I’m gonna try and do a bunch of micro blog posts showing off one or two little features to manga studio 5 – or offering hints and tips. Here’s the first:
Creating a more realistic pencil.
This really only applies if you’re using a cintiq or a wacom digitiser (or a compatible one that allows you to detect the angle of the pen – not a feature many people use or know about, I’m sure, but check!)
Manga Studio has a number of digital pencil options, my favourite is the “Rough Pencil” but I thought it would be neat to try and build something on that that might be a bit better. So I create a “Shading Pencil”. You can easily copy any of MS’s built in tools by clicking “Create Copy of Current Tool” icon (it looks like a blank sheet of paper and is on the sub tool menu).
I created a copy of the “Rough Pencil” and edited the settings so that the size of the pencil is adjusted not by size by by tilt of the pen. I kept the density as a setting of pen pressure.
By default though, adding a ‘Tilt’ setting to the pencil size does the reverse of what you’d expect – held at a high angle you get a thick pencil, held at a shallow angle you get a thin pencil. So I inverted the curve on the settings, and, voila – now I can easily shade like I’m using a pencil!
Images: Settings used in Manga Studio, A pencil sketch. The entire drawing was done with the Shading Pencil. Thin dark lines drawn by holding the pen at a high angle and thick light shading done by holding the pen at a shallow angle and lightly shading – in other words, almost exactly how you’d use a pencil.
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