Manga Studio EX and Digital Inking

Earlier this year I picked up a copy of Manga Studio to mess around with.  The Debut version of the program was only $25 on Amazon and I figured, well if it doesn’t work out it won’t have cost me too much.  I had also seen Doug TenNapel use it in a video he posted on Youtube.  After buying it I immediately fell in love with it.  It is super intuitive, and powerful.  It is the most powerful piece of comics software on the market.  Period.

When I started production on The Unknowns bk 1 I orginally wanted to do this entire book digitally, but I was really struggling finding the look I wanted.  I also struggled mightily with it and using a tablet only to make the comic.  It was hurting my wrist something fierce. Which I think a Cintiq will help with down the line. Recently I decided to try it out again after a great tutorial session with Stephen McCranie one evening.  I finally feel like I’ve gotten the hang of it and have been doing all my inks digitally since (wrist feels fine now too).  The nice thing is I dont think you see much of a difference between the two other than the Manga Studio version of pages look much cleaner and precise (which I like).   Here’s an example and little hint of where the book is going:

It just makes so many things very easy for the comics artist and is made with us in  mind.  I recommend you picking up a copy of the software, either the debut (which TenNapel made all of Ghostopolis with) or the awesome EX version.  The EX version is well worth the money if you can afford it for things like perspective rulers and 3d model importing that you can use for modeling.  Give this software a run guys!

Here’s some videos of Doug TenNapel being awesome with it: