I’ve finished the first chapter a few days ago — at last! Working on an illust for now:

Mm, hope I finish this tomorrow. *O* Happy new year, everyone!

Time for the digital screen tones!
I used same page of course, with smexy Sho taking a shower ^_~

The shower effect took me a while to create correctly with just screen tones and eraser, but I believe it looks very nice. That was the hardest part of this page I think… the rest is pretty simple screen toning as you can see.

Photoshop CS + Powertone 3 were my weapons of choice here, with help of the good ol’ trusty wacom tablet of course.

Update: Chapter is finished! Already sent the originals to Akito *O*

All of us here at RUSH team wish you a very happy holiday.

Live long and prosper
H.S.S.T.

That’d be me, one of the last to post here; I don’t do the blog thing on my own so it’s going to be tricky for me to keep up with this one… Still, I’ll see if I can swing it! >:D I’ll keep it simple and just try postin’ a couple sketches for now.

An early attempt at action poses… Luce looks like he’s about to whack Tax on the head :/ Also, spoiler for Luce’s weapon!

Here’s one of the first sketches I did of Luce; I like the weird composition but can’t figure out what I could ever use it for.

And that’ll be it for my first post! If I think of anything useful to post up I’ll make sure to do so; hope everyone’s having/about to have a good holiday vacation!

Hello people, just wanted to let you know that I’ll be taking a 5-day break starting from tomorrow, I’m going on a vacation with my family, yay!
I’ll be back by Friday or Saturday to continue my work, and perhaps post more juicy previews ^_~

Happy Holidays!

Hello, it’s me, Tina Anderson.

I want to say sorry for the lack of participation on both my and Laura Carboni’s part here at the Rush Blog; our excuse of course is, our careers. As much as we love DramaQueen [and we truly do] they’re not our only publishers, and because of this, our time has been ungraciously tight. (>_>) However, we have set aside the last few weeks to work on Roulette, and I’ve chosen today to make a post here, so no one thinks we’re in permanent absentia. 0_0.

I wanted to also weigh in on the ‘how-to’ aspect this blog has been taking by posting a ‘how Roulette gets made entry’, because Roulette, unlike the other great stories in RUSH, is not made by one person. It’s written/lettered by me, and illustrated by Laura Carboni. The writer/artist team is a standard in most manga genres, only within the last 10 years has the individual artist as story writer, become more prominent. Also, it seems to be the norm to many fans, because one-person creators are more active, in the popular licensed genres stateside [shoujo/shounen].

In Japan, the storywriter is called the gensaku-sha; the artist is called, a manga-ka. I tend to call myself a comics writer, since I’m neither from Japan nor in Japan. ((^_-)); popular BL teams making ‘manga’, as opposed to just BL novel projects, are Honami Yukine/Takaguchi Satosumi [Kiminiwa Katenai!], Momoki Sae/Nanbara Ken, [Junjou Heart Kaihouku ], and Ninomiya Etsumi/Sugano Esumi [Isoganaide].

Note: There are times when a pair of mangaka form an alliance under one name—the usual reason for this is because each does not limit herself to one aspect of production; both write and draw, and usually tag team their way through creating a manga: Japan artists Akatsuki Haruka and Watanabe Nobuyoshi AKA Duo Brand. is a prime example, as is Spain’s Studio Kôsen. Teams like this work in tandem artistically, and in prose, in order to create their title. They also tend to work together exclusively, on all projects, whereas Laura and I, and the teams mentioned earlier in this paragraph, also maintain careers in short works, anthology comics, and our own full-length material. For example, I’ve a graphic novel coming out from Iris Print with Caroline Monaco as illustrator – Laura has her own debut stateside with a full length graphic novel from publisher Yaoi Press. Each of us is currently featured in separate anthologies from these publishers, but we did not make these short works together, ergo, no reason for one singular identity. Will Laura Carboni and I keeping working as a team? Yes indeed. We’ve got three graphic novels due out within the next three years, and that’s not counting Roulette! And yes, our next one will be with DramaQueen, we love the freedom and respect we get from them as our publisher, and we’re in love with Rush!

Now, on to the stages of how Roulette gets made:

Image heavy content under the cut:

(more…)

Me again! Fufufu~ *___*

Hongfei with 龍女 — I’m not sure how I’m going to translate this yet. (Dragon Lady? Lady Dragon? Should I give her a name? =___=) Really fun page!

Break from sequential art. Super advance preview!

Till the next log! *D*

This is how digital inks look, if you wondering ^_^
I used the same page from the first preview sketch (yay for smexy shower scenes!).

I used Comicworks600, inked at 600dpi with a 6″ x 8″ Wacom Intous3 tablet.

Hurray for technology XD

Digital inking tutorial coming next year hopefully, with Akito-sama’s help ^_~

I kept wondering what my first post should be about, and since scanning seems a hot topic in the blog, I figure I try my best at making a general “tutorial” about scanning black and white artwork. I hope it will be useful but if there are any questions or things that need clarifying, please let me know and I’m more then happy to help.

There is a common misconception when it comes to scanning traditional line art or an actual black and white illustration for print. A lot of the artists I was involved with are under the impression that greyscale or colour settings are the best way to go. That might be valid for art that is destined to be shared via the internet or thru other virtual mediums, but when it comes to printing, the best way to go is pure black and white. Some scanners classify this setting as line art; some do it as black and white (BW) while others name it BMP. In case your scanner has some other way of calling this setting, I will now list the most important attribute that makes it very easy to recognize. In the preview window, when you scan as pure black and white, the preview will look very pixelated, scattered, and all around ugly. Do not be fooled as the actual scan will look nothing like that.

*it will look something like that (or even worse) in preview*

*random eye-candy*

Now, one other important thing about scanning black and white is that while it will indeed save you having to level or actually do any tweaking on the file, some details might be lost unless you scan at a higher dpi. So I will recommend you scan the files at 600dpi but you can go as low as 300dpi depending on what your computer can handle. Most digital printers will produce best quality when they use 600dpi pure black and white scans, as opposed to 300 dpi.
For professional press the files sent to the printers are usually 1200dpi. Do not worry, you shouldn’t bother doing your work at 1200dpi, not unless you have a powerful computer and don’t mind doing some extra work. The truth is that because you are working with black and white, you can get away with doing 600 dpi because, at the end of the day, you or your editor can rescale your file in BMP mode, therefore preserving all details intact.

When working with Black and White files, you must understand one very important thing, that is, pixels = good! Do not be scared if you zoom at 100%+ and you are able to see the pixels. That is a good thing and proves that once printed the lines will be extremely crisp. Here is a close-up example of a panel line art from Night and Day:

pixels=good

Talking about pixels and how great they are, I will also like to point out that, if the line art needs tweaking in Photoshop after it was scanned, all redrawing should be done with the pencil tool not the brush tool, and also made sure that your colours are defaulted to pure black and white (you can do that by pressing D).

The BMP mode (found in Photoshop under Image/Mode/BMP) is a great tool when it comes to creating black and white art for printing purpose. It can ensure you get crisp lines and also, if you prefer using gradients and greys instead of actual tones, you can even use the different setting of the BMP transformation to transform your shading into tones.
This is recommended for people that do not use traditional tones or any digital toning software, but still wish to have crisp shading in their prints. When you print a greyscale file to a black and white (digital or press) printer, the machine only uses one colour of ink so, all greys and any colour information is transformed into black by default. There is no way to control what gets printed unless you provide the correct one colour information in your files. Now, you can play with the different BMP settings and experiment, depending on what type of effect you wish to convey in your illustration and thru your shading. Just remember, you are limited to what you can do as well as the amount of layers you can have when you are in BMP mode (BMP will flatten all layers and only uses one layer), so when you want to edit something, I recommend you do it in greyscale mode.(when going into greyscale, use ration 1)

For people who wish to use tones, I can recommend the use of traditional Deleter tones, which are not overly expensive (the jr. types) and also have a great variety to them.
If you are on a budget, or you prefer using digital toning, then my recommended program is PowerTone 3. Power Tone 3 is a plug-in by Celsys that can be attached to your Photoshop and used as a filter. Unfortunately, the only version available is in Japanese, but lucky enough the software is very straight forward and easy to understand so it can be used without the need of knowing Japanese.

*pretty power tone box, click to visit the site*

That’s all for scanning. I better stop before I write a whole novel. ^^; I’ll do my best to cover other technical aspects of manga making in my future posts, so if you would like to know about anything in particular, feel free to comment with your suggestions.

While cleaning my uncleanable room, i found a really scary old folder with first pages of Boku no Kenshisha aka Guardian angel under my bed XD That was a real trauma XDDDD Following pics are the same first two pages of this comic. I dont like to change panles when in my opinion they are not bad, so panels are almost the same but… well, lemme show you:

That was made a year + ago:

That was made in less than a year:

That was made in less than a month XD :

Hope you can tell the dieference XDDDDD ;