In the following section we're going to make a pencil tool to use for sketching. It will give you a traditional pencil look, just like the following screenshot:

In order to make any custom tool, the process to start is going to be the same. Since we're going to create a pencil in this exercise, click on the pencil tool in your Manga Studio toolbox (so that when we're done, our custom pencil will show up as a sub tool for us here, rather than being somewhere else, like the inking or painting tools). At the top of your tools menu is the icon to open the Sub tool menu, to which the arrow in the following screenshot points:

Click on it and then select Create custom sub tool from the menu.

The following dialog box will come up:

Enter a Name text for your new tool. In this case we'll go with Sketching Pencil. The Output process dropdown tells Manga Studio what you want this tool to do. For most of these, we'll be using Draw directly, because we...

Manga Studio has excellent inking tools right out of the box (so to speak!). The default tools under the pen mimic several standard inking tools very well, including the very popular G pen which is a standard for many manga artists. It also has a calligraphy and a mapping pen, any of which might fit your style of inking very well. But let's say that we want a pen tool that reacts more like an inking brush instead of a pen. So we'll want to make a custom tool that has a bit more to give and maybe a bit more texture to the edges, so that we get the look of inking with bristles. Plus we'll want a lot of flexibility between the thick and the thin strokes.

So let's get started, and we'll make a brush that will give us this effect over our sketch that we did with our pencil tool.

Select the Ink tool in your toolbox, since that's where we're going to want this tool to show up when we're finished with it. When you click on the Ink...

So now that we've made a pencil to draw with, and an inking brush to ink with, it's time to get into some coloring. Or rather, some painting. I have to admit to the fact that I have a slight obsession with speed painting brushes. (If you've never seen speed paintings, you should go and look some up on the Internet right now. And if you're feeling adventurous, try a few! They're great warm-up exercises!) Let's make a brush inspired by a speed painting brush. It's going to give us lovely, soft texture that mimics traditional brush strokes. Take a look at the colored picture below, which was digitally painted entirely with the brush we're about to make. Even the linework, which was inked with the inking brush that we just made, had the transparency locked and was gone over in more subtle, softer colors with it!

Before we can start painting with our custom brush, we're going to make a custom material to use as our...

First we'll select the text tool (T), and then navigate to the Create custom sub tool setting under the Sub tool menu.

Clicking on this will open a menu that allows us to pick a few initial settings for our sub tool. Pick a name for your tool—maybe the name of the comic that you're going to be using this style of lettering on. I'm choosing the name Strange Text because of a character named Steven Strange that I will introduce you to later on in the book. Next click on OK and we'll be taken to the Sub tool detail screen. Here we can set our font face, size, and if we want to, we can use bold or underline styles on the Font tab.

For this tool, I'm going to use Arial Black as the Font and set it to 12.0 points.

Clicking on the Text option to the left of this menu allows us to set Justification and Line spacing. Let's set our font tool to Center justification, so that our text lines for dialog will be centered to one another.

The Edit...