Lowlife: Hostile Takeover Part One

Jon Davis-Hunt's trulys scrotnig* cover for 2000AD Prog 1700
© 2010 Rebellion Developments/2000AD 

2000AD Prog 1700 is upon us, and with it the first episode of Lowlife: Hostile Takeover. This one's a real roller coaster ride - there's gang war in the Lowlife as the Yakuza make a move on the Big Man, but can Dirty Frank stop them when he can’t even trust his own Wally Squad colleagues anymore? Part one finishes with a real bang and the story doesn't let up from there. I'm drawing episode nine of ten right now, and I can't wait to see how it ends.

Heavy Metal Kids from the Judge Dredd: Robot Wars storyline,  Progs 10-17
Art by Mike McMahon
© 2010 Rebellion Developments/2000AD

For Lowlife: Creation, I had fun re-creating a classic Carlos Ezquerra H-Wagon. This time round, I delved a bit further back into Mega-City history for the design of Trev the Robot. Keen-eyed long-time Squaxx** may spot that Trev is a slightly-modified Heavy Metal Kid, the demolition robot that formed the backbone of Call-Me-Kenneth's army in the Judge Dredd: Robot Wars storyline (Progs 10-17). He was meant to be old, second-hand and tough enough to break into bank vaults, so the fit was perfect. 

Cross-Dressing Trev the robot, from Lowlife: Hostile Takeover part one.
© 2010 Rebellion Developments/2000AD

*For non-2000AD readers: "scrotnig" is a compliment.

**For non-2000AD readers: "Squaxx" is not an insult.

Manga Studio Template for 2000AD Pages

Unexciting but useful: my 2000AD page template with panel grids for 2x2, 3x3, 4x4, 5x5, 6x6 

UPDATE: I've now repaired the download link that was lost when Apple discontinued its iDisk service. I've added single and double page templates for Manga Studio 4, and a new template for Manga Studio 5, which is not compatible with Manga Studio 4 format and earlier.

Following an exchange with Ian Culbard on Twitter, I've had a couple of requests for my 2000AD template with page grid in Manga Studio format.

2000AD SINGLE PAGE TEMPLATE MANGA STUDIO 4

2000AD DOUBLE PAGE TEMPLATE MANGA STUDIO 4

2000AD SINGLE PAGE TEMPLATE MANGA STUDIO 5 NEW!

Installing in Manga Studio 4: 

Clicking the above link should auto-download the file; it's stored on the server as a zip archive, but may download as an ordinary folder depending on your OS and what utilities you have installed. Inside the folder, double-click the file "2000AD Page Grid.cpg" to open it in Manga Studio, make any changes you want, then use File: Save As Template... to turn it into a template file.

Manga Studio's New Page Dialog Box (Mac OS Tiger)
1) Page Templates tab  2) User folder  3) Page template file

To access your template, go to File: New: Page… (or click Cmd/CTRL+N) and when the New Page dialog box opens, click the Page Templates tab and then click on the folder marked "User." Your template should be in there.

Installing in Manga Studio 5:

Clicking the above link should auto-download the file; it's stored on the server as a zip archive, but may download as an ordinary folder depending on your OS and what utilities you have installed.
Manga Studio 5 doesn't have a special template format or settings; just open the file (double click it or use File: Open) and use File: Save As… to save a copy under a new name. You're ready to go.



I like lots and lots of layers (including lots of different layers of outlines and spot blacks), so you may want to simplify the layer structure to suit your own way of working.

Drawing from Scratch in Manga Studio

Roughs - most of the straight lines are snapping automatically to the perspective rulers

Rough Pencils - these are mostly drawn freehand on layers over the roughs,
using the Page Rotate tool where helpful

Last week I finished an episode of Lowlife: Hostile Takeover in Manga Studio for the first time, but that episode had been pencilled in Illustrator; with episode 8 I'm trying to draw the whole shebang from scratch in Manga Studio.

I decided to jump in at the deep end with an elaborate perspective shot; I wasn't sure how easy it would be to draw in perspective in Manga Studio, and if it wasn't going to work I needed to know straight away. In Illustrator I'd have to generate perspective grids and draw along them without the benefit of a Page Rotate tool; Manga Studio's Perspective Rulers allow me to draw straight lines that automatically snap to the vanishing points (top image). The Page Rotate tool helps the process along.

Rough Pencils without the underlying roughs - there's still some tidying-up to be
done here, but much of the page will be inked straight from these.

Result? This doesn't look much different from what I was doing in Illustrator, which is the point, though perhaps the drawing has a slightly more lively,  gestural quality to it (something I like). I think this went more quickly, mostly because of being able to lay down lines rapidly in Manga Studio - in Illustrator the lines have to be drawn a bit more slowly and carefully as they "jump" into a very slightly different position when finished; quickly drawn lines often fail to complete properly.

D'Website of 'Israeli Go Bye-bye

The official D'Israeli website has lain neglected for several years since my web-based activity moved over to D'Blog, so this year I've decided to let the disraeli-demon.com domain expire.

Since I do still get emails from people saying they find information on the site useful (especially the stuff about colouring in Photoshop) I'm putting an archive of D'Website up on http://homepage.mac.com/matt_brooker/Sites/dizzy/index.html.

Be warned, the navigation on the site is a bit odd, and the mail link goes to a dead address. I can't fix any of this for the rather lame reason that I don't have an HTML editor right now, and my web-fu isn't up to editing pages without a WYSIWIG app.

Barely Seeing Daylight

Badly behind on Lowlife: Creation Part 7 so at the moment my days are spent working like THIS!

Sweets for the Sweet and a Tweet for Me

With some reluctance I signed up to Twitter a while ago - I haven't posted about it before as I wanted to check I'd stick with it before making a fuss.

If you want to follow me, the account is disraeli_demon and at the moment I ar mostly bangin' on about Manga Studio and Alberto Breccia, but I'm sure there'll be something about Daleks in there at some point :-)

Snapped Like a Twig!

Panel from Lowlife: Hostile Takeover Part 7 inked and greytoned in Manga Studio EX
Lowlife © 2010 Rebellion Developments/2000AD
Lowlife Created by Rob Williams and Henry Flint

Okay, so getting back to the UK and faced with several days submerged in inking for the already-week-late Part 7 of Lowlife: Hostile Takeover, I threw caution to the winds and just started blasting away in Manga Studio EX. Nothing like New Toy Frenzy to keep me at the drawing board.

It's already paying off as I can noodle away doing fiddly backgrounds like this much faster than in Illustrator (and, surprisingly, Photoshop too). The final version will have extra grit and texture added, but this is what came out of MSEX.

Click on the pic to see it big.

Manga Studio EX

Tanks for the Memory; sketch produced in Manga Studio EX 3 to test the Perspective Rulers feature.

So, a couple of years back I picked up a copy of Manga Studio EX, a Japanese graphics app designed especially for drawing comics, and ported into English. Several people I knew were using it, but after playing with it for a bit I let it drop; the translated documentation was rather sparse and I'd not been able to figure out how to get some of the cooler functions to work. On top of that, it rendered greys by default as patterns of dots, a feature many people love, but which I find inflexible and potentially problematic (my first sketch produced in Manga Studio came out of my laser printer with horrible moiré patterning because the default dot screen clashed with the printer's output resolution). None of these things was beyond fixing, but somehow after I put it aside to deal with "later" I never got round to it again.

Then the other week I got round to watching the video of Dave Gibbons' "webinar" (horrible word) in which he demonstrates drawing in Manga Studio, and suddenly all became clear. Re-enthused, I went back to my old copy of the app, and within an hour I was starting to get to grips with the features I wanted, plus curbing some of the habits I didn't like - including figuring out how to rid myself of those pesky dot-screens.

Sketch of Dirty Frank produced in Manga Studio 3; no dots please very thankyou

Dirty Frank © 2010 2000AD/Rebellion Developments

Dirty Frank created by Rob Williams and Henry Flint.

This pic was the first result - I still had a few things to figure out at this point, but it got me fired up to try more.

Since then I've started learning how to use the amazing perspective rulers (which among other things, give me the ability to do brush ruling digitally for the first time - see the sky in the pic of the giant tank), and I'm starting to figure out the 3D import options (though whether that will actually prove more efficient than placing renders from Carrara into my pages only time will tell).

Where's this coming from? Well, aside from the love of new toys, I've been getting more and more disenchanted with my current drawing app, Adobe Illustrator, for several years. The last two updates have failed to provide either a page rotate tool (It's now the only serious graphics app without one) or, more importantly, improvements in speed. Worse still, one of the most useful tools, the Selection Lasso*, was removed a couple of versions ago and shows no sign of returning. Despite the name, Illustrator is really a designer's tool, and there's no percentage in Adobe developing or supporting tools solely for the tiny number of us who draw freehand with it.

*That's the former-alternate Lasso Tool with the black arrow, not the formerly-default-now-only-one Direct Selection Lasso with the white arrow, which is still with us.

Changes in my own work haven't helped; working for 2000AD has pushed me to do grittier inks with more rendering, which puts a real strain on a vector program where every line is a separately-memorized editable object. Things have got so bad that I currently add most of my hatching in Photoshop after the main drawing is completed in Illustrator. I've tried inking everything in Photoshop, but it's somehow clumsy and surprisingly slow; Manga Studio, on the other hand, was designed for the task, and feels like it.

I've had to refer to the manual a few times while playing with Manga Studio, but on the whole I've been able to figure out things on my own (the interface follows many of the conventions of Photoshop so it's quite intuitive to use). There are a few things I find a bit odd; I'd like it to be easier to draw in opaque grey, and I wish you could globally disable that damned dot-screening, but on the whole the app's what it should be; a quick, intuitive tool designed for the task I'm trying to perform. What makes it all the more impressive is that I'm using a legacy version (3), which is running on Rosetta on my Intel Mac, but it's still fast and stable. It'll be a while before I switch for professional work (I want to be more practised before I trust deadlines to it) but if I end up using Manga Studio to earn money, the $120 upgrade to version 4 will be a no-brainer.