Manga Studio® for Dummies®

Chapter 8. You Can't Draw a Straight Line without a (Virtual) Ruler

In This Chapter

• Raving about rulers

• Learning to use the Line and Shape tools

• Creating a ruler layer

• Creating and deleting rulers

• Using rulers on an image layer

• Using the Object Selector and Ruler Manipulator to adjust and transform rulers

• Adding and deleting points on a ruler

• Aligning rulers

• Drawing while using the rulers

A few extremely talented artists may be able to draw a cityscape or pickup truck perfectly without using some kind of a straightedge or curved tool. The rest of us use rulers, French curves, and all sorts of other drawing tools to make those lines and curves look as good as possible on the page.

If you draw digitally, though, it's a different story. With some drawing programs, you might have a rudimentary straightedge tool to work with. If you're really lucky, you might have a curve tool available. For the most part, however, you're pretty much stuck with no kind of a freeform drawing guide to assist in any kind of perspective or technical drawing. Until now, that is.

A major feature of Manga Studio is the ability to create a near-infinite number of freeform rulers, curves, and shapes that you can work with just as easily as the real thing. Not having a virtual ruler or guide has caused me a lot of frustration in the past, and it was the only thing that held me back from going 100 percent digital until Manga Studio came out. Trust me when I say that once you use the rulers in Manga Studio, you'll wonder how ...