3.4 Pen, Pencil, Eraser

Hi, welcome back. In this lesson, I'm gonna show you how to use the pen, pencil and brush tool. One of the best things about Manga Studio are the drawing tools. So I think it's really important to go through each and every one of the settings and show you what they do so you have ultimate control over how you draw. So the first tool I'm gonna show you is the brush tool, and you select the brush tool by pressing B on your keyboard or pressing the paintbrush icon in the toolbar there. And you can see if I just make a mark on the canvas, it looks like a paintbrush. So when we select that we have a few options to choose from so at the moment we're on indian ink and you have different types of indian ink you can choose from. You can also choose oil paints, or you could choose watercolors. So if I go back to Indian Ink at the moment and show you all of the settings in auto properties. So this is where we control all of the settings of our brush. The first thing that we have is our brush size. This is fairly straight forward, as I drag this bar along, My brush gets bigger and smaller. You can also enter a very precise detail there numerically. And if you click this funny icon next to that you'll see how our brush is being controlled. So the input affecting to brush size is weirdly worded, but basically what we're saying is when we have pen pressure ticked we have our graphics tablet dictating the size of our brush. We could also tick tilt so if you have a graphics tablet that has the tilt feature, you can tilt your pen and you can change the kind of line that you're making. We also have velocity tick. So the slower we draw the thicker our line will be and the faster we draw the thinner our line will be. Just like if we're using a paint brush in real life. We can also change this curve which effects how responsive our graphics tablet is. So at the moment, it's saying that I have a fairly smooth transition from zero pressure to 100% pressure. But if you were to change this, you can get less responsive or more responsive tools. We can also change the opacity so, at the moment, we're not 100%. I can drag that down to 50% and you can see it's not as opaque. We can also change our brush sensitivity so this is basically telling Manga Studio how many hairs are making up your brush. At the moment, we're on 100%, and my line is really, really quite dense. So if I pull that down to around the 30 mark, you'll see that it goes a lot thinner and you can start to see individual strands or hairs that are making up our brush. And if I make a mark on the canvas, you can see there's a lot more texture then this previous line. Stabilization is a feature of all of the drawing tools in Manga Studio, and it can be really useful if you want to draw smooth lines. At the moment, our stabilization is set to the mid point. If I drag that all the way to the bottom, you'll see that my cursor stays to the very end of my line, so there isn't much of a gap between my line and my cursor, and it responds very, very accurately to the lines that I'm making. If I drag this stabilization all the way to the top you'll see I'm moving quite fast but our line is almost lagging behind the cursor. And that's because Manga Studio is making sort of a median line based on how we've moved our cursor. So if you've got a bit of a shaky hand, it's quite good to turn stabilization on to maximum, and that way you won't have quite as much jitter in your drawing. We can also change brush strokes. So at the moment, it's set to 0, and you can see that whenever I draw It reacts where my cursor moves. So if I turn this all at the top, this is basically simulating pressure for our brush. So if I draw like this and then I let go it'll finish my line for me and taper off to a sharp edge. So the higher your brush stroke value is, the more this effect will happen when you draw a stroke. Starting and ending is the last option we can change, and basically none of them are ticked as a default, but every time you turn one of them on it defines what happens at the start and end of your line. So if I change brush size to 100, and tick that on. When I start my line, it will always start at 100%. So the largest my brush can possibly go. And it will always end at 100% as well. So in effect, that will be taking away our pressure sensitivity. So if I just show you, you'll see it doesn't start off thin even though I was pressing really lightly there. And you can change all of these different settings, so that you have different behaviors at the start and the end of your line. If I move on to the pencil tool, now. And I'll just get rid of this layer, because it's looking a bit messy and I've not got much space to draw. So, our pencil tool is a lot simpler. We have a few different options here, dark pencil, light pencil, under our Sub Tools and we can also choose some pastels. So if I just choose a dark pencil, you'll see we don't have very many settings to play with. So we have our brush size, as we did with the brush tool. We have hardness this time, so at the moment we're at 100% hardness so the edge that we drawing is really crisp. But if I turn the hardness down, and I'll just increase the size of the brush so you can see what's happened to my edge. It's a really smooth line. And then on hardness 100% again, it's quite a big difference. We can also change our brush density again, so we've got more or less texture. And we can turn our stabilization up or down. Lastly, we have the pen tool. So if I choose the pen tool, You can see, again, we have brush size, opacity, and this time we have anti-aliasing. So it's on no anti-aliasing at the moment. I'll draw a partly large blob there. But if I turn anti-aliasing up to it's very maximum, draw another blob. It may not be immediately apparent what's happening, but if I zoom in all the way, you'll see that no anti-aliasing, when you zoom right in, has this really sharp, pixellated edge. And full anti-aliasing has a blurred edge. We can also turn on stabilization to draw much smoother lines and a really really useful thing, when using the pen tool, is if you're coloring a comic book. So I've drawn a really basic line drawing here, to show you what I mean with this. So if I delete this layer, and turn on the basic drawing, I'll create another layer underneath this layer. And I'll set our line work, right click on it, set the Layer Settings to Reference Layer. Or, you could click on the small lighthouse at the top there. Now, we have this option on our pen to choose do not exceed line of reference. So, I'll take that on. And you'll see if I make a really large pen, and I'll zoom in on this a little bit, that if I draw on the layer underneath our reference layer where our line work it. I'm drawing with an absolutely massive brush, but that's not going over the edges of our lines. So Manga Studio's actually computing where our line is. It's using it as a reference and it's not letting us draw over the lines. So as long as I keep my cross hairs, the middle of my brush, inside this line, so you'll see if I go over this line all of a sudden we've made a giant blob. So if I keep our crosshairs of our brush, the middle of our brush here, inside our line, you can really easily fill in a line drawing. And again, if you've gone wrong, you can always select a different color and you see how easy it is just to fix that. Another thing we can do, I don't know if you can see on this level of zoom, but I'll just zoom in. We've got quite a messy edge here and that's because Manga Studios computed our lines quite well, but it's not 100% accurate, so we've got this funny shimmering white line. So if I delete this layer and create another one, and I'll just show you what the last setting on our pencil does. So if I then turn on area scaling, and that's set to 20%, again, because we have do not exceed line of reference ticked on, it's not going through out lines. And we can quite easily color all that in again. But this time, if I zoom in, you can see that we don't have that horrible white fringing there. So if I change the opacity of our drawing layer, I can show you what's happened there. And you can see that our pink underneath has actually bled underneath our line, and that's because we've ticked Area Scaling. So that's a way of getting rid of all the jagged lines and making nice, clean line work. In the next lesson, I'll be showing you how to use the Air Brush, Fill Bucket, and Gradient tools.