telophase | (no subject)

Two impulse purchases today:

1) Comickers: Color Marker Start Up Guide Series. Japanese text, but I've seen Comicker books in English before and the text itself doesn't have a *whole* lot of stuff to add to the photos - they never tell you exactly how to do it anyway - and it had two sets of magic words: "Using top anime and manga artists' works, such as Saiyuki, you can see how the pros do it" and "On sale: $10.00."

I would so pay $10 just for the page with the photos of the marker going on to a Saiyuki pic. And I expect I can work out some sort of deal with some of the Japanese-reading people here to translate a couple of pages for me in exchange for art or books or something they want. *looks inquiringly at

homasse*

2) Action Pose Book #4 - Hands. Kind of expensive at $36.80, but duuuuuude! It's a book of haaaaaaaaaands! In normal, everyday poses, doing normal, everyday things, and not in those weird Art! poses you get in normal pose books. And the marker book only cost $10, so it was worth a splurge.

Will hit Borders today - the website claims that it doens't have Blade of the Immortal, despite it just having flipped from "Not yet published" to "In print," but there's a How To Draw Manga book on digital tones out. I don't care much about the book, but it comes with a CD of 100 tones, and I WANT THAT.

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The Computones book looks great. There's two of them available. Both of CDs. One is from the HtDM series and the other, I believe is from Antarctic Press.

That marker book sounds like a great buy. I wonder if our distributor at the store carries it. That'd be extra sweet with a discount.

I've got two Antarctic Press CDs of tones and speedlines (er, several of which look like they may have scanned them in from tone sheets...) - do you know if they're the same tones as their book?

The HtDM series is supposed to end up with 3 books with accompanying tones. I also think I'm going to invest some of the A-Kon money into the Andromeda Software Screen Filter (http://www.andromeda.com/info/series3.html), because I found where I can get it at academic pricing (http://www.creationengine.com/html/p.lasso?p=11979) for $79. There's three plugins I'd like from there, but at ~$70-100 each, I need to restrict myself to one and I think this one is the most versatile.

Come to think of it, a CD with sample line art and a buncha created tones would be a good potential product for PandaBuddha, hm? A tutorial would be a bit of a problem, at least for Photoshop because Adobe are pricks when it comes to allowing screenshots of their products in commercial projects, but clear explanations of the technique, screenshots of the results without including any Adobe chrome, and perhaps screenshots from OC and/or PSP would help? *ponders the possibilities*

That's definitely something to look into. I don't think I've ever seen any small Indy companies doing something like that and many of us have practice not only with using tones, but doing tutorials. We could definitely provide lineart.

As for the books, I'll look those up when I go into work tomorrow. I had them in my hands a little over a week ago and was pondering picking them up, but then my inner scrooge didn't want to spend money :p

The AP tones and speedline CDs that I have are invaluable. I'm really glad I picked those up.

Yeah. Jared Hodges and Lindsey Cibos of Peach Fuzz fame put out a CD on how to CG a few years ago, which was released to nowhere near as much acclaim as they'd hoped, but I got a copy of it and it was pretty good. I havne't seen any How To Tone Digitally CDs and not too many tone collections - most digital tones online are 72ppi and, because of the nature of the Web, up in jpg and gif formats which have to be converted to bitmap before being used for printing.

It'd be kinda neat to have a lineart and several different versions of toning on that same piece from different people, just to give an idea of the possibilities.

My inner scrooge is wincing a bit at the price tag on the books, but I can justify it because if I use the tones over and over and over and over, it'll be well worth it. When I ahd a Tpop editor look at y stuff at a portfolio review, he was interested that I'd used ComicWorks for it. Then he pointed to a sky in one panel and said "That's from ComicWorks, right? I'm going to get really tired of that sky, aren't I?" which made me realize that maaaaaaybe I should collect a bunch of nice original tones.

I'm spotting very familiar tones in the RSOM entries as well as commercial manga. XD