the paintings are digital so i'm just gonna skip that. when it comes to the black and white manga itself, what sticks out the most to me is how thick and smooth the line art is and how smooth the screentones are.
the line-art on ged looks like it was done with a standard round brush with some pen pressure, these kind of lines can be replicated easily. the screentone on his hat is light colored, smooth and less textured. the rain falling down is most likely on a completely seperate layer aswell. the shadow on ged's face that's coming from the hat is super smooth, it looks like a gradient, really even transition. they probably used that exact same screentone from the hat but made it very low opacity.
this here is a comparison between 2 panels, the panel on the top is guts from digital volume 38 which might i add looks very similar to the print volume 38 and the bottom panel is from the digital YA issue. as you can see, the top panel looks grainy and has texture to it, looks traditional. the bottom panel looks much smoother, the screentones are cleaner, they dont have those random white dots or texture that the top panel has. the lines on guts' hair look smooth and done with a digital brush with pen pressure.
here morda's hat has a darker and more textured screentone, then on the right you have that same smooth light less textured screentone. but you could argue that there is fire under her so the lighting changed. one thing to note, the morda on the right, her hat has doesn't have those lines on the bottom, image on the right has them and the the schierke that Eluvei posted has them aswell.
Source: both digital YA
here is just a random comparison of guts smiling, looks better in the new style in my opinion.
digital screentones are very easy to apply and save quite a lot of time, for those who don't know how they work, ill explain. i've tried digital screentones in photoshop, manga studio and coral painter and all the high quality screentones pretty much work the same way. they are normal brushes, all you have to do is fill in the spot you want to tone, what makes this easier is they do not overlap.
as you can see, i used a few different screentones here to demonstrate, i take 1 horizontal stroke and one verticle stroke, when the strokes meet in the middle, the middle area doesn't get darker, there is no overlap. the reason why this happens is because these brushes are part of a bigger texture that's covering you're entire canvas, by making a stroke, you're making part of that texture visible, that's how you should think of it.
digital screentoning saves A LOT of time, my question is, is miura the one who does the screentones? if so, he's saving a lot of time. if his assistants are doing it then they're the ones saving time.
Nowadays it's really difficult to be sure. Shinichi Sakamoto's digital art looks a lot like something made with traditional tools: https://www.instagram.com/p/BDcumoTFaeG/
Sakamoto has been using the digital medium for a very long time, his previous series titled "the climber" started out traditionally and switched to digital in the later volumes, his work innocent which is 9 volumes is completely digital, innocent rouge, the sequel is also 2 volumes fully digital. by the time he started innocent he was already very good at using the digital medium and making it look traditional. it also appears that he's using manga studio exclusively, one thing that makes his art look digital is that his lines have a canvas texture, he's either adding canvas texture to the brush itself or the canvas, I've yet to find out how to do that in manga studio.
give miura a few years and he'll master this medium
