How to Digitally Paint -- Paint with Manga Studio 5 (Udemy.com)

Go from sketch artist to master digital painter with How to Paint with Manga Studio 5.

( 35 Reviews )

Created by: Neil Fontaine

Produced in 2015

What you will learn

Blend colors in Manga Studio like a professional painter
Paint stunning digital paintings
Compose paintings like Leonardo Da'Vinci
Avoid beginners painting mistakes
Master the fundamentals of digital painting
Apply color theory
Paint from black and white to color
Paint a full painting
Tell a story with your paintings
Use the best color palettes

Quality Score

Content Quality

Video Quality

Qualified Instructor

Course Pace

Course Depth & Coverage

Overall Score : 88 / 100

Course Description

Master how to paint with Manga Studio 5, but this course is much more than just how to digitally paint. It also teaches all the fundamentals of painting, such as, how to paint thumbnail sketches and their importance, color theory, how to use color palettes, composition, values, making it look 3D, how to fit objects in your painting, how to tell a story with your painting, how to start a painting, etc.
We will do a few full paintings from sketch to completion. This is where we put it all together. So by the time you finish this course, you will have painted a few full paintings.
The course is structured so you can easily find the subject you are looking for. If you want to go back and watch how to paint that woman's shirt again in one of the lessons, you can, because the course is broken down into sections. Just find the lesson "painting her shirt."
You need this course if you are struggling with painting digitally. It will be a life saver, or your money back.
This is an eight-hour-long mega course, packed full of all the information you need in order to master digital painting with Manga Studio 5. However, much of the information can be used for any digital painting program.
You will not find a course out there like this that teaches so much and cost so little. Who this course is for:

This course is meant for people that want to learn to digitally paint with Manga Studio.
It is not meant for complete beginners that don't know how to draw anything.

Time: 13.5h

Instructor Details

Neil Fontaine

4.4 Rating
35 Reviews

I'm a best selling author on Amazon for "How to Draw Awesome Figures."
I studied art at different schools, one of them being a community college in San Jose, Ca. Over the years, subjects in art finally clicked. I teach these subjects in ways that make it easy to grasp. It's hard to brag about myself, but students have written me emails saying how they have learned more from me than they did in art schools, art schools such as Academy of Arts in San Franscico. That blew my mind because it's supposed to be a great school.
I also sell abstract paintings that I painted while meditating. A recent painting sold for $10,963. If enough art students ask, I will make a course on how to abstract paint. You can see my paintings at saatchiArt
I'm also a writer that has sold novels.

Reviews

4.4

35 total reviews

5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star

Write a Review

By Andre Gorziza

Great!

By Igor Nunes

I left this stars to motivate the teacher to keep doing the best for his students!

By James SMITH

Easy to follow lessons.

By Gary Ow

Very good!

By John Hendrix

good basic starting point

By Michael Rhodes

In my painting classes in College, one of the first things covered was the media the paint is applied to. In the digital realm this is the canvas size and resolution. Which, in this course (and others by Neil) goes unmentioned or is just commented on in passing. The main painting (or the first one in the series) is an absurd 2.5 by 3 inches (which I converted from the metric to english measurements, which can be set in Manga Studio, btw). I found this out when the painting Neil was working on just looked way to grainy and I couldn't figure out why he was zooming in at more than 100% most of the time.

Not covering the resolution and canvas size is a major omission and (unfortunately) par for this course (and others by Neil).

Another omission is that Manga Studio has awesome brush customizations. None of which, beyond size, opacity and blending mode got covered. It would be nice to know if the brushes Neil used were "stock" or if he changed some of the settings. There's things like the ability to have painting brushes smear/blend with the colors already painted and such that never got a mention.

Then there's the actual painting itself. Having done many video tutorials (and having taught digital graphics in a college level class) I know that things pop up and have to be dealt with. If you're working "live" you have to deal with them as they happen. When recording, the issues should be resolved off-camera and then the lecture should continue. It's jarring to have to listen to the same complaints that Neil has about his specific set-up time and time again. Get the darn sleeve/glove and then create the lectures. At best this is just a distraction, at worse this is just amateur-hour videos.

This is a very windows-centric course, those of us on Macs do not have a "print screen" button that we can copy images from (it's screen capture). Besides, most times saving the image to the desktop and then importing the image into Manga Studio works better. Case in point, at the later lesson when Neil's placing a bird flock into the background, the checkerboard pattern on the Google Search window indicates that there's transparency in the image. I saved the exact image to my desktop and imported it into Manga Studio and was able to skip a number of steps Neil had to do in order to use his copy&pasted image.

Now when the lectures begin, this is where Neil's knowledge and experience shines. His analysis of paintings, discussions about composition and explaining the 30-70 rule is one of the best I've heard, anywhere. It's just when he gets into the actual painting and using Manga Studio that he fumbles the ball.

It doesn't engender confidence when the instructor seems to be learning the program as the lessons progress. It's as if we're watching the rough draft of something that should be awesome, but isn't there yet. I feel that if some of the lectures had more planning and a second "take" they would be as good as the earlier lectures.

TL/DR capsule summary: Good info and lectures on basics of composition, color, contrast and basic painting. Little to no info on Canvas (file) dimensions and resolution. There's no info on how Manga Studio brushes work aside from the brushes Neil uses. When it comes to using Manga Studio, it's a superficial look at it, basically it's just a primer on how to begin to use Manga Studio for digital painting. We're told that the transparent Watercolor brush is good to use, but not really why it's "better" than other brushes (the oil or Airbrush for example). If one really wants to learn how to use Manga Studio for digital painting, there's other videos out there that is more complete and shows how to fully take advantage of what Manga Studio can do and not just use it as a faux-photoshop replacement.

By Dre Weiss

Love this instructors courses.

By Timothy Wise

The instructor does not teach how to think but hot to use applications

By mrglennreaper .

I have learned a lot.

By Wilson Stewart

Like the artists delivery method

By Steve Goupil

With what I've seen so far this course is exceptional in explaining the concepts completely without slowing things down with too much detail. Looking forward to the rest of the course!

By Kevin D Allen