It may not compare to the professional hand-drawn techniques used by manga artists and their tireless teams of assistants, but thanks to a few ingenious tools, it can provide editable, pixel perfect line art quite quickly and much more easily than other vector-based art programs.Īs far as I can tell, the software has never been officially translated into English, and even the website’s English is spotty at best. In comes Easy Paint Tool SAI, an awesome line art tool from tiny developer Systemax, who apparently still exist, but you could be fooled by their website. Drawing these lines is an incredibly difficult and arduous process – one that aspiring artists go to school to master and then do for years tracing over a manga artist’s sketches before ever dreaming of drawing something of their own. Unlike American comics, which take their time inking with heavy, shapely lines and large pools of black and color panels to make pictures readable, Japanese manga is generally done in black&white and is hundreds of panels long, and since no color will be applied requires a very fine attention to creating thin, perfectly readable line art quickly.

One invaluable program in my repertoire is a strange little painting tool from the land of holographic pop idols and gameshows that hit guys in the balls: Japan.

Paint tool sai crayon brush