Art tips: software

In the comic industry at the moment there are two softwares that dominate: Clip Studio Paint, and Procreate. There are other options, of course, and if you’re comfortable with one, you should probably stick to that, but these two have really become the standard.

Clip Studio Paint or Manga Studio (iOS, Android, Mac, PC) has been around for quite a long time. It’s Japanese and was originally designed for Manga creation. It’s one of the best softwares I’ve found for creating pencil or ink drawings on both. It is very powerful. While it goes on a subscription model and is a bit pricier than Procreate, it has a free trial, which means that if you get it a few weeks before a 48 graphic novel project, you probably have time to get used to it and use it there before you pay.

Procreate (iPad) One of the earliest art tools designed for iPad, Procreate is fantastic to work with, it’s simple, and it has a great community for finding tools that might help you. It’s priced very reasonably at around 11€ and is used by professionals to create comic books.

These are some great tools, and I recommend trying them out if you want to go digital with your art.

A note on resolution of final art

There is one thing to keep in mind – Procreate will restrict what you can create based on the power of your iPad. If you have an iPad Pro, you can create much larger works, and export at higher resolutions. If you’re on a standard iPad or iPad mini or possibly even an older iPad Pro, you will be restricted to lower resolutions. Clip Studio, on the other hand, can handle larger resolutions even on lower powered machines – though you may find that it crashes when working with very sizeable art.