“I’m going to do lot’s of perspective-y shit on this page!” – Me, roughly a week ago.
God I hate that guy.
As you may know, I’ve switched to digital art at the start of chapter two, using Paint Tool SAI at first, and Manga Studio 5 from page 61 on.
The first attempts were a bit awkward, but I slowly improved. What didn’t improve however, was speed. I actually considered going back to pen and paper for that reason, but then Manga Studio 5 came along.
In Paint Tool SAI, simple things like panels and drawing straight lines were a pain in the ass. Even more difficult: Perspective. This page was the last one I did with SAI and getting the perspective right drove me insane. I actually used a Sketchup 3d model of a train station, but it was still horribly inefficient. That page probably took me the longest out of all the pages I did so far. I didn’t have those kinds of problems on paper, with my trusty ruler.
Now we have this page right here, done in Manga Studio 5 with the help of some perspective rulers.
Oh my god, so much easier! So much more… reasonable! It baffles me how I haven’t seen something like this in other programs yet.
Anyway, here’s what my workspace actually looks like:
Looks confusing, but that’s just me showing every perspective ruler and every layer at once. Usually you only work with one ruler active at a time.
I can’t recommend this program enough, not only to comic artists.
Did I mention MS5’s painting capabilities? Those also handily put almost every other program out there to shame, probably only second to Corel Painter… so there.