The Artistic Burn

Lately, I've been feeling that burn to draw again. It never really goes away. When you're an artist, you're always an artist, 24-7, everything you learn is skill and technique. But I've been wanting to draw, to actually tackle the projects I've been daydreaming about. First up, my manga ideas, largely because I have zero skill in drawing manga (I always pick the hardest one first). That being said, I have two different sets of questions. First: What supplies do you recommend for someone focusing on manga? I have a general idea already, and did a little research. I'm wondering if fresh opinions from other artists that have more experience than I do might show me things I can't find from research. Second: Do you ever hit creative slumps, or experience creative bursts, where your art really shines? How much time out of your day do you dedicate to your art? And finally, just what is your art, anyway?! I'm a little hyper right now...

I just started doing the pencil work for my own comic/manga again after a long break. That kinda just takes some paper and a pencil. It's hard though to find motivation personally since I'm at work nine hours a day and am just drained once I get home. So now I'm trying to find time to draw right after dinner so it becomes part of my schedule, like brushing my teeth. Once I get enough penciled pages, I scan them and redo the linework in Photoshop. I hear a lot of people will pen their pencil art and use the scanned linework w/o repenning them in Photoshop but it's just up to your preference. I've got my nice clean line art so I go in and splash some grays in there and add all the text bubbles and speech. I'm still trying to figure out if I like doing sound effects by hand or doing them afterwards in Photoshop. <img src="http://i291.photobucket.com/albums/ll287/21wq/was04_zpsce9dca01.jpg" />

I've never been digitally gifted. I have a tablet and a small scanner, and when I have them hooked up to my computer (my computer crapped out so I can't use them for a while) I can do simple things, but I like to do as much as I can by hand. I like your work, in particular the greying.

You can get away with most of it outside of the computer. The rule I remember from a comic artist's panel at a convention is to draw your artwork 25 to 50% larger than the size you expect it to be when it's printed. Then it can be reduced to the right size on the computer or have prints done on a copy machine at the reduced size. I'm sure I remember finding tutorials on how to do screen tones with inks like older mangas had done, but that was a long time ago and it seems like it's mostly gone digital. I also can't imagine trying to hand write my own dialogue anymore. My penmanship is horrible

I would probably do the dialogue on the computer. Screen tone I have never used before, buuut from what I'm told it's a fairly simple process, and I kinda look forward to having a new toy to play with, you know? But for dialogue, yeah... Nobody can read my handwriting. lol. I do remember the rule about size. I'm going to be employed in a few months, the job is already finalised, so after a few paychecks I'm going to splurge on supplies. I'm hoping this will include a fairly large lightbox, which is something I have ALWAYS wanted. I also want to play around with nib pens, in particular an inkwell nib pen rather than a cartridge pen. I had a cartridge pen, and after a while it annoyed the crap out of me. It would get clogged and rip through the paper. I'm hoping an inkwell pen will be an improvement for my personal quirks.