Getting a Grip on Photoshop

I am a huge fan of Manga Studio. It's like, whatever I need to create a manga is right at my finger tips. Creating speech bubbles and text is easy, applying tone is simple, but at the same time it offers the amount of flexibility I need to make my pages whatever I want them to be.

However, I've always wanted to give Photoshop a try when it comes to doing colored artwork. I've had the software for awhile, but I've always been to shy to touch it.

Well, last weekend I decided to roll up my sleeves, find a good,  basic Photoshop tutorial that covers coloring manga characters, and give it a shot. 



I decided to follow the tutorial on this site:
How to draw manga - with Photoshop. A guide, divided in chapters, to draw manga for beginners


This tutorial is a bit long, but it's perfect for getting familiar with some of the basic tools in Photoshop, and learning techniques for creating anime style art digitally.


What I liked the most about this tutorial is that it covered how to clean up pictures after scanning them into Photoshop (During a previous attempt to use Photoshop, I scanned in a picture. It was all gray and I didn't know what to do with it...I sorta freaked out), and it has a lot of annotated illustrations that are easy to follow. It also cleared up a lot of other things about Photoshop that as a beginner, I did not understand.

So after hours of work, I made this colored illustration of Addison:


I really like the huge color palate in Photoshop. I think it might have more colors than Manga Studio. In the future, I am going to import line art for colored illustrations into Manga Studio first, simply because Manga Studio does a killer job cleaning up scans. Then after it's black and white, I'll export it from Manga Studio and import it into Photoshop so I can color it.

By the way, following the tutorial for Photoshop not only helped me learn how to use Photoshop, but I also have a way better understanding of how to use GIMP. In fact, GIMP has many of the same tools I used in Photoshop to create this illustration, they're just located in different places on the interface.  


This cute little picture of Addison will be appearing in next month's issue of Dream Manga.