My friend Dee Dupuy is an artist of many talents. In addition to her own comics, she did the toning for Svetlana Chmakova’s Dramacon and is currently toning Svet’s new book, Nightschool, which will debut in Yen Press’s Yen Plus magazine at the end of the month.
Dee talks a lot about toning, but never having done it myself, I was pretty fuzzy as to what it actually involved. So as part of my ongoing education, I asked her to write an intro to toning for manga readers. As a special bonus, Svet is letting us post some pages from Nightschool here for the first time. Enjoy!
And be sure to check out Dee’s site to see more of her comics work!
About Brigid Alverson
Brigid Alverson has been reading comics since she was 4. After earning an MFA in printmaking, she headed to New York to become a famous artist but ended up working with words instead of pictures, first as a book editor and later as a newspaper reporter. She started
MangaBlog to keep track of her daughters’ reading habits and now covers manga, comics and graphic novels as a freelancer for
School Library Journal,
Publishers Weekly Comics Week,
Comic Book Resources, the
Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog, and
Robot 6. She also edits the
Good Comics for Kids blog at School Library Journal. Now settled in the outskirts of Boston, Brigid is married to a physicist and has two daughters.
Brigid & Dee, thanks for putting that together. It was very informative. I’m going to be looking at tone use a lot more carefully when I review a book. Also, Svetlana’s artwork is so beautiful, I can’t wait to start reading Nightschool.
Indeed, that was very cool. Spinning Linoleum Floor Death Vortex would be an awesome band name!
Dee rocks so hard!!!
This was an awesome overview. Time for her to write a book so she can go into even more detail!
Thanks, Brigid and Dee! Now I have a fighting chance of saying something smart about screentone use (and abuse). Looking forward to seeing Nightschool in its finished form!
Ha ha, I actually took a stab in saying something about screentone in something I just wrote this morning. :)
Fantastic introduction to toning. Thanks for putting it together!