What I Did Today 06/16/15

  • On June 16, 2015 ·
  • By ·

Woke up tired this morning. Spent today tightening pencils, adding word balloons, and adjusting stroke widths. I remember when I first started using Manga Studio I was confused on how to add a stroke outline to a layer. If you go to the Layer Properties you can add strokes, tones, and change the entire color of the layer. See this vid by Doug Hills for examples.

I often struggle with deciding how tight to make my pencils. Sometimes you can be detailing something and realize, “Why aren’t I just doing this on the ink layer?” Then again there have been times where I’ve inked something, come back the next day, and decided to change the layer color and use them as pencils for re-inking. I know artists who redraw things regularly over and over until it works. I prefer to feel like an efficient little robot so I tend to draw everything about 3 times. One rough pass to block things in, another tighter version for facial expressions and body poses usually on another layer, and then the final inks I take the things I liked about the previous attempts and add to them. I enjoy adding swooping lines and contour to the form. I feel I’ve succeeded when I look at a page after stepping away from it and see life in the character. It’s easy to feel down about things that aren’t working. I just try to stay positive about the things I can see that are and remember to work on the rest as I go.