Last week I finally got around to reading The DC Comics Guide to Digitally Drawing Comics. It’s definitely on the short list for anyone looking to get started or making the transition to drawing their comics digitally.
Like a lot of these specialized books it doesn’t focus on technique if making art, but the process behind the art. The concepts that are emphasized are organization, automation and making use of the nature of digital images to give you more time to make great art.
The book focuses on Photoshop because that is what the author Freddie E. Williams II is familiar with and uses for his art. He has some tools on his Web site and also sells master page templates there. I’m going to be working in Manga Studio so I’ve started spending time thinking about how to apply his techniques in that program.
Most of it is easy to convert. In fact Manga Studio does a lot of organizing by default. The layers palette is divided into: image, selection, ruler, guide, and page. If you convert your panel ruler into layers, they’re automatically put into neatly named folders.
Other things are going to take a little more tinkering. I think Character Materials can fill the role of a stat library. The use of Photoshop paths for “chest symbols” is the technique that seems the hardest to translate. You can create a path based ruler in Manga Studio, but rulers can’t be distorted. You can distort any image you make after drawing with the ruler. The other option I think might work is saving the symbols as selection layers. Those can be distorted and then stroked or filled.