Manga-Style Toning Techniques?

[Ceridwen]

Hi, I tried searching the forum and couldn't really find any information on this, and I've never really posted here on the forum before today, so please yell at me if I'm out of bounds asking about this. But I've been doing a comic since June that's sort of manga-style esque page by page, and while I do all right for panel design and poses by looking through my extensive manga collection and 'How to Draw Manga/Anime" books, for some reason I just can't seem to figure out how to get my tones to look decent. Please understand that I'm not one of those "omg supa-kawaii wapanese" types, I'm not overly fond of chibi or extreme emotions, though now and then they're useful for comedic effect. I prefer a more realistic style of anime (no, that's not an oxymoron), something more along the lines of Mars or Her Majesty's Dog rather than, uh, Sailor Moon or Di Gi Charat (both of which, as it happens, I haven't read more than a page of). Anyway, I've carefully studied the use of tone in a lot of the manga whose art styles I'd like to employ, but unfortunately most of them were done with actual physical tone sheets and I've found no easy way to replicate them digitally. I have the tones that come with the "How to Draw Manga: Tone Technique" books, and just recently I bought Deleter's ComicWorks, so I'm really amenable to tone techniques using either program. Oh, and I use Photoshop to do my comic pages, though technically now I could do them in ComicWorks too, if I wanted.

Of course all this will have to wait until I either a. find my missing tablet pen or b. buy a new one, but still, I'd really appreciate any tips from other artists who use digital tone in their comics, or maybe links to websites or names of book titles that were of great use :p Thanks a bunch in advance.

[Metruis]

I don't use digital tone, but if I did, I would totally use OpenCanvas to do it because it has a TONE BRUSH. The time I did do digital toning, I basically selected and pasted in my texture... um, in Photoshop, what I'd do is get a really large tone pattern and make a clipping layer, I think.

And, ugh, I know there was a Photoshop toning tutorial somewhere but I never bookmarked it... it was ages ago... and this is handy too. http://psychobob.xepher.net/screentonez/

[Ceridwen]

Ah yes, I found that website before but had difficulty figuring out how to use the tones, heh. Still, thanks for your tips.