Xaviar Xerexes

Wandering webcomic ronin. Created Comixpedia (2002-2005) and ComixTalk (2006-2012; 2016-?). Made a lot of unfinished comics and novels.

12 Comments

  1. I use the Painter Classic software that came free with my Wacom to colour Ghastly’s Ghastly Comic and pretty much any other digital art I work with.

  2. Just another vote in favor of tablets. I will most likely never use it to draw and ink the comic, but for coloring and post production, it’s a must have. And it feels very natural. I recommend the 6 by 8 graphire, that’s all you’ll need.

  3. I do all my comics with a Wacom and Corel’s Painter IX. Photoshop isn’t really made for drawing; Painter is. Endlessly editable brush/pen/marker/crayon/pencil tools. I can imagine dealing with actual ink anymore unless I’m sketching.

  4. Same as those who replied above. I use my tablet only for coloring, can’t stand doing so without it. With the tablet, you can follow curves easier for shading and such, as well as customize photoshop brushes to have the pen pressure alter the effects.

    …and it’s at this point I reread the article and realized you’re talking strictly software here. The vast majority of my time with my tablet has been spent in photoshop. Though I’ve also found it comes in handy with Illustrator, at least as far as the pen tool goes.

  5. Is Painter IX still made. I heard Corel axed the Painter line. Does IX support layers and plug-ins? That’s the one thing I don’t particularily like about Painter Classic (which is just the first version of Painter). I have to work in Painter for colouring and then Paint Shop Pro for editing and lettering and special effects.

  6. Ghastly, Painter IX is still made – in fact, Corel released a 9.1 upgrade a few days ago.

  7. I’ve been toying around with a wacom recently and the only difference between drawing with it against drawing on paper is that you can’t casually rotate the canvas. And there are some things out there that remedy that, like those slick “draw on me!” laptops.There’s more than enough quality digital art out there for ignorance to be the only reason someone would have qualms with it. People producing crappily drawn and colored strips with a tablet won’t transform into great artists when they pull out a pad and pencil.

    That said, I ink all of my comics with a brush or croquill using india ink and if I color them I use paint.

  8. Sweet! I’ll have to go check it out.

    I just hope it will still run on my PII-333mhz Win98se machine.

  9. I had to stop doing Oekaki because I found it was actually causing me to become worse at drawing on paper. It’s like speed-chess for art. It may be a lot of fun, but it will totally mess up your long game.

  10. Wow… This is a comic blog that is interesting. Thanks for linking it. KThor and I haven’t exactly gotten along in the past, so I probably shouldn’t reply to that entry, but I’ll be sure to lurk for a while.

    Me, as a drawer of black and white comic, I find Photoshop fine for everything. I use the pencil tool. I set up macros to handle all the various shading/gradient/ziptone/whatever effects I need to do. I also work in 1200dpi. I know there are programs out there that can do more, but I really just like Photoshop’s interface and stability, something I always find lacking in the other programs.

    I actually have a Photoshop ziptone tutorial buried deep here: http://community.livejournal.com/go_girly/141577.html for those interested in that kind of crap.

  11. You can always try to go for a educational discount copy (full version which is $99, or roundabout that price) of it.

  12. Painter has some interesting brushes and simulates working with traditional media really well. Never quite cared for it’s interface after using PS forever, but it certainly has it’s advantages. Classic is the devil, though. I had a class using 8 and then I tried using Classic since it came with my old Graphire. Such limited file types and brushes… not to mention Painter’s normally quite the memory hog to begin with. There’s a higher version that came with my Intuos so I’ll probably play around with that when I get the time before I decide to invest in the latest version

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