Natural Media Tools in Manga Studio EX 4.0

I’ve been working with real brushes and ink lately. When using digital tools, the divide between my “real” work and my digital work seemed more pronounced. More exposure to the real thing tainted my perspective a bit.

Rather than give up my tablet for good, and the thought did enter my mind, I decided to try and create more realistic tools for Manga Studio. Sure, I could’ve leapt over to the SS Painter XI, but that ship is rotten at the core. Too many bugs to be sea worthy. And the good ship Photoshop still doesn’t handle linework as well as Manga or Painter despite some big improvements overall in CS4.

Natural media in Manga Studio? Oxymoron, you say? Not possible, you say? Well, after three or so years of banging Manga Studio against the wall, I’m happy to say I’ve approximated natural media about as well as the program is capable of. Recent updates on how the program handles “interval,” or “spacing” for you Photoshop veterans, have equipped it with a brush creator that rivals the latter.

Here’s a screenshot of some of my most recent brushes.

After creating the brushes, I had to find some way to export them. I started a conversation with Doug Hills (Manga Studio for Dummies author and stand-up artist chum) on Twitter and showed him the above screens hoping he would have some insight. He was excited at the prospects of using my tools and, after tinkering, we discovered how Manga Studio stored custom brush files on both Mac (me) and PC (him). He’s gotten my brushes to work, and vice versa, so I plan on offering a detailed tutorial bundled with the above brushes soon. Woo!