Tony Cliff
The Manga Studio perspective tool is amazing, but yes, this is almost out of control!Vanishing point madness in Manga Studio.
How can you not love this.And we have lift off of Soviet Spacecat One! The Motherland knows her feline son flies in the sky~
My top 3 drawing apps for Android tablets
Last year I got the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 as my new digital sketchbook. I’ve since gone on about how exciting it is to have a light, portable device to capture all of my creative ideas (http://leanintoart.com/blog/2012/8/27/lia-cast-50-a-wacom-enabled-tablet.html), and after several months of use I’m finding it to be my constant companion. I sketch on it in the car, while I’m watching TV, and even in bed (when I should be sleeping).
But as a newcomer to the Google Play ecosystem, it took time for me to find the apps that served my purposes. Some are good for “professional grade” illustration, while others are more suited for general sketching and idea capture. While none of them are the all-in-one solution I had hoped for, it’s fairly simple to combine them into whatever workflow you need. And they’re all very affordable compared to desktop solutions!
Idea capture and sketching
Papyrus (Around $3 on Google Play https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.steadfastinnovation.android.projectpapyrus)
I love using Papyrus for sketching and note taking. While it’s a note-taking app first and foremost, the developer did something wonderful in how the app handles lines. Pressure sensitivity on the Note works great.
There’s some unique ways in how it treats lines, though—each line is treated as an object, so when you erase any part of the line, the whole line disappears (there’s an in-app purchase where you can get a more “natural” eraser that erases only the bits you want). But as I’ve gotten used to this it’s actually sped up my sketching on the Note: you can set the app to register your finger as an eraser, so whenever I throw down a line I don’t like I can simply tap it to erase.
And yes, it features palm rejection, so it only registers the Spen and your fingertips. Rest your hand right on that screen!
You can set your canvas to “infinite” to create some really big drawings, after which you can export to PDF to open in your desktop version of Photoshop for high-res finishing.
However: no layer functionality or fills. Again, it’s not a designated drawing app.
One of my sketches in Papyrus: https://plus.google.com/+JerzyDrozd/posts/7mcJ9De1PdT
But I’ve used it to rough out an illustration and exported it to other apps for finishing (Pencils: http://instagram.com/p/X3SOQQnafS/ Finishes: https://plus.google.com/+JerzyDrozd/posts/PxkdEwgXfD4)
Finishing
LayerPaint (Around $3.50 on Google Play https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.nattou.www.layerpaint)
While this app’s interface is a bit chunky on my Note 10.1 (looks like it’s more suited for phone screen sizes), it’s a nicely simplified drawing app that folks accustomed to Photoshop will quickly come to understand.
Features:
- Pressure sensitivity on the Note
- Layer support (and even clipping layers)
- A decent selection of brushes (though no chalk brushes)
- Exports to PSD
- Bucket fills (and you can set a small range of pixel threshold to fill behind your lines)
- Gradients
- Non-anti-aliased and anti-aliased lines
- Drawing guides Photoshop Touch ($10 on Google Play https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=air.com.adobe.pstouch)
While the latest update has improved the brush tool quite a bit, I find drawing in LayerPaint to be a bit more natural and fluid.
However, PS Touch is a lovely simplification of many of the tools we cartoonists use in the full version of Photoshop. The image for this post was colored entirely in PS Touch.
It has a more robust selection tool assortment (lasso, polygonal lasso, selection boxes and circles), layer effects (multiply, overlay, etc), and you can turn on syncing with your Creative Cloud account to easily update between your tablet and desktop.
But here’s the only complaint I have about PS Touch as a solution: You can export layered files out, but you can’t import them in. PS Touch flattens all incoming PSD files. Cursory research suggests that this has something to do with the range of layer options available in PS Touch, but whatever the case, it’s not quite as great as it could be. Ideally I’d love to be able to work on coloring a page in my studio, but then be able to continue that work on the road. For now we’re limited to starting on the tablet and finishing on the desktop.
As awesome as all of these solutions are, there’s still the tablet’s or phone’s horsepower to contend with. When working with large files I noticed some lag while drawing, and if you have background processes like wifi and syncing on, it just gets worse. So when I work on bigger drawings I turn off my wifi and syncing just to be safe.
But the really nice upside of sketching and drawing on the tablet is the ability to instantly share what I’ve done. I just export the image to jpg into my gallery where it’s ready to be posted to my Instagram, Tumblr, Twitter, G+, and so on.
There are others I’ve been testing. Infinite Painter (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.brakefield.painternote) has some really terrific brushes and naturalistic painting effects, though the interface is a little confusing to me. I’ll keep testing that and report back.
One more update today. Just a few more pages to color in this book! Going a little crazy with the backgrounds.
More progress images on the freelance comic! Had a lot of fun with this page. Soooo saturated.
Penciled on typing paper, inked in Manga Studio, colored in Photoshop.
More coloring on the freelance project. Entering what’s supposed to be a scary scene, so I’m playing with stylized backgrounds and color themes to emphasize the nightmarish quality of the upcoming fight.
Penciled on typing paper, inked in Manga Studio, colored in Photoshop. Soon to be lettered in Illustrator.
