Yo Ho Ho, Me Hearties!

Greetings, you scurvy swabs! Anyone familiar with my usual artwork style will recognise that this is not it. I do have a variety of different styles, but I'm always experimenting and this one is brand-new. I'm illustrating two (possibly three) books for Autumn -- that's the publishers, not the season. The first one is about pirates, the second about cowboys. The third -- which I'm really worried about -- is probably going to be about fairies. That will be very much stepping outside my comfort zone. Yikes! My usual painted style of artwork is done with a mixture of Corel Painter and Photo Shop. The pirate artwork style is drawn in a program called Manga Studio. Now, as a general principle, I can't abide Manga artwork (I think it's an age thing) but this program is phenomenal. It's very cheap (you can buy a cutdown version of it, which is all you'll need, for about $80). There is a pro version, which I'm using, but frankly most of the cool features are in the cheap version. The amazing thing about it is the control you have over the way the pen behaves. You can set the pen parameters in so many different ways, for example to smooth, straighten or have very sharp points (mitres) on corners or zigzag turns. This all may seem very small beer, but to anyone has ever attempted to make a inkpen, real or digital, do these things, it's a revelation. You can do a lot of these things in programs like Adobe Illustrator, or CorelDRAW. But they are indescribably clunky in comparison. Manga studio is a program that does one thing but does it very, very well. It is, and I've been using digital drawing programs for 15 years, the best pen and ink program I've ever come across. Dave Gibbons, the artist who illustrated the seminal graphic novel Watchmen uses it. That's a good enough endorsement for me. All the best John