Pretty easy to use.
This drawing done before I knew several things I now know.
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Mostly sketches. Occasionally a painting. Nothing political other than caricatures reinforcing the truism "Politics is Show Business for Ugly People".
18 comments:
These look great. But I'm curious to hear how the tool works...?
Here you go Marty. 2 minutes worth of how it works. Thank God for Youtube. My old head would never absorb anything without it.
I've sent you 6 minutes deep into the video. It may still start with a commercial. Should be skippable in 5 seconds.
Seems like a cheat to me. If all those snap and duplicate guides do all your work, all your doing is moving the stylist. Software is doing too much of the work for you anymore. In time ALL drawing software will be made for the lazy and non-talented so that a 5 year old will be able to operate. Real Artists will be obsolete or at least downgraded to nobodies. Where's the work and skill required if the software does all the hard work?
And that's the Luddite in me talking.
Perspective sucks. Period. Anything that shoves it aside and lets you create is a good thing.
I call it lazy.... tackling drawing problems is part of the process. With this way it just eliminates the problem associated with learning and keeps you brain working. This is part of the problem with letting the machine do it for you. I mean think about the laziness of the undo function. Using traditional materials...there is no such thing, you have to learn to get it right the first time or redo it. Thus a learning process. Computers dumb us down by doing it for us.
Also the easier they make the software to use, easier for a monkey to get your job. Secretaries and typists doing page layout and design, that now is a NON-Job now. Just like they want Graphic Artists now to have programming skills among other things.
Technology changes the job market, that's for sure. And it can be very hard for the older generation to adapt. Especially in a time when technology advances so quickly that you can't count on your job sticking around for the duration of your thirty or forty year career.
But people have been saying "Technology makes us lazy," since the wheel and lever were invented. In the big picture, I see that technology simply allows us to divert our efforts to the creative side of things, rather than the repetitive, mechanical tasks. We can accomplish greater things because we stand on the shoulders of new technology.
As for the perspective software, what it does is lower the value of the "perfect perspective" look in illustration, and raise the value of artwork that departs from that look. And I like that.
The invention of photography is a good example of technology affecting the art field. On the one hand you could say, "Oh, photography is cheating. Any five-year-old can work a point-and-shoot camera." And photography certainly took away a lot of work that would have gone to traditional illustrators.
But the photographers whose work graces the pages of National Geographic and Time magazine aren't the works of five-year-olds, but rather of extremely talented artists whose medium of expression is the photograph.
And people certainly value, more than ever I'd say, non-photo realistic artwork.
At least I do. :)
the repetitive, mechanical tasks are a bore but necessary to learn. If technology does it for you the learning is eventually lost because it's been relegated to a pull a vertices, a lever, or push a tab button. It requires no skill to do these things and it opens the door for the "lessers" into the ranks because of the cost and easy availability of software. Too many fan artists out there as it is. It diminishes the whole concept of this being a profession or trade.
Photography did kill the Illustration business back in the 60's. Just like it killed Movie Poster art
Yes but photo realistic artwork is also part of today's problem. I too prefer non-photo realistic artwork as it shows the artist interpretation and intention.
I agree with you that many art skills have been lost due to advancing technology, and I value a lot of the old ways of doing things.
For instance, I don't much care for the soft, fuzzy, modern look of paintings created on a Cintiq in Photoshop. I love and prefer Marty's crisp, old-school brushwork; its bold spontaneity that comes from hours of practice and one sure movement of the hand.
I had a college professor who used to make his own egg tempera from scratch, grinding his own pigments and extracting egg yolks by hand. He also bake-hardened and whittled his own pen nibs made from goose feathers. His work had a quality about it that you couldn't get with computers.
I on the other hand, have no interest in doing that. I draw with pencil on paper the old-fashioned way, but scan, color and assemble art in Photoshop the new-fangled way. And that too gives my work a unique look. I don't see myself as lazy; I'm just happy with a different working process.
True, I lack skills that my college professor had, but I have developed many skills that he lacked (including programming skills). Skills that have enabled me to make a good living for the last twenty-two years.
Mostly I'm glad that I, and other artists, have a choice about what tools they can use. There's room for all.
I know as much about perspective as I need to know. I have 6 hours of Marshall Vandruff DVDs on the subject that I've actually watched. I've done layouts for the animated Curious George movie where I had to get my damn vanishing pints about 6 feet apart and figure out how to establish a grid I could use.
Perspective is completely paralyzing to the process of image creation. You should never start a comic panel or any image thinking of the perspective grid.
Draw the emotion, the important elements, direct the eye where you want it. Then make it look like any incidental things hang out in space properly.
When you look at Scott Caple's amazing perspective rich environments for things like The Hunchback of Notre Dame, you'd think he's all about the grid. Nope, he gets what he wants down, makes what he wants to draw the basis for extrapolating how a grid gets built from there.
Most of my career of doing fairly convincing environments was done with made up grids. And I liked that way of working. Now my digital work is going to have stuff that proceeds like this- freehand on figures- freehand beginnings of backgrounds- then a couple of nice tight perspective guides to show how to skew everything up straight as need be.
I definitely want a hand made look.
And the deal with the tool is those 6 feet apart perspective points.
That's the perspective so hard to do on paper but is the camera lens you want to approximate how the eye sees.
I don't use the perspective tools in MS5, but not because of any personal objections... it's a style decision. However, I will say that I'm all for tools that make it quicker and easier to make comics. I'm using MS5 o create my comic and I'm happy to report that I'm about a 3rd of the way through my lettering/inking tasks. I think it's safe to say that I wouldn't be able to do this project without the digital shortcuts that are available to me. The time savings I get from not having to outline borders and ink word balloons are huge. I can take care of those 2 tasks in about 20 minutes now, a job that before would have probably taken an hour or 2, even in PS. Also, I'm getting the line quality I want and it's VECTOR ART! I can enlarge till the cows come home and it's still crisp and clean!
I suppose I could hand letter, draw word balloons myself and ink the borders by hand if I wanted to, but to what end? My lettering would never be as legible as a font, nor would my border lines be as smooth as what MS does. I come up with a better quality product in less time. Win/Win.
Wow. Rick has jumped in big on Manga Studio. I love it too.
Can't wait to see this comic.
Yeah... it's my go-to illustration tool now. I still us PS for painting and for general asset manipulation (resizing, pasting, layer FX, etc.), but for line drawing illustrations I use MS. I have it as work, too, so I'm getting more and more used to it. It has an undo memory as well, which is pretty nice.
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