Alrighty then… you’ve just finished inking your latest masterpiece and it needs some color, shading and highlights. No problems. On your Layers tool box, click on the New Layer button. See the reference image below.
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You will want to name your Layers as you go along or else you’ll loose track of which layer is what color. I am starting with Lorraine’s base flesh tone, so I name the layer Flesh as shown in the sample below.
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Make sure this new Layer is *below* your inking layer, I will show you why in a bit. See the sample below.
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The trick is now you have to tell Manga Studio you want this new layer to be Color and not Grayscale which is used for inking or penciling. Go to the task-bar and click on Window, the scroll down to Properties, if your Layer’s Properties window is not open. You will see two radio buttons next to the title Display Color. Click the radio button next to Color and
now your Layer will display in color. See the sample image below.
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To set this Layer’s color, click the blue box labeled “Alternate color of black” and you will see a typical palette appear. The nice thing about Manga Studio’s palette settings is you have the Basic Settings and a savable Color Set as well on the color picker. Really handy if you have a color palette for your comic. If you don’t, then this is a great time to make one! See the sample image below.
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So, where’s our crayon? Welcome to the 21st Century Duck Dodgers! It’s now called a Marker Tool. Click in your Tools bar and select the Magic Marker tool. This works and feels like Magic Marker. It flows very quickly and you can adjust the “tip” of your marker to be narrow, wide and even change the thickness. What I like about the Manga Studio marker tool is once you finish an area and need to touch it up, it is not additive like in Photoshop so you do not get overlapping areas. I know real markers do this, but I think this is a great feature and allows you to touch areas up without having to worry about changing the density of the color.
LET’S COLOR! As you’ll see in the sample image below, I’ve outlined an area I want to be filled in with the Flesh color. Note I’ve left her eyes blank. If you forget and color over something you’re not suppose to, don’t worry, Frankie Says Relax and simply use the Eraser Tool to get rid of any area you mistakenly colored in. This is one of the many advantages to doing each color on it’s own layer.
