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I have read a lot of manga books over the
years. My favorites were the Shonen Manga books. These books are usually
filled with a lot of action and are aimed at boys. A good manga books
must have interesting characters, a great storyline, and, in my mind,
plenty of action to keep me interested. Along comes
Shonen Art Studio, a
book that not only teaches you about many of the different types of
manga characters,
it also instructs you how to color them like the professionals do . . .
on the computer using either Adobe Photoshop or Photoshop Elements.
There are plenty of backgrounds to be added and colored, along with
speedlines, word balloons, and accessories. You could make a quite a
varied Manga comic with all of the tools provided on the disc.
 Along
with the book comes a compact disc that contains 217 images of
characters,
accessories and backgrounds. Each image has multiple layers which can
either be selected or deselected, so your character can have multiple looks.
For instance, I have Adobe Photoshop CS3 and opened the image entitled
Female lead_action. This character had thirty-eight layers you could either use (view) or not use,
like: 4 accessories, 5 eyes, 5 mouths, 3 heads, 4 arm positions with
three varieties of each, and 3 leg positions with 3 varieties of each. So, I took the original
female lead character and changed her up a bit,
chose each layer that I wanted to work on, and used the paint bucket to
drop color on my different layers, even though I left it in the default
of Grayscale. I also added a word balloon with text, using Comic Sans MS
as the font. I didn't do anything fancy like
shading, but I was happy when I was done. On the right is an example of
my character. This took me about ten to fifteen minutes to create.
This book
contains the following sections:
- Introduction
- The History and Rules of Shonen
Manga
- On the Disc
- Taking It Further
- 01 // DIGITAL MANGA
- Introduction to Digital Art
- Photoshop and Photoshop Elements
- Photoshop Tools
- Photoshop Brushes
- Creating Characters
- Pacing Your Story Telling
- Creating Manga Pages
- How to Convert a Photo into a
Background
- Adding Speedlines and Focus
Lines
- Adding Tone to Pages
- Creating Your Own Tones
- Letting: Text and Word Balloons
- Adding Sound Effects
- Choosing Colors
- Choosing Color Schemes
- Blocking in Base Colors
- Cel Shading
- Natural Media
- Designing Cover Art
- Finishing Off!
- 02 // THE CATALOG
- Male Lead Characters
- Female Lead Characters
- Supporting Characters
- Page Layout Templates
- Word Balloons and Caption Boxes
- Speedlines and Focus Lines
- Tones
- 03 // BACKGROUNDS AND ACCESSORIES
- Backgrounds
- Accessories
- Weapons
- Vehicles
Shonen Art Studio
is a instructional book on how to color many types of action Manga
characters using Adobe Photoshop and Photoshop Elements by Yishan Li. The book also
includes a disc with all of the layered artwork you will need to created
your very own Manga book.
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