Jimmy Jay Drawn with vectors in Clip Studio Paint

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This my first vector drawing. I had many before before I could complete this simple drawing. I’ve been practicing using the vector pen tool with Illustrator and Affinity Design, and now with Clip Studio Paint EX. CSP’s bezier curves have some useful features that I haven’t seen in Illustrator of Affinity Design. Jeez! That statement doesn’t mean anything. I know almost nothing about those two programs, I may be insanely wrong.

When I’m learning something new, I really have to push myself to keep going. It’s all too easy for me to say, “Bezier curves are stupid and I’m so talented I don’t need”, and then quit. That’s the way I operated for most of my life. I got enthusiastic, tried and little, and gave up with things got tough. I’m glad I got over that kind of thinking. Even though it took me 50 years, it’s never to late get out of the ditch and get back on track.

Trying Clip Studio Paint's bezier curves

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When I first started using Clip Studio Paint years ago, I tried the bezier curves a bit, became baffled, and quit learning about them. Today I tried them again. My opinion is in the formative stage. I can see that bezier curves would be great for all of those things that should have precise curves. Time will tell if I have the patience to do the work to become comfortable with vectors.

Clip Studio Paint's Gallery View

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If you’re creating a graphic novel or comic that contains dozens of images, Clip Studio Paint EX is worth the extra money it costs over plain Clip Studio Paint Pro. CSP Ex organizes all of the images into a single folder and names all of the file uniformly by page number. When you want to export all of the images, you can do a batch export as either JPG, PNG, PSD, orPSB. You can also export a Kindle ready e-book if you want.

CSP has an excellent vector-based text bubble tools, vector layers, and a good set of basic brushes that can do pretty much everything you need to do for comics. I should mention CSP’s frame capability that allows you to divide pages into image frames of any size and shape. There are many more features that I haven’t used yet.

Add it all up and CSP EX is like a combination of some of the desirable features of Adobe InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator in one package.