Making Manga from Start to Finish! | Clip Studio SPEEDPAINT

hello hope you're doing well and welcome to a video that I actually began making last year but in order to explain why I'm only just now getting around to sharing it I'm gonna have to dip into some personal backstory for a second you see when I was a young boy my family took me into a bookstore and that's where I got my very first volume of manga ever since then my number one dream as an artist has been to become a manga author myself and be able to tell stories that could inspire people just like the ones that I read when I was a kid now the reason I'm even mentioning any of that is because in pursuit of that goal I've developed a habit of keeping my eyes peeled for any manga or comic related art competitions and entering them when I can because they're a great way to challenge myself and hone my storytelling skills all that to say I actually made a short One-Shot manga for one such contest last year and basically just wasn't able to share it online until the results had come out but now that it's all done and dusted I'm happy to say that the one shot I made managed to earn second place in this Nationwide competition which I'm really really happy about um and ended up getting displayed at the Japanese Embassy here in the UK for for a while alongside the other finalists which is pretty cool but now that that exhibition is over I wanted to share not only the comic itself but also the entire process of making it as a kind of Deep dive into my entire manga making process from start to finish and like I say I am going to include the full comic at the end of this video but if you don't want it spoiled beforehand there will be a link in the description and potentially on screen I'm not quite sure um but either way there will be a link down in the description so that you can go ahead and read the full thing over on my website before coming back here to see how it was made also appropriately enough this video is sponsored by clip Studio which is the very program that I use to make this comic as well as pretty much all of my other art nowadays so I'm going to be talking you guys through not only my process but also all of my favorite features in the program plus a bunch of new ones that I'm looking forward to getting to grips with in light of the 2.0 update now everything I'm going to cover in this video is obviously going to be based on my own process of making manga but I want to make it 100 clear right out the gate that there's really no right or wrong way to make comic the goal of this video is only to be a helpful hub for anybody who needs some advice to be able to use as a point of reference but I definitely recommend seeking out as much reference as possible from as many different sources as possible rather than just listening to what I have to say in this one because ultimately that is one of the best ways to learn anything anyway with that in mind let's get started foreign to cover here I figured it might be good to begin by showing you guys a general overview of what my comic making process looks like so here it is as you can see it's a pretty involved process but for the most part the only reason it might look a little bit way too complicated here is because I am really really breaking everything down into a bunch of different steps here but in reality a lot of these things kind of over weave and interlap and those aren't the words I was trying to say but you understand what I'm getting at right um basically it's a lot more of an organic process than this mind map might make it out to be at first glance and by the way you can fully skip steps and add steps and rearrange this entire process into whatever order might work best for you but for today I'm going to be going through them in the order that I do them in starting with step one have an idea some people might consider this the most difficult part of the process and some might feel like it's the easiest but the first building block of making any kind of comic is very much what it says on the tin here which is just having an idea it doesn't need to be anything fancy or detailed and it could come from anywhere from real life or a cool dream or by taking inspiration from mythology or your own Hobbies or even just the kinds of stories that you already know and love another common starting point is to ask a question like what if this happened in that kind of place you could even just have a random offhand thought that grows into something much bigger over time hell I remember hearing that the creator of One Piece originally came up with the idea for what is now one of the world's most well-known manga protagonists because he was sitting at his desk one day and thought that having stretchy arms would be convenient for reaching stuff across the room all you need at this point is a spark of something that gives you that oh that could be interesting kind of feeling sometimes as well an idea can come from a prompt for instance for this particular contest I worked on the prompt that we were given was the word connect and the whole challenge was to convey that theme within a maximum of eight pages which is actually a lot harder of a limit to stick to than it sounds so the idea that I started with went from being a single word connect to me thinking oh I want to show the connection between two characters because that's one of my favorite parts of Storytelling two what if two characters were connected across a great distance and there you go that's it that is as detailed as your initial idea needs to be because it's what we do with that idea from this point forward that is going to make things interesting Step 2 turning an idea into a concept this is one of the most fun parts of the entire storytelling process for me because it's a bit like a big connect the dots kind of jigsaw puzzle refining one idea into a more solid storyline leads you to having further ideas and questions that end up inspiring more ideas and connections and getting to weave them together and get a real feel for your story as it takes shape is just electric I love it the concepting stage is also one of the many parts of the process that is pretty flexible in terms of like um I don't know how to phrase it exactly but like it's not something that can only happen at this point and then it's done forever because like I say storytelling is organic and even as you're working on the final draft of your actual comic Pages there are more than likely going to be times where you'll end up jumping back to your story notes and changing some things around after a wave of inspiration anyway hyper fixated rambling aside what exactly is concepting well it looks different for everyone but for me it takes two forms Visual and narrative the visual development side of things usually consists of sketching out character designs and rough ideas for scenery and scribbling down notes about key props and powers and anything like that which might end up needing some kind of visual design depending on the scale of the project that you're working on it can also be really helpful to do full turnaround sheets for characters and props and whatnot so that you can easily refer back to them whenever you might need to it can also be really helpful to keep like a folder on your computer or a Pinterest board of inspiration and references for anything that you think you might have a tough time nailing down the aesthetic of at this stage however because I only had like a week to turn this entire comic around in between working on several other things I had to keep my prep work for this one really simple so I only ended up using my own very quick sketches for the concepting stage here rather than spending a ton of time that I didn't have making an entire mood board and refining everything several times over when working on bigger projects though I much prefer taking my time to go over everything more thoroughly when I was first thinking of potential story ideas for this manga competition I knew I wanted to go on a Sci-Fi kind of Direction with it which is why some of my initial notes feature an astronaut or two and as you can see here I did sketch out a design for what would end up becoming the main character however when it came time to actually draw the pages out later on I ended up making them look a fair bit older and more scruffy looking because once I'd finished blocking out the entire plot I felt like that fit their situation and what would become quite a grouchy personality a whole lot more speaking of plot besides all of that kind of visual development like I say another major part of the concepting process is building the groundwork for the actual story that you're going to be telling I tend to go about it by jotting down all of the scenes and moments that I know I want to include before connecting the dots between them by going back and forth to fill in any gaps and unanswer questions until I eventually have a way more detailed timeline to work with oftentimes I even end up rearranging the order of events within a story entirely until I feel like everything is Flowing along together in the best way also typically I don't tend to count myself as much of a writer even though I kind of actually have done a surprising amount of writing in my time but one bit of advice that I really would want to give at least when it comes the story writing and this is whether you're aiming for something long form or just a short one shot is that being concise is a very valuable skill and I say all of this as a person who has struggled with this exact kind of overthinking for the majority of my creative life it can be really easy to get bogged down in feeling like you have to know every little thing about the world you're trying to put together and all the characters that live in it and convey all of that information to your readers all at once all the time but even though it might be helpful for you to know everything that's happening behind the scenes of your story it's also important to find a balance between what you decide to actually show or have your characters say outright and the things that you just imply or even keep completely hidden instead a lot of the time letting certain things remain unknown so the audience can ask questions is much more effective than basically just laying all your cards on the table and telling them everything that you know immediately anyway that's more of a specific story writing tip but having said all that some people don't even bother with making an overall plot outline in the first place I got a book a while back that contained interviews with a bunch of different manga offers and it turns out that apparently the creator of Chainsaw man makes this story up as he goes which I gotta say is a wildly intimidating concept to me but I both fear and respect the hustle um step 3 scripting this is another very does what it says on the tin kind of stage after building up some kind of groundwork in the form of visual designs and a rough plot outline I open up a Word document and work on refining that outline into a final script and this is going to look different for everybody some folks go Shakespeare style and leave out any kind of scene descriptions in stage Direction in favor of only laying out the dialogue some people will go more of a classic script kind of way with it by setting the scene and describing a character's actions alongside the lines that they're going to say and some people even prefer to write it out more like a novel and pack the written side of things with more flowery detail about the scenery and the character's emotions and basically everything else if you're working as part of a team where one person writes in the other drawers it's important to work together to find a format that you can easily understand and easily make notes on so that you can Mark where you might need to put page breaks and extra panels to let things breathe scripting can also at least I think be one of if not the most impactful parts of the process when it comes to developing your characters because this is where their personality is going to take shape Beyond just giving them a certain kind of pose or outfit whenever you draw them and what I mean by that is that like yeah you could have a cool looking visual for a character but what actually gives them character and makes them engaging and often even helps to inform the way that they look in the grand scheme of things is the way that they behave their mannerisms that they have an accent are they timid or aggressive or friendly and does that align with what you might think when you first look at them and moreover What feelings do they feel and what reactions do they provoke when interacting with other characters all those aspects and more are the kind of things that really get my brain buzzing to think about because those kind of nuances are what really make a character come to life and make them believable for thumbnails so once I have a script ready to go I move on to doing the thumbnails you could also call them storyboards or layouts or probably a bunch of other names as well but the long and short of it is that this is the part where you do your rough scribbly does not need to be clean whatsoever kind of workings out of how you want to translate your story from concept into Comic again this is going to look different for everyone but one point of reference that you can look out for is that sometimes in printed manga volumes they will include the before and afters of certain pages so that you can see how that particular author takes their pages from rough to final form but anyway when it comes to thumbnailing for me I kind of do a very mixed bundle of like sometimes I will draw on paper and sometimes it'll be digital and sometimes I'll try to rough out potential camera angles in a series of rectangles as if it were a storyboard for film while other times I'll just do a bunch of random drawings all over a page while trying to narrow down what might look good for different story beats but the real Crux of my personal process for doing layouts is that I will take whatever Doodles I have and then I scrapbook them together digitally into a rough arrangement of comic panels by AI copy and pasting and resizing them the more traditional method which I also used to use before adopting this formal manic technique that I currently go with would be to really quickly rough out a panel Arrangement that you think looks good and fits the flow of your scene and then doodle what you want the content of those panels to be basically I kind of do it in a very round about and backwards way but that tends to be the method that a lot of people go with whichever way you go when mapping out your layouts though you've got to remember to factor in room for speech bubbles and sound effects and also bear in mind that certain moments will call for different kinds of panels for example as a very general rule of thumb I'd recommend putting a panel showing some kind of background element when your scene moves to a new location to let your readers know where things are now happening and also that having elements popping out of panels or having a panel that fills the entire page all the way to the edge can give things more of a dynamic feeling the size of your paneling can also make a massive difference using a big panel or a full page spread for a big impactful shot will make it feel like more of a highlight and putting a small panel right before a big one like that will make it feel like it's building up to that bigger moment but hey there are plenty of rules of thumb like that which you can learn by reading a ton of manga and then bend and break in whatever way you find the most fun for the kind of story that you're telling the main bit of advice that I found to be pretty Universal when doing layouts though is that whichever direction your comic reads in you're usually going to want to avoid having a layout for one page that looks too similar to the pages directly before or after it unless of course you have a deliberate reason for giving those pages more of a monotonous or repetitive feeling anyway after getting all of your layouts all done and dusted it's time to move on to the main event step 5 page prep and I say step 5 as if it's all one thing but really I'm treating this portion as a kind of umbrella category because there's a lot of little bits and pieces that I tend to do at this point which all basically amount to things I try to get out of the way before tackling the heavy duty drawing work obviously this only really applies if you're working digitally like I do but this is kind of the point Beyond which everything that I do is gonna happen digitally and no matter what kind of comic you're aiming to create you're going to be faced with a lot of options when opening a new canvas in clip Studio my go-to settings look like this which basically will just open up an A4 sized illustration type canvas but if you use the comic type instead there are going to be a bunch of different settings that will allow you to add blue page guidelines to Mark where the bleed trim and text boundaries would be for printing and customize them to suit whatever specifications you might be working to down to the millimeter also a feature which I sadly only got to grips with after I'd already finished my entry for this comic competition is the fact that you can set up multiple comic Pages At Once by checking the multiple page option and in doing so you'll create a story file which will let you manage all the pages in a comic at once and switch between them easily instead of going through and making new files for every page individually which is something that I know is going to be really helpful when creating a series chapter by chapter the really cool thing about setting your Comics up this way though is that clip Studio has a special kind of print preview feature for story files which turns them into a 3D model of an actual book that you can turn the pages of and rotate and look at in its entirety as if it were already published also for anybody who might be looking to make some kind of scrolling comic or webtoon clip studio also has you covered in that department in all honesty I don't really know a whole bunch about webtoons in general so I don't know a ton about this particular kind of setup but it does look like you can easily organize your webtoon canvases in a similar way to story files by setting the number of page divisions that you want and I also know that the 2.0 update to the program also brought in a feature that lets you remove or insert some extra space into a scrolling canvas like this anywhere that it might be needed just by going to the edit menu and selecting the change canvas height option now next up paneling now I know I did just mention that by using a comic canvas you can automatically input the guidelines that you might need for printing purposes and in order to help you align your panels and text but because I used an illustration canvas for these pages I ended up just importing my own pre-made template as a layer instead I know I've mentioned this template in the past but I'll try and put a link to it in the video description here too just in case it might be useful for any of you guys but yeah anyway so when it comes to paneling this is where the layout sketches that I made before are going to come into play because what I do to get started here is copy and paste my layout thumbnails onto their respective pages and then size them up to use as a base for laying my final drafts out cleanly also side note it's at this point in the video that I realized that I recorded all of my process footage in the wrong aspect ratio so I actually can't show you guys my layers palette or what my workspace look like in general while I was working on these but I am still going to be doing my best to actually show you guys any of the relevant tools and features that I might be talking about so uh yeah just a heads up that I might need to cut away to show you certain things or I might end up putting examples on the left hand side here instead the reason that I even mentioned that little recording mistake anyway is because there is something that I wanted to show you at this point that got cut off which is that there is a specific panel drawing tool in clip studio called the frame border tool and when you use it it will make a whole new folder in your layers palette called frame one Frame 2 and so on which will automatically keep anything drawn inside them contained within the bounds of that panel the way that I tend to use it to make sure that all of my frames align neatly around the edges though is to make one rectangular panel along the guidelines of my page and then divide it by switching tabs in the tool palette and either using the one called divide frame folder to split the panel with guttering while also separating it into one of those frame 1 and Frame 2 kind of folders or just by using the Divide frame border option to add guttering to a single panel which can be helpful when you want the same drawing to flow between multiple sections you can make curved and angular guttering by changing the shape of division that you have selected and you can also change the size of your guttering to fit whatever you might need personally I prefer having the horizontal gaps a bit wider than the vertical ones because that's the kind of industry standard that you'll see in most Comics you may have also noticed that alongside doing the paneling I tend to work on putting in any text boxes and speech bubbles at the same time this is mostly personal preference because I know some people prefer to do speech bubbles at the very end but for me I'm more of a fan of getting them out of the way at this stage all in one go because for one thing they can get a little tedious but also because that way I can make sure that all of the text fits onto the page and resize my panels accordingly before doing any drawing and potentially wasting space or having to make major corrections to the artwork later down the line when using the balloon tool in clip Studio it's a bit similar to the paneling feature in that it has its own special attributes and the new layer that it makes when you use it will behave in a certain way namely that when using the text tool after making a balloon it will automatically align your text to the middle of the speech bubble that you click on and you'll be able to resize that bubble without affecting the text inside it in any way while still keeping them tethered together as one object one of the most convenient things that I find with the balloon feature as well is that it's quite space-saving which is to say that you can make multiple balloons and they will automatic automatically appear as part of the same layer and the text inside each of them will appear as part of that same layer as well while all still being able to be adjusted individually by now I also have learned a bit more about making custom balloons but at the time of working on this comic I was still getting to grips with that notion so you may notice as I'm working on these Pages here that I did have a bit of a struggle trying to make my own like spiky balloons for certain bits of dialogue and uh yeah like I say I didn't have a whole lot of time to make this comic so I kind of had to resort to more traditional manual methods for those um there is also another kind of time saving feature in clip Studio that I am aware of but I haven't actually had the chance to really use yet called the story editor where you can basically copy and paste the dialogue from your written script and from what I understand it kind of Auto inputs those lines of text onto your pages so that all you need to do is adjust them and distribute them as you need again I don't know a ton about it yet but it does sound interesting step 6 pencils and also 3D models alright so I didn't quite know where to put the 3D model section in this video because they're more of a tool that comes into play all throughout the final draft process rather than at any one point in particular but as you can see here because I had to make this one shot on a really tight deadline I used a couple of shortcuts to help speed up the process where I could the main one being that I made use of clip Studio's 3D model features to help fill in some of the props background detail and even to help figure out a pose or two here and there I think the first page of my comic here is a pretty good example of all that because I ended up downloading a fully detailed model of like an office with loads of computers and whatnot and then zooming in really really far just so I could get this one opening close-up shot of one of the characters desks and um if you're trying to put together more Fantastical scenery or just something way more specific than that though you might not be able to find the exact thing that you're looking for on the asset library because it depends on what other people may have uploaded but in my last video I actually went over a method I found really helpful lately for making my own 3D models which can then be imported into clip studio and used just like this so I'll try to put a link to that tutorial on screen in case any of you guys might want to refer to it speaking of the asset library though there is a more Community Driven kind of section of clip Studio where anybody can upload their own 3D models and brushes and presets and textures and anything else really that you might ever want to use within the program and then other people can come along and download that stuff to use in their own projects there's an absolute ton of really helpful stuff on there I have no idea how many things I've downloaded in my time and what's more most of it is completely free anyway the penciling stage should feel like much more familiar territory to anybody who's ever drawn on paper because once the pages are all prepped and ready to go the art can start for the most part this is just a case of cleaning up my layouts and doing proper pencil work to base my inking off of later so the main thing that I needed to do here was just start sketching over my rough thumbnails although some authors prefer to skip this step entirely and just go ahead and ink directly over their thumbnails or least over a much looser kind of pencil sketch of only the basic shapes in anatomy rather than mapping out any fine detail for me as you can see here I usually prefer to do pretty clean pencil work but I am perpetually trying to get better at inking directly over more simplified sketches instead because that can really save a lot of time if you're able to do that comfortably during the penciling stage I also found myself making little adjustments to the layout of each page as I went along like resizing things or moving them a little to the left that kind of thing and that's mostly because a lot of the time and I think I might have even said this earlier already so please excuse me if I'm repeating myself um but a lot of the time you can't really know exactly how readable a page is going to be until you have all the pieces laid out on the final draft one of the things that I've always found both really engaging and really challenging about making Comics not least of all because I am a hopeless perfectionist um is that the whole jigsaw puzzle kind of side of it doesn't end in the early stages during every step of the whole process I find myself constantly juggling the balance between pacing and Rhythm and contrast and composition not only when it comes to the arrangement of panels that fill pages but also of the contents of each panel itself all while trying to make sure that the story is being told clearly and emotively and in a way that overall both looks cool and feels compelling to read one of the things that can help with that is mixing up the kind of I don't quite know how to phrase it but like the amount of things that you put in one panel after the other and the reason I don't quite know if I phrase that right is because I'm not necessarily talking about just one kind of thing here like for instance you could have a really detailed panel right next to a more goofy looking one with a simple art style or when it comes to speech bubbles and narration you typically don't want to have like an absolute wall of text on every page because then you may as well just be writing a novel instead but hell that's another example actually even if you're just doing a completely written project you don't want every sentence to be the same length because then it starts to feel stiff and makes it hard to read I could ramble about this kind of thing for a hot minute and I feel like I already have here but the main point I'm trying to get at is that variety is the spice of life and you want to make sure that you season your Comics well by giving them plenty of variation in plenty of different regards that's the kind of thing that is going to give both your story and your readers room to breathe so that everything you're trying to convey can be properly digested also side note another helpful thing which really kind of sold me on making Comics digitally in the first place because I used to make manga fully on paperback when I first started out and uh fun fact I didn't even have a light box or basically anything back then so I would hold my pages up against my bedroom window whenever I needed to like Trace over my sketches or anything which was really tiring um it works but I wouldn't necessarily recommend it but anyway yeah um another really helpful thing with digital comic making is that you can kind of do your sketches out of bounds so to speak and then resize them to fit the panel that they're supposed to be in it's a method that I found to be really helpful for close-up shots and like any panels that might have close cut edges and that kind of thing because it means I'm able to draw a pose in its entirety if I need to so that I can be absolutely sure that the anatomy won't look weird when it's been cropped to only show a small part of it also it's during the penciling stage here that you'll probably begin to see what I meant when I was talking about how the character designs changed quite a fair bit between the concepting stage and actually Penning down these final drafts I still had the concept art I drew pulled up as a reference alongside but on the whole when I was penciling these I did try to give our main character here an overall older more raggedy appearance than the spiffy looking protagonist I drew is an initial concept another instance of these graphs changing since the early stages came along in the overall layouts themselves there were several moments where I would end up changing things on the Fly while finalizing these Pages even sketching out entire panels only to end up scrapping them later which can sometimes be necessary to try and improve the overall pace of the story and make certain moments stand out in the way you want them to this was especially true for the ending page which actually ended up getting several revisions even as I progressed through these final stages I know I wanted it to have a kind of big reveal sort of feeling but it took a lot of trial and error to eventually land on a composition for it that I was at least mostly happy with um I also can't remember which pencil settings I used to do the sketching with on these but I'm pretty sure it was just one of the default ones that come with the program rather than being anything majorly fancy or specific step 7 inking when it comes to inking I am a bit more mindful of the tools that I choose I'll try to put some links in the description to the main pens that I tend to default to I think for the most part for this comic I used one called the real G Pen which has been a bit of a Mainstay for me ever since I first started using it but I have also been getting to grips with a more angled gritty looking inking brush in my more recent work which I can't remember the name of right now but I know it has a really nice feel to it so I'll try and remember to include that in the description too so a lot like with the penciling stage this is very much just a process of cleaning up but specifically and probably quite obviously this is the final final draft so this is the point where I try and make everything look as cohesive and put together as possible and like I say some authors may very well skip directly to this step without bothering themselves with doing any clean pencil work beforehand but whichever way you go about it this is basically just the bit where you want to try and make things look nice though I will say I am very aware that I have a tendency to get a little bit too focused on making things look nice to the point where inking can sometimes end up taking a really long time for me but at the same time I really love manga where the lines are a bit looser and you can see more of the expressiveness in them so this can kind of be an area that I can get really frustrated with myself over but yeah to make a long story short while I am still happy with how this one shot turned out overall I do really want to try and get over that personal hurdle of mine and get more messy with it next time I try my hand at this competition I think combined with some of the other techniques I've been learning this year though I do feel pretty hopeful about that goal which is nice because like I said in the competition that I made this comic for I managed to get second place which is awesome and I am really happy about don't get me wrong but truth be told until the results came out I had been quite worried to find out about how I'd feel if I didn't manage to at least get into the top three because you know I'll be honest I wanted to get first place real bad I mean everybody did that's largely what people aim for when they enter a contest so uh you know but uh yeah I don't know I guess both in the moment hearing the results and talking about it now I kind of realize that I'm just happy that I feel like excited about still having things to learn and room to improve because I know there was a time in my life where I would have only felt frustrated or disheartened instead of motivated so uh yeah a bit of introspection for you there but I do think it's important to try and reflect on the times when you don't fully manage to reach your goals in a more positive way and look forward to hopefully honing your skills and doing better next time instead of dwelling on what you weren't quite able to achieve with your current abilities learning is fun is what I'm saying um anyway life advice aside one General bit of art advice I'd also give for inking not only for Comics but just in general is that much like with so many other aspects of this whole process variation is going to be your best friend there are always exceptions of course but generally speaking for most comics and manga having different thicknesses for your line work is going to make it feel much more appealing to look at as well as help you denote things like how far away something is from your imaginary camera one general rule of thumb that I try to stick to is that I want to try and keep the line work for anything in the foreground the thickest and then try to use thinner lines or even just block out the outline of Silhouettes for anything that might be further away otherwise I find that my panels can begin to get a bit cluttered and hard to decipher I actually have like several different copies of my favorite inking pens saved as their own tool presets just in different sizes so that I can easily tab between like a big medium and small version of Any Given pen for different purposes without having to constantly change and remember which size of pen I had been using for a different thing also another helpful tool that I use pretty much religiously when it comes to doing my final links and making everything look nice is the decoration brush and basically this is just a brush tool that can be super duper customized to draw in different patterns so for example I've downloaded a bunch of different decoration brushes from the asset Library over time for things like chains and clothing details and leaves and special effects basically anything that can be complicated or repetitive to draw it can be really helpful to have a custom pen for I think the one I use the most is probably a really simple dotted line kind of brush that I use to just really quickly add like seams and stitching to a character's clothing but in this comic I also used a braided looking brush to give the secondary character his bracelet I know there are probably other examples I will have forgotten about in this one too because I did draw it quite a while ago now but I do know that I also used a bunch of custom assets on the final page because it needed a lot more spattery and Spacey details for me the inking stage is also the point where I go ahead and put in any sound effects if you read a lot of comics but I think especially if you read a lot of manga actually then you'll already know how big of a roll sound effects can play in the overall makeup of pages and panels I didn't really have any big sound effect heavy moments in this particular one shot mostly it was just little things like yawns and shuffling and more minor everyday stuff like that but some of my favorite moments in my favorite manga series are those times when they'll be like a big sound effect that takes up the whole background of a big action sequence especially when it's like style matched so that it really integrates with whatever kind of super powered move it might be illustrating like you know a zappy electric looking font for something lightning based or a big Hefty block of letters that look like they're getting knocked out of place when somebody lands a solid punch all that good stuff even if all you need to put into your story are little yawns and shuffling sounds though it still really helps to try and do that kind of style matching so that the sound effect is written in a way that matches the sound that it's for kind of like a visual onomatopoeia I forgot to mention it earlier but the same can actually be true of paneling as well sometimes it can really help to illustrate the contents of a panel if you give that panel a funky or unusual shape and Style Match it to whatever is happening in it for instance you could have a wibbly wobbly panel for something happening underwater or as another example at one point in this one shot I gave some panels a kind of staticky camcorder kind of look to give that moment a stronger like oh these guys are on a video call right now kind of feeling I also mentioned earlier that I used 3D models while working on this one shot for things like backgrounds and props and I actually want to Circle back to that for a second because I forgot to mention that another feature in clip studio is the ability to convert photos and 3D models into what is basically a fully automatically Inked layer at the click of a button which makes them even more efficient when you're working on a time crunch I think this may only be a feature in the bigger EX version of the program but if you do have that version then there'll be a button in the palette called layer properties that looks like two overlapping circles and clicking on that is going to activate the extract line feature and turn whatever you're working with into pure black and white by eliminating any color or gray areas and then you can alter the settings for the contrast and line thickness until it looks the way you need it to another thing I forgot to mention on the 3D model front is that if you're using 3D models to help with characters the clip Studio 2.0 update actually also added a really cool new feature which is the ability to add 3D models of heads and faces to your canvas wherein every feature is heavily customizable it comes with a bunch of presets that you can adjust the details of even allowing you to blend the features of those various presets together to create something completely accurate to the character it's being customized for this is another thing that came about after I'd already finished working on this one shot but it's definitely a feature that I'm excited to get more familiar with because I imagine that essentially having a pre-made base to help withdrawing your character's faces from any angle that you could ever need and having that bass literally just be your character's face is something that's going to make for a really helpful shortcut if you're in a pinch step 8 screen tones so other than the extract line function there's also another button in the layer properties palette called tone which can convert your currently selected layer into a half tone pattern and basically turn it into a screen tone automatically based on the light and dark values of whatever's on that layer while remaining fully editable as a regular layer this kind of function can be really helpful for either applying cones quickly or converting entire photos into screen tones so that you can use them as quick and easy backgrounds but initially while working on this one shot I use the other a potentially more well-known method of applying tones in clip Studio which is to pick the ones that you want from the materials palette and then drag them onto your canvas to act as a material layer which you can cut and resize as needed while still having the pattern available if you ever want to draw it back in but eventually I think I switched to using regular layers for my tones here and then just turning that halftone effect on and off with the tone button every now and then before eventually just leaving the halftone function turned off completely because I didn't know what like density of halftone would look best when printed because my print to run out of ink and I couldn't test them out on paper and I do wish that I could give a proper recommendation here of like which grade maybe that's the word which grade of screen tone will look best when printed at different scales because as you'll see when using either of those few methods that I mentioned there you will be able to pick between either a higher or lower frequency value for your tones and basically with the frequency it's just a case of the higher the number the more dots that your tone is going to be made up of and the smoother and potentially darker it's going to look depending on which kind of screen tone you're using and then if you want a chunkier halftone texture you might want to bring your frequency value down to like 20 for example but uh please take all of that with a pinch of salt because unfortunately that whole more mathematical side of things remains an element that I've not really had a chance to look into and become fully fluent in as much as I would like so I wouldn't want to go giving bad advice in that department especially because picking the right tone ratio to avoid it printing or scrolling in that way where it turns into a weird pattern that makes your eyes Go funny um online manga readers I feel like you'll know what I'm talking about there especially um but yeah that feels like the kind of thing where as far as I do know what looks best is going to vary from Project to project depending on your intended print size or if you're going to be publishing completely digitally even so I think all I would recommend in that regard is that you do a couple of tests of your own if you are like me and get anxious about the prospect of potentially picking a dotted pattern that's going to look weird in print and just try to see what tones look best for what you're going to be trying to do and either make a note of the settings for them or put them into a little favorites folder in your materials palette so that you can always have them to hand if anybody does have any advice for what the like the industry standards might be for using halftones on different paper or print scales by the way I would welcome it please feel free to leave any such advice in the comments below also by the way I feel like I should mention I pretty much only needed to use halftones in this one shot to add like value to clothes and put Shadows here and there so I was mainly working with just gray and gradient patterns but there are actually a ton of different like full-on patterns and designs in the materials palette and down from the asset library that you can use to put in more fun textures like glitter and flowers and doom and gloom and everything in between for whatever kind of tail you're putting together at this point I also want to mention another bunch of tools that I didn't really have a need for in this one shot but which can be really really helpful for more action-packed kind of stories and that would be the effect lines and miscellaneous rulers they're another one of those things that don't particularly have a set place in the chronological order of things because when you use them is going to vary depending on what you need them for and how you work so I figured I'd just talk about them now um but yeah they are basically just a collection of tools for doing those like horizontal lines and action lines that you can see in a lot of manga for effect lines you're going to find them alongside your shape tools with the parallel speed lines being called streamlines and the like radial effect lines that you sometimes see being called saturated line and you can adjust the settings on either of those tools to whatever you might need and they will automatically generate those kind of background effects for you without you having to spend ages doing them freehand if you do want to add more of a personal touch to it though you can also use the perspective ruler to Mark out a vanishing point and then whenever you draw on the layer with that ruler attached to it all of your lines are going to follow along towards that set point there are also a bunch of other rulers in there for other things but I think the main one that I use personally is the symmetrical ruler which can come in really handy if you ever need to make a mirrored pattern you can also drag the ruler icon from one layer onto another so that if you ever need to you have the ability to draw along that same guideline on a different layer one General warning that I would want to give with those kind of effect lines though and this does feel like it could err on the side of being a personal preference thing I will admit although it is also legitimate design advice besides anything else as I have been saying this whole time variation is key and both Action Line and Screen tone are among those particular bits of seasoning that you may want to be wary of trying not to overuse that is to say um and I don't want to sound like some kind of harsh art critic here when I'm giving this example but one example that does come to mind in particular on that front is that I don't remember the name of it and I also wouldn't want to go about roasting any author in particular even if I did remember but there was this one short-lived manga series that I was reading a while ago in jump that had an interesting premise but like I swear practically every single panel and that's I wish I was exaggerating but practically every single panel was just packed with really dense Focus lines and speed lines all over the place to the point where they not only lost all the impact that they were meant to be adding to the panels because when every moment you're presenting is presented with this shorthand for action and impact all over them nothing ends up actually feeling like it stands out anymore because every moment both High Octane and low looks the same but also it kind of made the whole manga kind of like frustrating to read if that makes sense because it just had this glaringly unnecessary aspect to it that became really hard to ignore I do realize that it may very well have only stood out so much to me because I am a person who reads a lot of manga and who reads it with the hardwired habit of analyzing it to try and pick up on patterns and techniques and learn what works and what doesn't by observing them in public Nation but yeah that one element basically just felt like it got overused to the point that it was distracting you know what I mean and you never want to detract from your own work no matter what format you're working in I guess it's kind of like a case of all good things in moderation as they say which admittedly is another one of those times in comic creation where it can start to feel like a bit of a double-edged balancing act like a couple of lessons that I've learned over time for example would be like don't be afraid of adding darker shading and Screen tones but also don't use too much or the pages might feel dark and grubby likewise don't forget that adding effect lines can give a feeling of action to a high impact moment but also don't use them so often that none of your pages feel like they actually have any impact anymore again though this Myriad of rules that I personally try to bear in mind are completely flexible so please don't take everything that I say here as gospel by any means oh my god um I'm very much just kind of rambling and info dumping everything I know so you only gotta you know throw that pastor at the wall and see what sticks for you having said that though one other bit of advice that I would want to give on that same note of like balancing things out is that especially when working in a completely black and white and gray medium like manga it is pretty much universally very important to bear in mind your overall like values of brightness and contrast that you attribute to everything because it's really going to play a role in making your artwork clear and distinct and readable if you flick to a random chapter of your favorite manga right now you'll probably see that quite consistently the contrast between black ink and white paper is used for the maximum effect that it can be even if you disregard any gray areas of tone characters with dark outfits will normally have a lighter element or two to break up their silhouette and make sure that their gestures can remain clear when posing and even moments that happen in dark locations won't leave any characters completely covered in screen tone to the point where they become hard to see likewise if you do have a darker character you'd want to bear that in mind while drawing and put them on lighter backgrounds or add a light outline to them for that same reason and oftentimes vice versa for characters with a lighter look I think Naruto is a really good example of like just an expert control of that whole black and white contrast Factor because for the most part I think that manga is entirely black and white like I don't know if they use any screen tone whatsoever but regardless it remains really readable and really balanced uh anyway this train of thought is kind of running away from me a bit but the point I'm making is that one way you can kind of try not to let tone or effect lines overwhelm your pages when working with a more classic printed Manga style in mind anyway is not necessarily to use it sparingly because I don't know what you're making you might need to use a lot of tone for a lot of things but try and get a good balance of black and white laid out with only your ink first and then go back in with tone to like denote which elements would have a more mid-tone kind of color for instance and then adding any shadows and like decorative stuff can kind of come secondary to that because those can often be almost like just extra kind of things that can be easier to figure out the need for after you have that main black and white and gray balance mapped out and I did have to bear that kind of balance in mind very heavily again while working on the final page of this comic in particular it gave me a lot of trouble I don't even know how many times I change different layers from like 19 to 18 opacity and back again while trying to nail down a good overall balance and full disclosure even now even after how well this comic did and again I am still legitimately proud of it I really do feel like I could have done a better job of it but uh you know sometimes no matter how many lessons you learn and creative rules you follow and break you also just have to come to terms with accepting good enough as the best that you can do for now and quit poking around at the thing you're working on because you've got a deadline coming up um anyway I do declare that is more than enough for this video um I have no idea how long this is going to end up being because I had a ton of footage I ended up needing to go over but thank you very much for joining me like I said this is one that I've had on the back burner for a hot minute and it took another hot minute to put together so uh I hope it was worth the wait I mentioned as much a little bit at the beginning but you know even having crammed as much advice as I humanly could into this video I do want to take one final moment here to highlight that the most important part of the entire comic making process or at least the factor that I would consider to be the most important when it comes to telling a story that people are going to enjoy reading is to make something that you want to read and that if you are a reader you know would make you go oh man that is interesting especially if you're aiming to make anything longer than eight pages anyway stick around to see how this whole thing turned out in just a minute and please do let me know down below what other videos you might like to see in the future but for now I hope this helps and that you will keep on staying as safe happy and healthy as you possibly can I'll see you next time [Laughter] [Music] thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] [Music]

Channel: ABD Illustrates

Views: 103,298

Keywords: ABD illustrates, clip studio, manga, speedpaint, oneshot

Id: qJnFlG2zOBU

Length: 46min 12sec (2772 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 22 2023