't do.  It's just that the few things it does do are really, really amazingly cool and awesome.

• Spline controlled curvey lines.
• Automagical word balloon generation.
• And the ability to create your own custom brushes, word balloon and other sparklies.

I love it though getting used to it delayed the latest page a couple days.  Still, I think that pages 7 and 8 are two of the best comic pages I've ever drawn.  I'm starting to feel a flow developing and that's really exciting.

Page 8 is also special because it's the first page I did on a single piece of 11x17 paper instead of drawing all the panels individually and then glueing them together in Manga Studio.

At any rate, on to Page 9!  Let's go!  Ikkimasho!  XD

Manga Studio EX
Posted 2006-10-15 20:55:51

So, this weekend, I finally broke down and order Manga Studio EX from e-Frontier.  I've been using Debut, the 'lite' version, since this Summer and I've been extremely happy with it.  It has the best inking system of any graphics package I've seen and its ability to deal with dynamic layouts is far superior to using things like Illustrator or Photoshop.  The EX version adds a lot of functionality such as dialogue balloons, custom brushes and the ability to integrate 3d objects into a layout.  Good for mecha and space scenes.

At any rate, it set me back a couple hundred bucks along with the copy of Scott McCloud's Making Comics, the third in his line of highly intellectual yet easily understandable books about the hows and whys of sequential storytelling.

Getting There
Posted 2006-10-12 20:59:35

I posted version 2 of the page 7 preview so you can admire all my wonderful inking.

It'll be done tomorrow night.  I won't sleep until it's done.  I won't eat until it's done.  Well, that's a lie.  I probably will eat before it's done.  But I won't enjoy it!

[Update 10/13/96 :: I posted the finished inked page sans dialogue and narration.  I'll finish in the morning and then get to work on Page 8.]

Page 8 will be done for Monday.  And then the next 4 pages are already roughed out so those will be on schedule.

Finally getting back into the swing of things.
Posted 2006-10-09 23:28:47

I decided I couldn't put off posting something any longer.  So I posted a preview version of Page 7 so you can see that I'm making progress.  XD  It's partially inked and I still have to drop a couple drawings in at the top, finish inking it and then add narration and dialogue. 

Inking, by the way, takes forever even if you use software to help.

At any rate, I'm going to try to finish Page 7 tomorrow evening and then I'll get moving on Page 8. 

(I just realized I still need to go back and ink Page 6.  Eeks!  Oh well.)

Busy Week Ahead
Posted 2006-09-24 19:00:32

So I finally posted the rough pencil version of Page 6.  Sorry for the long wait.

This week is going to be very busy for me at work.  So I'm going to set a hopefully realistic goal of getting Page 6 completely inked and getting Page 7 done by Sunday, October 2nd.

After this week, things should speed up a bit so I can get three pages out per week.  We'll see.