Monday, November 25, 2013

Software Review: Manga Studio 5


I love trying out new software. I recently purchased Manga Studio 5 and have been wanting to try it out. I've also been wanting to do a little more Jak Phoenix art, and so...

I'm impressed with quite a few features of Manga Studio. First, it has a lot of great tools from pencils (light, dark, rough, and more) to pens (slick to textured) to watercolors (and gauche like paints) to oil paints to pastels (including chalk like strokes). It has an amazing set of rulers from straight lines to curved lines to perspective lines. It masks. It has lettering and easy balloon creation. It has layers and adjustments one is used to in Adobe Photoshop. But it isn't feature overloaded which means one can sit down and start using it pretty quickly. It's kind of like a stripped down version of Corel Painter providing the tools you really need and will use but with the familiarity of Photoshop. And the price at under $50 at Amazon is hard to beat for all this power. Just look at the line work above. That was with a default brush, no adjustments needed.

I still have a lot more experimenting to do with all the powerful features (like 3D models for reference) but so far I'm very happy with the program.

Usually I use a more naturalistic color scheme for my fan work of Jak Phoenix, but I was curious how his universe would look in my Wandering Koala Stark style. It looks pretty good. What do you think?

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