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Goth Girl Practice - Let's Review Clip Studio!
🕑 Added 2023-03-11 18:05:19 +0000 UTCFor the last week or so I've been doing all of my drawing practice in Clip Studio as a trial period to see how I like it. I started out with some basic sketches, then moved onto some linework. This cute (or at least busty) goth girl is the first bit of fully coloured art I've finished, and I wanted to walk through the experience with you all!
I'm going to break my workflow up into a few different stages and give them all a score of -5 to +5, with 0 being "the same as GIMP", -5 being "dramatically worse, nearly unusable", and +5 being "dramatically better, can't live without".
Construction (0): The first bit of my workflow is laying out the pose, proportions, and outfit of my character in a rough sketch. Once I found a sketching brush I liked I really didn't notice much of a difference between GIMP and Clip, but I also wasn't actively looking for any new tools here. I think Clip has some tools for adding in 3D guides for tricky things like hands, which I'll need to try in the future and might tilt things in Clip's favour. Overall this stage is important for me, but really doesn't demand much of the drawing program.
Lineart (+2): Next up I take the construction sketch that I have and refine it into crisp lineart. Once I had a brush set up to give me crisp lines my workflow was basically identical to GIMP. I would have given this a score of 0 as well, but I discovered that Clip has a much better warp tool for lineart. With GIMP the warp tool quickly results in a blurry mess when used on lineart. In Clip it was easy to draw a section and warp it around if I wasn't happy with the exact layout. This is super useful on faces where I'm still trying to figure out how a chin should be rounded or where her cheekbones should sit. Clip also has support for doing vector lineart, but I didn't experiment with that at all and will leave it for a future post.
Flats (+1): At this point I take my lineart and fill each section with flat colours. Clip has some tools for auto-selecting and filling regions that should have made filling in my drawing trivial, but I found myself struggling with it. The fill tool had a tendency to over-fill past lines or to undercolour at black edges and leave a transparent border of pixels. I'm pretty certain I'll be able to figure this out in the future, and if I can this rating would jump up to a 3 or a 4. Even in the less-than-perfect state it's faster than GIMP, where I needed to hand select every region I wanted to colour.
Shading (+4): The shading step is where I'm picking out the highlight and shadow colours for each section of the flats and putting those in. Here is where Clip really started to run away with the show. The tool layout made it much faster to adjust brush settings like hardness, which was very useful for folds in clothing. Critically, it also includes an incredible library of materials (even just looking at freely available ones). From effects like stitch lines to lace patterns to dynamically generated chains, it was SO MUCH EASIER to add interesting textures compared to GIMP. This might be the "killer feature" that convinces me to switch all by itself. I also feel like I've only scratched the surface here; there's so much more to do!
Rendering (2): Rendering is the final stage where I basically polish up all of the details and add things like some lighting effects, tone shifts, and so on. Here the main draw for Clip Studio are adjustment layers. These layers let you apply things like hue and brightness adjustments to layers without changing the original layer. This is a feature that is entirely missing from GIMP, and it's something I didn't realize I wanted until I had it. This allows me to experiment with tweaks to a whole bunch of small parameters and toggle it on and off to see the effects. I think there's a lot of potential here that I haven't gotten into, but I still feel like I'm coming out ahead compared to GIMP.
So overall we're coming out at a +2 for Clip over GIMP, and that's while I'm still dealing with the teething pains of learning a new drawing program - I fully expect that number to grow with time. I haven't felt the desire to go back to GIMP during any part of this experiment, and I've had a few moments of "Oh wow, I can do that?". I'm going to keep experimenting, but I think it's very likely I'll be keeping Clip as my go-to drawing program for the foreseeable future!
Comments
Mr R
Whatever tools you use, your art is great! Thanks for keeping us updated on behind-the-scenes stuff like this :)
Ashani
I do
GamingaM
Beautiful piece of art here.đ„ Now the question is do you have an audience that'd want her in the game? đ€đ€đ€
You can, and it's SO nice to have. You could achieve the same-ish thing in GIMP by applying a mask to an entire layer group, but it's nowhere near as convenient. Another thing to love about Clip is that it's only a one time purchase, no need to get trapped in adobe's subscription ecosystem!
If you want to use clip or nip or whatever you want is ok! Just give us more animations and sexy characters like her hehe
Ugh, my heart. The hue/saturation/brightness/levels layers are probably the #1 thing I miss in gimp from Photoshop. That, and being able to just click on the border between two layers (while holding down alt, I think?), and it makes the layer on top automatically use the layer below as its alpha mask. Maybe you can do that in Clip Studio too, I don't know. I should probably try it.
