My hype was high. My expectations, however, were low. I was in a long term relationship with my Cintiq Companion, the precursor to the MobileStudio Pro, and a Surface Pro, and the slate of apps available on the iPad Pro seemed more suitable for sketching and ideation than finished works. Some folks swore by Procreate, but the floaty, distant feel of making marks and the shallow, odd brush engine left me wanting. I returned the Pro.
Clip Studio on the Cintiq Companion offered me desktop-grade art software with no compromises. Sort of. The compromises asked by the Companion were those of true portability. I love my Companion. Well, loved my Companion. I used it for three or four years — daily — from launch until now.
The other devices I live with are even more studio and desk bound. My main workstation boasts a Cintiq 27QHD. The 27QHD is roughly the size of a late eighties Buick with the price tag to match. No normal monitor arm dare try to hoist its heft, so it sits on an imposing metal limb that looks like an assembly line robot in an automotive plant. Is the iPad Pro, when paired with desktop grade art software, that unicorn?
How much overlap exists in its Venn diagram? Will I ever be able to leave this damn studio? Imagine that Photoshop, Painter, and Sai were chopped apart and sewn into a Frankenstein-ian monster. For hours and hours. On a single battery charge.
The Pro had no fucks to give. Less than no fucks. Negative fucks. The monster could not be stopped. But every Rose has its thorn, right? Here are the thorns. Put on your gardening gloves. First, the easy one. Dropbox and Google Drive integration and a less tedious way to import tools, materials, and templates, are the biggest items on my Clip Studio wishlist. Now, the toughie. But it has. Being untethered from my studio adds more than nine dollars of value to my life. Check your credit card statements.
Soon art apps will have loot boxes containing random filters and brush tools that can only be purchased with in-app currency. You can take the gloves off now. The only negatives left to explain are things I got wrong when I tested an iPad Pro at its launch. What I thought were hardware limitations were apparently just the narrow ambitions of the art apps at the time.
Clip has best in class stroke and pressure interpretation. If something feels off to you, adjust the global pressure curve in Clip Studio to get the most out of your Pencil. Select it. Make a few strokes.
I set the curve to a straight, flat line. This allows the Pencil a full range of pressure un-massaged by the application. These newest brushes reflect seven years of obsessive, masochistic iteration on making the best drawing tools possible.
The Painterly brushes are great for mass work or for coloring underneath comic style lineart. They create soft edged, blending strokes with light pressure and totally opaque, dense areas of hard edged color with hard strokes. Creating soft or hard edges to create emphasis in a painting is as easy as varying pressure with your stylus. One tool to do it all — no separate blenders. The pencilling tools include shading brushes, layout pencils, and sketching tools of varying hardness replicating analog style effects and workflows.
The Hairpin Sable and Lando Callbrusshian tools are my favorite inkers in any app, ever. Do you use Painter but curse the gods whenever it crashes to desktop during your tenth iterative save? It inks and paints well out of the box, unlike Photoshop. I can pencil, ink, and paint in a single app instead of the Frankensteinian hodge-podge I resorted to before.
No longer do I need to pencil and ink in Manga Studio and color in Photoshop or Painter as a second step. And no subscription to boot.
If you use any of the above apps on a daily basis, you should really try it out. I seldom fire up any of those other apps after. The kicker? All updates and additions are free for the life of the set. Version New tools include inkers, paint brushes, washes, pencils, and more. New FX tools include ropes, chains, trees, tentacles, lightning and more.
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