Manga making, and Toning

Celestialsunberry requested that I make a tutorial on how to do tone work, so here it is~ and not -just- that, but also how I am making the entire manga page! I wanted to start from the beginning, so I could explain the whole process, I think of it as a package deal. This tone tutorial is very VERY basic, I will be working on one that will involve more sophisticated tone techniques later.

Here is the finished page:



And now for a look at the chicken scratches it started out as:



At this stage in the process everything is very rough, people are little squiggles, and there is more basic scribbles to show where I want shadows, and the speech bubbles to be. If you look closely enough, you might be able to distinguish words in the speech bubbles, but I know that my hand writing is terrible, please do not strain your eyes in an attempt to see if the dialogue is the same in the rough draft.

I do know at this point that the frames are where I want them, so before I start to re-draw the people and scenes I take my Micron 08 size felt tip pen and my straight edge and ink the frames.
I would also like to direct your attention to the fact that I ink in the speech bubbles at the same time. I always try to incorporate the bubbles into the page from the start. I am not a fan of adding them after the fact. I think they are part of the page, and they need to be balanced with the rest of the page, and that they should be thought out and laid out in such a way that allows the page to flow more easily. If not, they will make the reader disinclined to read it. Readers want to be entertained, and do not want to have to TRY to figure out where to read next. (/rant)
If you would notice the doted lines around some of the speech bubbles. That is my reminder to myself that a thought bubble goes there. I add those during the toning process, which is several steps later.



This could be a potentially bad move if, for instance, I would decide later that I didn't like the perspective in one of my frames. I would not be able to change the frame layout to accommodate a change inside the frame, or layout to avoid that perspective all together. But, at the same time, since I have not done a lot of detail work on the page, I would not be loath to start fresh on another page.

After my frames are set in stone, I re-do all my original penciling. This is the final penciling when I add all the detail I want. Iit starts to look much better at this point ^.^



And now that the page is penciled to detail, and it meets my approval, I start the inking process. For this page I used a Micron 01 size felt tip pen. After I am done with this inking, I erase all of my pencil chicken scratch.
On other pages I have used a fountain pen to ink my pages, but I am still playing around with what works best for me to get the look I want. I am somewhat limited by the size of my original drawing, which means I have to look for new ways to ink and add detail to the page. I am working and inking 1.5x the size that it would be printed in. I believe manga is normally drawn and inked 2x the size it is to be printed. (the printing methods are different too X_x) For a couple pages in Dowsing Chapter 2 I inked the entire page digitally. That was a terrible experience >.< But I also had a tiny tiny screen. It might be different now that my monitor is the size of Kansas. I will try digital inking again to see if it is as bad as that.
This page looks terrible with just this step on inking, -cringes- Notice the little 'x' marks on the drawing, that is me reminding myself to put solid black in that area. I also added the beginning of the cross-hatch shading during this step.



After the initial inking, I add the solid black. For the black I use a combination of pens, I use my Micron 08 felt tip pen to get the tiny black areas, and for the big solid areas of black I use a big chisel tip Sharpie. I like using the Sharpie because it leaves a bit of a texture behind. The ink is not perfectly consistent, and I find that I like the effect very much. It makes the black less black, and adds a bit of dramatic variation to the shadows. I have also finished all the cross-hatching I wish to do. I went back to the Micron 01 felt tip for that.



After I black in the shadows, and finish the cross hatching, I pick up an even smaller pen. My Micron 005 felt tip pen. With this tiny pen I add the little detail lines. The purpose of the detail lines is to give a bit of texture to the walls, and cables. A little drawing secret is that tiny little detail lines like that make your back grounds look more realistic. I also use the little detail lines to frame the character, and add a bit of mood to those two frames.



Now that the detailing is done, it is time to TONE~ So I scan the page into my computer.
I have a cheap HP scanner/printer. The printer has stopped working, but I find the scanner works very well, and it gives me good results. It can scan a fairly high resolution, the biggest I ever scan things is 1200 dpi, and it can do that just fine. When I scanned this page, I scanned it at 600 dpi. That is because the Digital tones I am using are 600 dpi tones. Chapters 1 and 2 of Dowsing were all scanned at 1200 dpi, because all I had to worry about was printing, and I wanted to print in high quality. However, now that I am adding tones, I need to think of how to make the tones print correctly. 1200 dpi images and 600 dpi tones look very odd together when printed (trust me, I tried >.>'). So the Images are scanned in 600 dpi. I use Photoshop to scan the images, the image is directly scanned to Photoshop. It has no formatting before I save it as a psd.
I have the 600dpi image sitting in Photoshop. It is the 'background layer' or 'layer 0'. To add the tones, first I make a new layer. The reason I do this has to do with my tones, and the way they work.



I got my tones from a 'How to Draw Manga Computones Vol. 3 Mecha' book by Hideki Kakinuma. It came with a disk full of my digital tones. This was already installed on my computer. The tones are installed as a filter in Photoshop.



When you click through the Filter>Computones>Tone a window pops up. That is where you decide what tones to use, and how they should be arranged (I will detail that more in a later tutorial).



When you select the tone you want to use it appears. In this case it covers the whole page, because I have not specified a specific location for the tones. I could use the Lasso tool in Photoshop to select certain areas, but I find that time consuming. So I make a new layer and fill the entire thing with just one tone (see Sunberry? very basic, I will do a better tone turotial later).
I am only using one tone on this page because I do not like over toning things, keep it simple. I also have cross-hatching and solid black shadows. The page has enough shading and dynamics that is does not necessarily need a lot of tones. This could be debatable, but I like to keep it simple, so I used one blanket tone over the whole page.



Now that I have selected my tone, it is time to edit the tones. I hit the "ok" button to apply the tones to my image in Photoshop. My 'layer 1' is now covered in little dots. Below that, my "Background layer" is untouched by the tones. I separated the tone layer and my scanned image to give me some breathing room in case I completely mess up with the tones. In order to edit the tones in the most efficient way I know ATM I arrange my layers differently.
First off, I change my "Background layer" to "layer 0" by double clicking on it. This unlocks the layer, and I can move it around now.
So I do move it. The second step, I move it above "layer 1". This temporarily hides the tones on "layer 1".
Thirdly, I change "layer 0", my pen lines, Blending mode to 'multiply'. What this does it let me see the tones through the layer my pen lines are on.
Lastly, I make a new layer. "layer 2". I put "layer 2" between my ink lines "layer 0" and my tones "layer 1".



At this point I have three layers, starting from the top, "layer 0" inked lines, "layer 2" empty ATM, "layer 1" completely covered in tones. To edit the tones, I go to "layer 2". On this layer I paint white over the areas where there should be no tones.
The reason I paint over the tones with white on a different layer is to, once again, give myself some breathing room. It allows me a margin of error. If I were to erase the tones, instead of hiding them on a different layer, I might see an area where I had wanted tones but accidentally erased them. If this happened, I would have to go back, select that area and go back into the Computones Filter. This seemed very inefficient to me. So instead of erasing, I paint over them on a different layer. This hides them, and if I see an area that needs tones, I can erase the white on that area, which lets the tones show through again.
The other reason I blanket the whole page with tones as opposed to carefully selecting the areas I want to tone is for speed. I can add and take away huge blocks of toned areas very quickly.
This shows the first big areas I painted white:



After the big chunks are taken away, it is just a matter of going through and doing the detail work.




Here is the page after I finished editing the tones:



Now its time to add the thought bubbles. These are also tones. So I made a new layer, "layer 3", and went back into the Filter>Computones>Tones window.
I scrolled though all the various tones until I got to the thought bubble I was looking for. After I found it, I hit the "ok" and got a page full of repeating thought bubbles. I only need one to start with, so I used the Rectangular Marquee tool in Photoshop to select one of the thought bubbles and deleted the rest.



I then proceeded to shape the thought bubble to fit the dotted lines I had left for myself to mark where the thought bubbles would go. I used the Move tool to edit the shape of the thought bubble. I had to click the 'Show Transformation Controls' box in order to edit them. After I got the first thought bubble where it should go, and the shape was right, I duplicated "layer 3". This gave me another thought bubble, and since it was on its own layer, I was able to move it and edit it freely. In this way, I was able to add all the thought bubbles.



After all the bubbles were in place, I used a combination of the Polygon lasso tool, and the eraser tool to fit the thought bubbles in their designated frames. I also erased enough of the first two thought bubbles to sort of fuse them together into a lopsided thought bubble.



And with that, the tone work is done! All that was left at this point was to add the text, and upload it to my website.

Whew >.<
That was quite long, I hope it was fun and educational. I don't think it was much of a tone tutorial, I only used one tone >.>'

If there are any thoughts, comments or questions feel free to ask ^.^

Most informative. (I was going to request you do a full page tutorial on manga...however you have satisfied it.) ^_^ I love it when the guy rolls around on the ground...it made me laugh!

Having the ability to tone with photoshop makes life 100% easier (and cheaper). I can't imagine trying to do that the traditional way. X_x haha

Me either 0.o

I think toning the traditional way would make some things easier, and other harder... it would be easier to see what it looks like, and how it would print, but it would be harder to cut out each individual little dot X_x

Very, very, very useful tutorial. I will really have to try something like that.