Today let’s talk about multi-page projects and how to navigate them.

 

What is a multi-page project? Well, technically it’s any project that has more than one page. So Webtoon or series of illustrations count, and this tutorial might be useful for you as well. Webtoon projects, in general, utilises pages for convenience, and for reader an episode look like one long page. And series of illustrations might be designed to be exhibited on the wall simultaneously, or one or several at the time of that’s, for example, a deck of card or series of postcards. However, comics and manga are telling continuous narrative through pages, so I have a few extra tips for comics and manga creators.

Note that Multi-page project are only available in Clip Studio Paint EX.

Creating the project

First thing first, we need to create comics project. To see all settings available for multi-page project you need to select second to last icon with a comic page and a gear sign. There are a lot of things you can tweak (it does not fit my screen!), so let’s walk through them one by one.

At the top you can define the name of the project, select the folder where to save it, and pick a template. Template is a set of predefined settings, so even if you want to change every single one of them, I suggest to start with the template and tweak things from there. You can also save your own template for the future projects.

Multi-page projects in Clip Studio are organised as a project folder (named after your file name), which contains separate files for every page and a project file with information about order of pages. The project file itself doesn’t take much disk space, so there is no benefit in trying to manage multi-page pages as separate illustrations.

With the next group settings you can specify the page size and trim and margin guidelines.

Safe area (green) - in a middle of the page. Everything you want to keep on the page should go here: art, text, sfx, etc.

Margin area (yellow) - a space between safe area and trim line. If you want your art to take the whole page you need to extend here.

Bleed (pink) - an extra area that most likely will be cut (depends on the printer) but should be taken into account for bleeding artworks.

 

If you are planning to print your work in multiple formats, you can enable safety margins. Read more about safety margin here.

Quick tip! The size of your page is always larger than all of the marks. And sometimes when your drawing is bleeding through the crop marks is hard to estimate the composition of the page (if characters are cut in the right way or if background doesn’t end in weird place. White colour of the page might be distracting as well. In these cases, I often use an extra layer with a black rectangle to quickly see how the final page will look like. It is way faster than exporting the page.

You can add a cover to your project. Since cover is usually printed on different type of paper, Clip Studio Paint allow you to specify different resolution and colour. For example, you can have your manga in black and white and a cover in colour in one project.

 

Here, you can also set where the cover and back cover will be placed in your project- at the beginning or in the reading order.

Next you can specify the story information: title, author; and setup the page number. This information will appear at the bottom of the page outside of bleed area, so it won’t affect your final result.

If you’d like to have page number on the page itself, check the Folio parameter, then specify the position, size and font.

 

 

Last, but not least (without it we won’t have a multi-page project) - Multiple pages settings. Here, we can select appropriate number of pages (but it can be changed later), set the view (page-by-page or webtoon), select the binding point and starting page (left binding and from right for western comics and right binding and from left for manga.

By default, I have the timelapse recording on. Timelapse is recorded for each page (or spread) separately in their respective files, the same way timelapse recorded for illustrations. But to be able to split and combine pages, you will need to manually turn off recording for these pages, so I’ll do that in advance.

Quick tip! For project to have a cover, it must consist of at least 4 pages. Make sure you have enough pages in your project to have a cover.

Now, we are finally ready to click ‘OK’ and start our project.

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Managing the pages

Once the project is created, you will see a project file, where all pages a shown as thumbnails in order of their appearance in the book.

To open the page double-click on the thumbnail. Depending on your settings, the page will open in the same or new tab. Now, you can edit the page in same way you will work with normal illustrations.

If you realise that you need more/less pages, you can adjust the number in a project file. To add page, select the page where you need extra pages and right click with a mouse. Select “Add Page” from the menu. To remove the page, select “Delete Page”. You can also replace the page with the page from your other project by selecting “Replace page…”

 

 

Quick tip! If you selected combine two pages into spreads, you’ll be able to add or delete pages only in pairs. Split pages to manage them separately.

To change the order of pages, select it, then drag and drop it at a new place.

Quick tip! If you work on a multi-page project, plan your panels and text before you start to draw a final artwork. If you decide to change number of panels later, you might have to redraw several pages or even add/remove them.

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Export the result

Let’s pretend we’ve finished our project. What can we do now?

First, we can preview comic project as a printed book in 3D. To do that go to File -> Export multiple pages -> 3D preview for binding…

You can export all pages as separate files by saving them separately or by exporting a batch. To export pages as a batch, select File -> Export (Single page) and pick a format.

To export project in an electronic book format, EPUB, go to File -> Export multiple pages -> Export EPUB data…

You can also export project in PDF format. To do that go to File -> Export multiple pages -> .pdf (PDF format)…

Don’t forget to setup your own template for exporting the page!

Thank you for reading!