I swear, I thought I’d never get this one done.
In an effort to find a more effecient way to do these cartoons, I tried doing the pencilling and inking the old fashioned way, on actual paper. Both stages went very quickly, and I was extremely happy with the results.
Until I scanned in the inked cartoon, that is. It did not look good when I went to clean it up. Manga Studio gives me a very nice, crisp pressure-sensative line. My pens do to, but they also bleed a bit on the paper, and that showed up very quickly on the scan. So it took me a while to fix that little problem.
Then there was the matter of adding the screen tones to the cartoon. You know, those little shades of grey I color with? Yeah, those were a bitch. I had to make them all by hand in Photoshop, and then the pasting in took lots more time than I would have prefered. I did learn a few things in the process, which was nice because I’m still feeling my way around Photoshop, but man I was not satisfied with those tones. Manga Studio has some very nice tones, and they look great when I paste them in. My handmade ones do not measure up, I’m afraid.
The lettering and adding of word balloons did go much quicker than it would have in Manga Studio, and that has led me to the following conclusion. For the next episode, I plan to do the pencils on actual paper, scan them in, import the scan into Manga Studio, and then ink them there. Then the cartoon gets exported out to Adobe Photoshop for lettering and word balloons, because that’s one area where Manga Studio really falls short. At least Debut does. Not so sure about EX. I’ll have to see.
And about what’s going on in the toon itself? Those screaming kids in panel one are all part of my “mom posse” playdate group. Patty and Mary of course are there with them, and yes, I have wandered off to capture story ideas on whatever paperlike surface I can find. Writing on cheap fast food restaurant napkins sucks, by the by. I know. I’ve done it.
See you in a week, hopefully!
