Inked imagination

 Accept and learn from criticism I believe the old saying goes, there are no wrong answers. Well, that’s wrong. Of course there are wrong answers! It’s the yang to the yin: You aren’t going to know or understand what the right answer is if you don’t stumble upon the wrong answer. It’s probably odd to suggest that there is a wrong way to draw a manga or comic, when it’s such a subjective genre in and of itself. But as you go along your artistic journey, you’re going to encounter times when you work on a piece of art, take a step back, and you (or someone else will) say, “Well, that didn’t work at all!” It happens. Not everything you create can be a touchdown. There will always be instances when you throw an incomplete pass or worse yet, fumble the ball. (You can probably tell that football season started at the time of this writ￾ing.) I think, more than anything else in this book, that ground rule needs to be established because (hopefully) that will help you as you try to push you...

 The Idea Behind Panel Layers You can think of a panel layer in Manga Studio as a page within a page. Each panel layer acts as its own page file, with the ability for multiple image layers, just like the main page. Rulers, guides, and other tools that you would use on the main page can all be used within a panel layer. Only the section of the page covered in the panel layer can be shown at any time. This helps focus your attention on the one part of the page. What’s more, each panel layer is independent of other panel layers. So, anything you work on can overlap onto a different panel layer, and the other panel layer isn’t affected by it. You may see the scribblings from the other panel layer, but the art on the current one is untouched. The idea here is to give you the freedom to really go crazy with your drawing. Need to draw the entire body of a character in a scene to make sure the half that will be seen looks correct? No problem. Anything you draw that you don’t want to show c...

 Figuring Out Why a Track Won’t Play Sometimes, you might receive a track in your inbox or see it on a playlist — but it just won’t play. Why can other people seem to play it but not you? This playback problem might be happening for a number of reasons: ✓ Unavailable track: If you try to send someone a track from your own MP3 collection, you aren’t actually sending him that track — just a link to that track. Spotify tries to match the track from its own streaming catalogue so that he can play it. If it doesn’t have the track, your recipient can’t play it unless he also has it stored in his local files. A message may appear encouraging you to import the file in order for you to be able to play it. ✓ Country restrictions: Spotify’s current record label agreements mean that if you send tracks to friends in other Spotify countries, it’s possible that they may not be able to play those tracks and vice versa. Spotify’s official blog says that the restrictions “are a legacy from...

 How Get Satisfaction works Whenever there’s a bug you want fixed or a missing feature you’re after — or you just get stuck trying to do something — simply go to the Get Satisfaction forums and submit a question. You can also submit an idea for Spotify’s devel- opers to consider, and other people can vote for whether they like your idea. For example, at the time of writing, close to 1,000 people want gapless playback in Spotify (where there’s no pause between songs), and almost 500 people are wishing for an easy way to report problems with the music (such as instances when bands that have the same name appear in the same artist stream). People can follow threads, or posts related to a particular topic, to keep up to date — replies to a topic can go straight to your e-mail so that you don’t need to keep checking the site for the answers. Oh, and if you absolutely love Spotify, you can choose to flatter everyone working there by clicking the Give Praise button and typing a f...

 Examining the origins of Spotify websites You can have a lot of fun discovering all the Spotify-friendly websites and tools out there. I’ve found that many of them started off in order to fill a certain need. For instance, Kieron Donoghue developed ShareMyPlaylists.com after he discovered there was no easy way to get other people to check out his songs (this was way before Spotify introduced social features; you can read an interview with Kieron in the sidebar “Behind the scenes at ShareMyPlaylists.com,” in this chapter). And Gigero, featured in the section “Gigero,” in this chapter, started off as a university assign- ment to create a web service, according to co-creator Filip Engberg. He and his former classmate Robert Åberg, both from Sweden, created Gigero after realizing there was no service that showed upcoming festivals in an intuitive way. To make it easy for people to dis- cover new music, they also decided to insert Spotify links to all artists attending...

 Examining a Playlist’s Anatomy Playlists you create are all stored in the fluffy Internet cloud, on Spotify’s servers — the large, always-connected computers that host content. So, if you log into a friend’s computer that’s running Spotify, you can access your play- lists at any time (as long as your friend is in one of Spotify’s launch countries, or you’re a Spotify Premium customer and allowed to log in from anywhere in the world). Despite playlists being stored centrally in the cloud, your experience with them may differ slightly, depending on whether you’re online or offline, the country you’re in, or the computer or device you’re using. Here, I outline dif- ferent playlist features and situations you may encounter: ✓ Synced playlists: Playlists I’ve already synced to my computer for offline listening (a Spotify Premium feature; see Chapter 16 for more on how to use it) have a symbol next to them shaped like a green circle with a white down arrow inside it. I know tha...