A fan just emailed me. They wanted to let me know how excited they were to buy Panthera from Shirt.Woot. It was news to me! Head on over if you want to buy it. Sales last, sometimes, a day only.
Mark Leitch, Vice President and GM of Smith Micro, emailed me to say that Manga Studio 4.0 for Windows is indeed progressing towards a stateside release. Furthermore, a beta version was debuted at the NY Comicon last week. Perhaps more importantly to the existing Manga Studio 3.0 user base, a fix for Leopard is forthcoming.
In the meantime, I’ll be doing most of my linework in Painter X. I have a ways to go before finding a brush that mimics the Manga Studio offering closely, but at least the full color painting tools are swell to noodle with. If only Painter could handle 1200 dpi files half as well!
I appreciate that Mark took the time to contact me. It was swell of him.
Well, let me preface this post by admitting a sad fact from the start. There’s going to be a lot of whining.
You see, about a year and a half or so ago I purchased Manga Studio EX 3.0. In Japan it is just called Comic Studio. Oddly, were it named Comic Studio here, I think it would sell a lot better. Or, hell, even calling it Better Brush Algorithms than Photoshop would be a better title. It takes a leap of faith from a professed Manga skeptic like me to give the software a shot.
CelSys is the name of the company that sells Manga Studio in Japan. In Japan, version 4 has been available for quite a long spell. Those of us who don’t speak Japanese, or use Macs, have to wait till it is localized and ported.
Up until a few months ago, it was eFrontier who sold the software stateside and who ported it for the Mac, though not as a Universal Binary. Recently, Smith Micro bought Poser, Manga Studio, and Anime Studio from eFrontier at a time which just about coincided with the release of Mac OSX Leopard.
Herein lies the crux of the matter. Read about the problems this causes and my proposed solution after the jump.
In addition to spring, collaboration is in the air! I really like getting to mix things up with other illustrators. And, man, has there been a lot of that going around.
With some art direction from a friend, I tackled an age old concept: Make a black panther ripping through stuff! So, with the concept suggested, I went to work trying to capture all the awesome that such an image should drip in. Really, if it doesn’t look like Lisa Frank mated with the dude from Trapper Keeper (Mad Balls!) and gave birth to a Garbage Pail Kid, I failed. This tee may be up on Woot’s shirt site. If not, My friend and I will likely shop it around. I did create it with the Woot demographic in mind, though.
See a heap of process and a gaggle more designs after the jump.
