Any manga artists know how to do shading+highlights quick'n'easy?

[Raavea]

Umm... Hi there. I'm not sure if this is the right forum, but it seemed the best fit.

I draw cartoons and remotely-manga styled strips and doodles when I'm bored. Well, a few of my ideas are rather popular with someone I know, and she wants to publish them as webcomics on her site.

Buuut. I can do all the lineart and colouring, however I haven't yet figured out how to do 3D shading without going over with the 'burn' brush in the GIMP. Can anyone help?

If I make these into webcomics, I want a quick and easy way to do this. I've experimented with tools in the GIMP but none I've found do what I want.

I know there is a way of doing it in photoshop.. But as of yet, I don't know exactly how, nor how to translate that into GIMPage.


Please help?

PS: If there isn't a way in the GIMP, can anyone recommend a program (free, please! XD) that WILL do it?

[HanZo]

I'm not really into Gimp since I earn my money by doing graphics and illustration and the Gimp is not a professional solution yet. But as far as I remember, and if I understood your problem right, it's very easy... once you have your lineart scanned, you make a new layer for the colour and set the layer mode to "multiply". once you're done with the colours you make yet another layer and set it to "multiply", then draw the shadows with a light grey. "multiply" makes the luminance of the layer get mutiplied with the one of the layer underneath, so grey just darkenes the colour on the layer underneath it.
btw... I think Gimp is the best free app for these kind of things... you could try Krita shoul be more or less the same just KDE.

[commodore]

Krita is not a general purpouse graphics editor. Krita is more towarded to painting.
Linux really doesn't have any great painting programs yet :(.

[BlacKat_K]

WHAT??Gimp is not as good as Photoshop??Meow...:(

[HanZo]

ehm... no.
but I think it's a good start, and it's not such a bad app after all... I have done some stuff on gimp... I think the tool doesn't matter if the idea is good... because a tool is just a tool.