I wanted to work digitally on my previous manga as well but since we hadn't started that class yet I did not feel comfortable venturing out to the digital manga making world all by myself. But now, after having just had a small number of classes I am already well prepared for what the digital brings!
The program we are using at school (which I also bought so that I can use it at home) is called "Clip Studio Paint", but in English it's usually referred to as "Manga Studio". This program really is fit like no other to deal with the making of comic books and manga in particular and it has a lot of functions that programs like Photoshop and Paint Tool SAI just don't have. I really like this program and I would definitely recommend it to anyone who wants to draw comics digitally!
I knew things would be a lot easier and go a lot faster with this program, rather than doing it all by hand the original way, but I was still surprised about just how efficient it was. It did not take long for me to never want to cut out another tone by hand again. Digital is great!
It's not just that putting the tones on the manga goes much faster, but also, if you made a mistake in your lines while drawing them - no problem! You can erase and delete and copy and redraw as much as you'd like once you've scanned the page!
Just today I when I was working on a page I cut out the head of a character and made it smaller, then put it back, and voila! Suddenly a drawing that I had hated (because the head was too big) had transformed into a nice-looking dude!
I have also, made atleast one drawing bigger for more impact (it seems like in Clip Studio making drawings bigger does not changes the quality of the lines, it just makes them a lil bit thicker). And I have changed the eye-sizes of many characters, and so on effortlessly.
Something good about putting on tones by hand though is that you have a lot more tones to choose from. Even though I have downloaded probably more than a hundred tones into Clip Studio, there are still many times when I wish I had a particular tone, and I cannot get it because it is not in the program.
But it is a minor problem and I can live with it.
So now I just wanted to show you some of my previous manga pages compared to the manga I am making now (the digital manga) (though I don't yet have any scans of my previous manga so there are just shitty pictures):
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| This one I made during my first year and has almost no tones! |
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| This manga I made during my second year and I tried to use a lot more tones |
Digital:
Maybe it's hard to compare since the quality of the photos are sooo bad compared to the computer-made manga. But when using the computer I have added a lot more gradation tone than I would have otherwise (for better or for worse) and I have also colored the characters eyes with tones and not just markers even if the eye is small. The characters also have more shadows on them, even if they are small.
(Sadly it seems like after turning these files into PNG's to upload them some of the tones faded and have disappeared and some you can barely see. The original files have a lot more depth.)
I still suck at manga, but digital sure is getting me another step in the right direction!
