Please help!

[Grigari]

I've only recently started drawing and have done some Manga, but I'd like to take my pencil sketches into 3d. Everyone seems to use photoshop, but being a poor and lowly student I don't have the $300 or whatever that it seems to go for. So I was wondering if I could pick everyone's brains to see if there was a cheaper alternative?

[Sess]

3d? Photoshop is 2d dear.
And for 300 dollar you'd probably get Paint Shop Pro - photoshop is really expensive nowadays.

Did you try MS Paint? It comes standard with your system, and you can actually do some funky stuff with it, really, you can.
http://www.geocities.com/lizasimonova/art1.html
the first two are done in MS Paint - well it's obviously a whole different sort of charm that the programme has, but a charm nonetheless.

To take them into 3d - well I'm not an expert on this, you should ask the 3d experts around here. Poser or something probably?

There is a third alternative, but it's basically stealing, which is a bad thing to do, so I can't advise it. But, if you decide you want to do that, there's programmes like Kazaa and the like - in the country I live in, the judge ruled that downloading anything from Kazaa except child porn is legal - but your country might have laws that are a lot tougher and you could get into trouble, so, as i've said, I don't advise it, and I can't get you a copy either.

I'd say play around with MS Paint - you might be surprised at what you can do with it! And besides, just pen and paper and pencils and the like have their own charm as well.

[Sess]

Uhmmm another thing there is a programme that is I believe for free that has most the functions paint shop has - "gimp" or something? I'm not sure.

[Grigari]

I have paintshop pro 7, but I've always been enamoured of the things that photoshop can do. Maybe I should have made it clear that I wanted a Photoshop style program to improve the backgrounds to my starship images that I create in Blender as well as improving my manga style pics. I have a gallery at scifi-meshes.com under the alias 'MythRAJdir', thanks for your help anyway. I'll try and find some tutorials for cell shading and the like in Paintshop, if it exists. If you have any advise for paintshop, I'd love to hear it.

The UK are probably a little more facistic when it comes to Kazaa so I'll steer clear of it for now. Again thanks for the help, I'll look into Gimp. hmm, now that's something I hope I never have to say ever again!

[Sess]

Did you try real life photography for backgrounds? :D
You'd be surprised at the amount of things you can make coloured water pass off for.

[Grigari]

hmm, sounds intrigueing...

When I first started I did some rather terrible 'aliens float over the local horizon unconvincingly' style pictures, time to dig out the digital camera perhaps...

[General Phoenix]

You could also take a look at Photoshop Elements. It's kind of a slimmed-down version of Photoshop. Most of the normal Photoshop features and functions are there. Best part is, it's only about $100 to purchase.