Tour of the App

Are you interested in turning your morning commute into art time? Or maybe you just enjoy painting outdoors. Either way, the Clip Studio Paint app is handy for working on projects on the go.

 

You can start from a photo or start with a blank canvas. There are many types of projects including animation, magazines, and comic strips. Settings are fully customizable such as left to right or right to left reading styles and the number of comic panels on a page. You can also change the canvas color if you don’t want to work on a bright white page.

 

Across the bottom, you have materials, recent colors, the default standard color set, a color wheel, properties for your active brush, layer properties, layers, and three tabs of quick access settings which are easily customizable for whatever shortcuts you use most. Then on the right side you’ve got a panel for hotkeys, which you can move around to wherever is convenient.

 

In the main menu, you can access things like filters and specialized settings for animation and stories. Then there are lots of ways to customize your experience in the app settings. The Command Bar and Palette Bar settings let you swap out the buttons on the bottom of the screen.

Under tool preferences, I’d recommend checking the box for “Reduce pen pressure when drawing with finger/mouse at the start and end of brush strokes.” This gives a more natural look to your art when you don’t have access to pressure sensitivity settings. You can also adjust various display and performance settings as needed, and change the touch screen gestures here.

 

Next let’s take a look at our painting tools, where we have many different kinds of pens, brushes, erasers, and more. If you press and hold one of the sub tools, you can edit its settings. Double click it to edit the brush properties.

If you’re having troubles drawing nice lines with your fingers, I’d recommend increasing the stabilization setting on tools that have it. This will give you smoother lines.

 

Right above the drawing tool selection button is an extremely handy way to toggle between drawing and erasing. To change what kind of eraser you use, simply go into the drawing tool selection area and select a different eraser. I definitely recommend using a vector layer to create your line art since it makes it much easier to edit and refine later. Just remember – to use the draw/erase toggle feature, you need to have your brush / pencil / or pen be the one active on the drawing tool selection button.

 

Then if you are drawing on a vector layer, you can use the object tool to move any of the points on your lines. Lastly, the selection tool gives you the ability to resize or reposition your art, or even clear it away entirely and start over.

 

When you’ve completed your art, be sure to save your project if you haven’t already. It’s good to get in the habit of manually saving every few minutes even though there is an auto-save that periodically backs up your work too. If you close out of your project, you should now see it listed under the In This App tab under Manage Works.

Transferring Your Project to Your Computer

Make sure you are signed in to your Clip Studio Paint account and have a good internet connection. Then toggle the button on the left just below your art to sync your art to the Clip Studio Paint Cloud. Click the arrow on the right just below your art and then click Sync Now to begin syncing. When it is finished, you’ll see it on the Cloud tab of Manage Works.

 

On your computer, again make sure you are signed into your Clip Studio Paint account, then click on Manage Works then on the Cloud tab. Click on the download button below your art to download it from the Cloud to your computer.

 

If the download button is blue, it means you don’t have the file on your computer yet. If it is orange, then you already have a version of that file on your computer but you can choose to replace it with the version in the Cloud. Now if you go to the This Device tab, you will see your art.

 

I hope that you found this little Clip Studio Paint tutorial helpful. Have a fantastic time painting, wherever you choose to go!