Rizian Art

Hi guys! It's Monday, so today I'm going to write a new review about some drawing software I've been using since one year, what I'm telling you here is about my own experience, other people can have their own, but I'll show you a little review and the pros and cons for Adobe Photoshop and Paint Tool SAI.

Well, to start we must talk first about one of the most used software for Digital artwork, it has a lot of tools and uses, so you can find here everything, I really mean it, everything!! You can adjust the default brushes, add your own, use blender, manipulate light and shadows in your paintings, change colours, manipulate photos and add the little final details to your artwork. It is a very complete software, but that's the bad point in Photoshop, you need to take your time to learn to use all the options and tools available, there are so many tools that you can be a little stressed when using Photoshop for the first time.

Pros:

- Very useful and versatile for Drawing or Painting.
- You can create your own Brushes or Download some cool brushes in a lot of Websites.
- You can have every tool in the same program, you can easily do a complete piece only using Photoshop.
- On the internet you can always find a lot of tutorials of how to use this program.
- You can create your own shortcuts, and modify the default actions, so this can be really helpful and can save you a lot of time when working.
- The selection tools are more reliable in Photoshop than in other Programs.
- You can easily edit a scanned draw in Photoshop.
- It is compatible with a lot of formats like PDF, JPEG, GIF, PNG, TIF, and others.

Cons: 

- At the beginning is really hard to get used to all the tools, so you have to go slow and have tons of patience.
- This program is a nightmare for slow computers, it needs a lot of resources from the computer to work with it.
- Most of the people give up when trying to learn Photoshop, so they start drawing or painting in other programs.

Paint Tool SAI is for me one of the easiest and simple Drawing software I ever used, because it shows only the important tools to make a draw or a painted artwork, you can easily customize the tools with a simple Double click. The bad thing is that most of the people needs to open Photoshop to add the finishing touches to their artwork, or just to add text to the image.

Pros:

- It is really a really simple Software, so you can memorize the tools more easily than other programs.
- You can customize the available tools, create shorcuts and rename the tools, only by Double-clicking the Tool you want to change.
- It may not be compatible with a lot of formats as Photoshop is, but it has the most used formats in Digital art.
- It is a very light program, you do not need a very fast Computer or the best of the Graphic cards to work in excellent conditions.
- It has better selection tools than Photoshop.
- The Lineart layer add some cool tools for fixing little details in lines and a very interesting tool to create Vectors and modify them.
- This is a very popular software between people who draw/paint Manga or Anime style. So you can give it a try to this powerful Japanese Tool.

Cons:

- This software has no Text tool.
- You can't modify colours, light and shadows as easy as Photoshop does.
- The brushes are very limited, you can create your owns, but in "available forms" you will have a limit.
- You can find some resources for this software but not as many as Photoshop.

So, that's my opinion about these two great programs, I usually use both, because I just can't find perfection in just one. You can make your own conclusions, remember this is only my opinion. So I hope this review was useful to you, I'll be back the next Monday with a new post in the Blog! Have a nice day!

Previous Posts:

Manga Studio 5 Review
Tutorial: Draw Women Hair
12 Tips for Webcomic Beginners
Tutorial: Create Scenery/Background
How to get used to your Tablet
Improve your sketch abilities in 10 steps

Hi guys! It's been some few days since the last entry, I know today is not Monday, but I wanted to write this  article about my thoughts on the new Manga Studio 5 from the company Smith Micro, Inc.

The first thing I thought when I opened the program was: "Whoa! It changed a lot from last version, such an amazing change and has a nice and clean interface. It surely looks more friendly". And well to be honest what I thought on the beginning is becoming better and better while I'm testing the tools and the markers.

Most of the content is still being the same, but in the tool bar you can look at the new brushes preview, get more information about the pressure, density, texture and other cool features. The brushes look even better than in last version. It feels more like drawing on a real paper sheet with a real pencil, so that's one of the things that really got me, because I do a lot of sketches, so I need a good pencil tool to doing it, for now I can say the pencil tool in the new Manga Studio 5 is the best one I've ever used!

What I did not like in Manga Studio EX 4.0 was the horrible interface, It looked like some old drawing software, the tool bars were not as clear as the new ones. The program looked more for an engineer rather for an artist.

Here are my pros and cons about the new Manga Studio 5:

Pros:

- The pencil tool has a really good feel, it is like using a real pencil on a real paper.
- The brushes are more organized and have a little preview, so you can compare with others before clicking on one.
- Attractive interface, it looks modern and soft, the program looks less stressing with this new interface.
- For me that I run the program on Windows, it is a really fast program, the older version gave me one or two problems when the screen was frozen, or I couldn't use Photoshop and Manga Studio EX 4.0 at the same time.
- The preview of the tones is really awesome, you can see the tones clearly and separated in themes.
- There are some cool resources, the new poses and beginner's assistant are really good for people to get in touch with the program.

Cons:

- No font preview, that's really a shame, you need to pick and pick a font to get the one you want, not like in programs like word that you can see a little preview.
- It is harder to find the "Panel creator" or the tool to put panels. I had to search for a tutorial on Youtube for this, you can see it here.
- I don't know if it is only me, but the program looks a little like Paint Tool SAI.
- God please, It is really addictive!!

So for now that's my view about the new Manga Studio 5. I hope you liked it, if you have any thoughts about your experience in this new program I'd love to read your comments! So, that's for now! We will see soon on Monday with a new entry! Have a nice Weekend!

I invite you to read my Webcomic Ereggia, I'm doing this Webcomic using Manga Studio!

To see more drawings from Manga Studio 5 or other related artwork from Rizian Larc you can take a look to the Facebook Fan Page or Twitter Account!

Previous Posts:

Tutorial: Draw Women Hair
12 Tips for Webcomic Beginners
Tutorial: Create Scenery/Background
How to get used to your Tablet
Improve your sketch abilities in 10 steps

Hello! Happy holidays! How have you been? I hope you had a great Christmas, quite cold but a hot meal to comfort always work any tired body or a frozen hands not wanting to draw, draw and DRAW!!

Today I come to give some advice to those who bought their first "Tablet" or digital tablet, but before I will discuss my experience with digital media, not everything is always a garden of roses, you'll see what I mean.

To start I'll tell you, before I start drawing comics my tablet was powdered in a corner of my room, I did not use it since I bought it and came to release it six months after it was acquired, well, not had much respect to digital at first, but when I started drawing comics and this, I began to see an occasional video of "speedpainting" on YouTube and said, "Damn, I want to do that thing too!" I just took out the tablet of the box, connect the cable, I opened Photoshop as a freaking genius, I looked for the tablet pen and I decided to make an image, do not expect ... was not a simple image, but it would be... The best-super-mega-ultra-hyper-image Fourfold-INCREDIBLE! IMAGE EVER! The result was as follows:




Well, OK, I exaggerated, it was not that bad, but it was pretty bad, in fact it was enough to make me want to vomit, and tell myself "I should not buy this filth, after I have taken a look of the face, now I want to get the one with the horrible things that this thing does" Well, today is the day that the tablet I wanted: give, sell, break, throw, throw, massacre, destroy and burn, is being right next to me while I do the "cartoons" to bring the article.

I tell you, I was in search of a tutorial to teach me how to "properly handle the tablet" The result was a straw ball rolling on the desert "Fiuuuuuu ...", and I think two rocks and a cactus were there too, but do not worry I will tell you some exercises that will be useful to your process. Let's do this!

First:
You fall into account in this first, you've bought a digital tablet and if you're here is because you realize that is not the same drawing with a pencil in your sketchbook to do it using your tablet in drawing software like SAI, Autodesk Sketchbook Pro, Photoshop, Gimp, or whatever you're using to draw... Many people says that drawing with the tablet is like "learning to draw again" I put it in another way, as "learning to draw digitally".

Second:
If you wanted to buy a tablet is usually because you wanted to do artworks like some other artists you admire, seek for those art pieces, if they have videos of the process that makes it real better, so you can look out how your favourite artist or how the kind of illustrations you want to do are done. One of the easiest ways to learn to use this wonder is to know the techniques and other experts use in their videos.

Third:
Do you have an very nice and solid line in your pencil work but on the tablet you want to draw a line and suddenly you have become a gauge of seismic waves? I recommend you to draw over some drawings and not yours as practice mode and make you noticed in the lines correctly, than trying to "create" and "make good lines" simultaneously. Alleviate the burden and you concentrate more on just improving your line on the tablet.

Fourth:
This is one of the tips is the one that helped me most, not only with the tablet, also improved significantly my pencil lines. Open a new blank document in your favourite drawing program, now take the tablet pen on one end and not support any part of the hand on the tablet surface, try to draw straight lines, vertical, horizontal and diagonal in the sheet, as close as possible without sticking to the one before. The aim of this is to improve your hand pulse significantly, it is also a good warm-up before a drawing session. I recommend seeing the example:



Fifth:

As in the previous exercise instead of making straight lines we now turn to make curves, but I have here a simple trick to dominate the line and probably will make this part more complicated than the previous one, but with patience and perseverance you can achieve this one too.



Previous Posts:

Manga Studio 5 Review
Tutorial: Draw Women Hair
12 Tips for Webcomic Beginners
Tutorial: Create Scenery/Background
How to get used to your Tablet
Improve your sketch abilities in 10 steps