The Set Up

You’re a budding artist, looking to take advantage of all the things people tell you drawing digitally will help you to do.

You buy Clip Studio Paint, because Photoshop is too expensive, costs money every month, and has too much stuff in it.  It’s a confusing mess that would take months and expensive classes to learn.

You open up Clip Studio Paint and you see this:

Clip Studio Paint first impressions

You begin to wonder if you shouldn’t have splurged for Photoshop, after all.

Good News/Bad News

Good news: You made the right choice in picking CSP.  It’s made specifically to help comic book artists, but functions well as a general drawing, painting, image editing, and graphic design program.  For less than $50, it’s a steal.

Bad News: There is a learning curve.  It can be a tedious and time consuming one.  The manual that comes with CSP is nearly 900 pages, and most of it is useless.  It’s a bullet point list of every button with cross-references to other buttons.

There are nuggets to be found there, but do you really want to comb through the 888 page User Guide to find them?

Does this look like a gripping narrative?

CSP User Guide is unfriendly

Good luck wading through that.

You can search on-line, but the results will be all over the map, from speed paintings to reviews to tutorials.  Even better, a lot of the material isn’t in English.  Since CSP hails originally from Japan, you’ll find a lot of the marketing materials and user created material will be in Japanese, as well.  This doesn’t help you, my English speaking friend.

After all that, the videos and tutorials you might find on-line will be of various ages.  Lots of tutorials cover previous versions of the software.   Things have changed a lot over the years.  I remember using Manga Studio 4.  Clip Studio Paint today is a big jump up in many ways from that.

Even if you do find a tutorial that covers what you’re looking for, you might need to wade through a 10 minute or 30 minute video to find that golden nugget of wisdom.

There has to be a better way.

Enter LearnCSP

LearnCSP is an independent website dedicated to answering your questions about Clip Studio Paint.

Like you, I’m a hobbyist artist.  CSP has helped me to improve my skills, but it’s come with a lot of questions along the way.  I kept notes on lots of them over the last year and want to share those answers with you here.

To improve your art, you need to continue practicing it.  You need to try new things, experiment in different styles, maybe even perform exercises to drill techniques into your muscle memory.

But learning your tools is important, too.  LearnCSP will help you Know Your Tools.  Clip Studio Paint gives you a lot of tools to work with, after all.

I haven’t found a good CSP-centric website out there.  Finding answers has always been about searching Google and YouTube and Pinterest and DeviantArt.  It’s exhausting. It’s time to create one place to go to find answers that are quick, relevant , and clearly explained so that you can get back to creating your art, whether it’s for comic books, webcomics, or something else…

Disclaimer Type Stuff

LearnCSP is an independent site not affiliated with or produced by the folks behind the program, itself.

Amazon links on the site are affiliate links.  They won’t cost you extra, but I’ll get a small cut of those purchases to help keep this site going.