Moving on to Clip Studio Paint
As digital art tablets become cheaper, digital arts programs become more numerous. Manga Studio 4, one predecessor to Clip Studio Paint, has been around for a long time. Personally, it wasn’t my favorite. I bought a disc which didn’t come with a serial number, and had to suffer through a long, frustrating call before I received a replacement serial and could finally use the program. And when I could, I hated it. I couldn’t even color on a single layer if I wanted to, because only one color could be used per layer.
I’ve bounced around a few different art programs. Autodesk Sketchbook, Photoshop Elements, Adobe Photoshop CS2, and even a free trial of Creative Cloud, which didn’t run well enough on my laptop for me to justify continuing to use it. My all time favorite program, Paint Tool Sai, is officially abandonedware — it hasn’t received an update in years. Just in case it stopped being compatible with my computer, I wanted to find an alternative. I tried Krita, but it lagged too much to be useful. Firealpaca was straightforward and easy to customize, like Paint Tool Sai, but lacked a few very basic functions, like the ability to flip a selection horizontally or vertically. (If it’s since gained that functionality, then good for Firealpaca users.)
Eventually, the internet clued me into Clip Studio Paint. It wasn’t free, like Firealpaca or Krita, but it frequently goes on sale. I snagged my copy for $25. For some perspective, Photoshop used to cost $700 for a license. So I’d say that’s a pretty good deal.
There are two versions of Clip Studo Paint. There’s EX, which contains a bunch of additional features apparently. It’s the professional version. It’s a little confusing, then, that my not-professional version is titled Clip Studio Paint PRO. Actually, a lot of the text involved in Clip Studio Paint is confusing, maybe in part because the program was originally made with Japanese text. It’s not always very clear what a function will do just from reading it, so it really is better to just click around and see what happens. Clip Studio makes it easy enough to return to a previous state, so you might as well experiment.
One of the most immediate functions of CSP is the ability to view and adjust the canvas you’ll be working on. Clip Studio asks you if you’re planning to make an image, an animated illustration, or an animation. None of these options will lock you out from the other, but it will set you up with an appropriate template to start with.
The next thing that becomes clear is the absolutely ridiculous amount of options that Clip Studio comes loaded with. It can be overwhelming to figure everything out, but protip — if you want to apply a texture you don’t just click on it. That opens the texture’s menu. You want to drag and drop onto your canvas. Layers function the same way that Photoshop, Gimp, Firealpaca, Krita, and Paint Tool Sai layers function, except for one critical detail: the folders in Clip Studio Paint will allow you to use multiple clipping layers whereas Photoshop will freak out if you try the same thing. I personally learned this when I offered to send my friend an editable file of a piece he commissioned from me and it completely glitched out when he tried to open it in Photoshop.
Apparently, Clip Studio Paint allows you to stack clipping layers in layer folders. Photoshop does not. That’s something to keep in mind if you ever need to work collaboratively.
In terms of customization, I can tell that CSP is very customizable because I’m able to see the thousands of custom brushes, textures, fonts, and so on in the store. And this isn’t really a fault in the program proper, but most of the brushes are labelled in Japanese, and the automatic translator is almost totally useless at conjuring a legible English equivalent to whatever details the original creators have packaged with their creations. And this is a common theme with all of CSP’s instructions, websites, adverts, and so on. It might look like English, but it reads like an alien approximating human speech.
When it comes to figuring out the program, you’re better off searching relevant forums or YouTube videos for tutorials. Even though the text associated with the website isn’t particularly fluent, the videos on Clip Studio’s Youtube channel are clear enough.
Another feature that makes Clip Studio Paint worth investigating is its myriad of comic-making tools, which Photoshop certainly has but isn’t really geared for. Here’s the thing. Photoshop is really geared towards editing photos, not creating digital art. Using it for a purpose other than its intended one is always going to require some finagling. But Clip Studio Paint is actually made for comic-making and digital painting. If you tell it you want to make a panel layout, it helpfully (and automatically) separates each new frame into its own layer folder and creates a clipping mask that binds the layer to the area of the frame.
If you want to make a text bubble, it will helpfully create a new layer with its own mask, and when you add text it will automatically start from the center of the bubble. Again, probably because the program is geared towards Japanese-speakers, the text defaults to right-align. I also find that using the prepackaged speech bubbles looks, well, sort of bland, and I have a hard time replicating their look when I want to create a custom speech bubble. For that, they have a pen tool, which I combine with the ellipse tool to make neat bubbles that don’t look super mechanical.
Also useful is the figure tool, which allows you to create a posable figure to use as a reference, or to trace over if necessary. The figures are also customizable — you can make them fatter, leggier, top heavy, tiny, enormous, pin-headed, and so on. Posing them can be a bit of a trial, but they’re flexible enough to be a helpful guideline if you don’t have your own armatures to pose. I mostly use them when I need help with a harsh perspective shot, because you can basically move the camera wherever you want. Overall, a fun tool to play with but not one I use often.
Ultimately, Clip Studio Paint Pro is probably the best digital art program for the price, and while it doesn’t quite fill the void that Paint Tool Sai left, while it’s not as user friendly and customizable as that beautiful program abandoned before its time, it’s a powerful program with its own unique benefits, and it’s cheaper than Photoshop.
