DGM: EX3 [fanart]

[life_of_eden]

DGM again! But in B&W this time :D I finally got around to playing with MangaStudio, and have come to the conclusion that I am going to marry the brush and G-pen tools and we are going to have lovely, smoothly rendered babies.

/extreme art geekiness

*koff* ANYHOOS.

Title: DGM: EX3
Series: D. Gray-man
Medium: MangaStudio
Rating: G

Comments

[life_of_eden]

Ahh, DGM is yummy ♥ And so is MangaStudio! If you're used to using Photoshop, there are a few similarities, but when I first started using it I was sooooo confused. I'm one of those people who likes to just jump in and begin clicking around and experimenting, rather than reading userguides, though XD; I think the biggest stumbling block was figuring out how to save my work as something other than the program's unique filetype. To be honest, I haven't used the program all that much yet, so I don't know about the screentone functions, but the pen tools are pretty amazing, IMHO. They have different sizes according to the usual 'mangaka' pens, like G, School, etc, and you get a really beautiful, smooth line with auto width variance.

MS saves your work as 'projects' meaning that if you're doing a multipage work, you can keep adding pages to the one document, rather than having to create a new document for each page. You can also do side-by-side comparisons of your pages to check for overall flow, etc. When you're working, you can either open a blank document and start from scratch, or you can import a scan of a rough sketch and establish it as a 'sketch layer' to trace over. There are some really great ruler tools as well, some for just regular straight line/parallel line work, some for doing panels, some for doing perspective work. Also, all your work in MS is resizeable without loss of resolution, which is awesome if you realize that you need to change your page dimensions.

I went with MangaStudio EX, since that's the full package with more tones than the first version of MS. If you decide to go for it, I recommend buying from The Academic Superstore, since you can get it cheaper there than from the official company website or the more popular commercial sites. The EX version is still around $100, while the Debut version is only around $30, but you do get more bells and whistles to play with.

Hope this helps!

Oh, btw, I linked you to the Windows version of MangaStudio EX, but you can also get the Mac version as well as MangaStudio Debut from that site :3

[life_of_eden]

Friend away :D Though, I must warn you I am an uber-geek when it comes to my favorite art programs XDDDDD