Snow White's face fixed, final inking done. Starting with background color.

I made some minor fixes to Snow White’s face and cleaned up the line work on the house today.

After compressing all the inking layers into one, I removed any white so the layer was transparent. Then I fiddled around until I found the buttons needed to change the layers from black and white to color.

This took far longer than I like, as a long time Photoshop and Illustrator user, I have come to expect things to be in certain places and to act in certain ways.

I don’t know why I am not finding Manga Studio’s interface less intuitive for me, but the time spent learning where all the tools are and how to make them function the way I want is taking a major portion of my ‘drawing’ time.

I feel good with the amount of progress I made today. I hope I will have time to get back to the illustration before next week, but because of my schedule for the next several days it seems unlikely. I hope the time away from the program doesn’t slow me down again.

All-in-all, I am quite pleased with the program’s capabilities once I figure them out, but a good tutorial would be something I would appreciate. The tutorials I have been able to find are either too generic or assume the viewer is already familiar with the tool pallets. I would love some lessons on how and where all the tools are and how to make them work. I guess I’ll have to do it the old fashioned way. By trail and error.

08. September 2010 · Comments Off · Categories: Blog Tour, Uncategorized

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I missed a bunch of days, being out of the studio or just too danged busy with other deadlines to get to this project. I can tell. I’ve lost some ground on being comfortable with the stylus. Because of this I am not as pleased with the line quality on Snow White. Also, something is bugging me about her face. I’m not quite sure what as I have been drawing and redrawing individual parts for the balance of the afternoon. Time to move onto other things on the list. I’ll revisit it tomorrow.

inking in Snow White

03. September 2010 · Comments Off · Categories: Illustration, Thoughts

Today is one of those days where I have more projects than time. It seems to happen much more frequently than I can to admit.

I made good progress if not as much as I’d liked. On the other hand I did manage to write 2,000 words since last night. Not bad for a very busy few days.

beginning to ink in Snow White. Window stones laid in.

Gotta run!

Things went smoother today. Still having issues figuring out how to use the rulers and perspective. I’d like to be able to turn them off and on by layer, but haven’t discovered how to do that yet.

I find the manual nearly impossible to use. I will probably never purchase one of those e-reader things. Reading on the screen is just too difficult on my eyes. I also like to be able to flip back and forth quickly between pages. That is not happening with a 400+ page document on this old MAC.

I inked in the pathway and the house wall stones. Tomorrow I will attack the window and Snow White. I have to fix the depth of the stones in the window and still make the arm hanging out of the window realistic. I hope to finish with the inking layer during Friday’s session.

Here’s today’s picture:

inking layers for house wall and path added