Related tags: How to draw manga, manga software Written by: Otaku

Many people often ask me what the best software is to draw manga characters. I’m not a mangaka or artist in drawing, but I know lots of tools for drawing manga. I’m a freelance webdesigner and sometimes I use the same applications as the professionals in drawing manga. This post maybe a bit subjective and some people will probably disagree with me, but I will just let you know my personal view on the tools.

The software that I will discuss are all made for raster images, but some may also can do a little bit of vector art. For vector art you may give Illustrator or Inkscape (open source) a try.

1. Paint Tool SAI

Paint Tool SAI is very user friendly. Some artwork from a dude of DeviantART really inspired me. I asked what software he uses to draw and his answer was Paint Tool SAI. Eventually I decided to give it a try and I’ve really liked it. The GUI (graphical user interface) is really easy to use and learn. I also connected my Wacom Bamboo Fun (tablet for digital drawing) to my laptop and it was an amazing experience. The software really handled the pressure from my Bamboo pencil very well. Paint Tool SAI is a no-nonsense tool. The price is also affordable and it should even run on old computers without any problems. It doesn’t use much RAM, diskspace and CPU power.

2. Gimp

Gimp is a free open source software available for the Windows and Linux platform. I’m a Linux fan, but I really hate this software. It was originally made for editing pictures to make it web friendly, but it has been developed to a very powerful tool (they claim)! I just can’t get used to the user interface, it is almost the worst user interface I’ve ever seen. I only recommend this software to Linux users, but there are lots of better choices if you’re a Windows or Mac user.

3. Photoshop

Photoshop is the most used software by amateurs and professionals. It is made by Adobe and it was originally designed for photo editing, but you can use it for lots of other purposes. Web and graphic designers use it very often, but I prefer Paint Shop Pro as a designer. Should I use it for drawing manga? Photoshop has very much build in features and plugins, but you probably won’t need most of those if you just want to draw manga. It also uses very much memory, disk space and processor power. The price is very expensive!

4. Painter

I’ve also Corel Painter installed on my computer. I’m a big fan of Corel software, but I’m a busy person and so I haven’t explore the tool much yet. I know it’s a very powerful tool to use it for paintings and coloring images. You should check it out if you like fantasy style!

So what’s the best software? I mentioned four tools, but there are probably many more awesome tools available to you. I would like to recommend Paint Tool Sai, because of it’s user-friendliness! The only thing that might irritate you are the keyboard shortcuts, but you can always customize the shortkeys. So, you’ve finally chosen a tool….but you want to find and learn from some tutorials. I recommend Youtube and DeviantArt for free how to tutorials. These websites can be very useful sometimes.

(2 votes, average: 10.00 out of 10)

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