FRENDEN

CLIP WHO-DIO?

Thu, 25 Aug 2022 13:02:43 -0500

CLIP WHO-DIO?

Clip Studio, the chosen one of non-subscription model based art making, recently announced they’re joining the Adobes of the world. Yup, we’re not gonna get free updates anymore.

I have a modest portion of my CSP tools already ported to Krita. I will release that set soon–I started that process two years ago, and I’m glad I did. I plan on making Krita tools from here on out, and will still support and update my Clip stuff too.

I’m in the middle of moving–and my partner and I are opening a tabletop gaming and maker space with our friends–or I’d drop the in-progress set now.

Krita is pretty rad. It’s capable. It’s free. It’s also a shame that Clip swerved hard.

Capitalism comes for us all.

COME CHECK OUT MY TWITCH STREAM! I’m making Clip Studio brushes and rad art. Going live in a bit…

Mon, 19 Apr 2021 11:33:19 -0500

COME CHECK OUT MY TWITCH STREAM!

I’m making Clip Studio brushes and rad art.

Going live in a bit here, so follow!

I’m about to go live on Twitch and finish up this...

Sat, 27 Feb 2021 14:44:30 -0600

I’m about to go live on Twitch and finish up this SpongeBob art. THEN, D&D character art or brushmaking or or or…

SEE STREM, JOIN STREM: http://twitch.tv/FRENDEN

45% Off Clip Studio Paint Brushes

Mon, 18 Jan 2021 14:35:18 -0600

Get 45% off my 800+ Clip Studio Paint brush set this week only!

Use the code MOVE at checkout: https://gumroad.com/l/clipstudio

Reblog here, or retweet my sale on Twitter, for a chance at a free set.

Below are just a few examples of the work created with them. Many more are available on my Twitter, and my storefront.

My Clip Studio brush set, with over 700 penciling, inking, and...

Sat, 02 Mar 2019 14:56:56 -0600

My Clip Studio brush set, with over 700 penciling, inking, and painting tools, is on sale until Monday.

Get 30% off at checkout with the code THIRTY.

️Update 14.0 – 70 new Clip Studio brushes!️ New tools...

Tue, 18 Dec 2018 10:46:49 -0600

️Update 14.0 – 70 new Clip Studio brushes!️

New tools include inkers, paints, washes, pencils, and more totaling over 700 brushes.

Get them here!

Updates are free for existing users. Reblog for a chance at a free set.

FRENDEN’S 600+ CLIP STUDIO BRUSH SET...

Tue, 12 Jun 2018 11:49:30 -0500

FRENDEN’S 600+ CLIP STUDIO BRUSH SET UPDATE

store.frenden.com

These painting, penciling, inking, and special FX tools utilize a wide range of custom made textures, daubs, and settings emulating traditional media and beyond.

This set reflects twelve years of obsessive iteration in the pursuit of making the best digital drawing tools possible.

All updates and additions are free for the life of the set. Speak of the devil:

Added approximately 200 new brushes. New FX tools include ropes, chains, trees, tentacles, lightning and more.
Optimized all tools for better performance on iOS and low-spec systems. Nearly every tool’s texture and daub were adjusted.

Reblog for a chance at a free set.

Clip Studio Paint, the iPad Pro, Art Studio House Arrest, and You

Sat, 11 Nov 2017 06:54:03 -0600

Celsys recently released a feature complete, no concessions made, portable version of its desktop illustration software, Clip Studio Paint, for iOS and the iPad Pro.

I’ve used some form of Celsys’ art software since about 2004 back when it was called Comic Studio in Japan. It’s successor, Clip Studio, has been my go-to application for illustration since I beta tested the English localization for Smith Micro.

Suffice to say, the release of my preferred art tool on the iPad Pro intrigued me. An hour after hearing the news I rushed out and purchased a new 12.9” iPad Pro and Apple Pencil. My hype was high. My expectations, however, were low.

When last I’d checked in with the iPad Pro, it was a nascent device with little apps more than Procreate to justify its expense. 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. Was the Pencil’s feel a result of the hardware’s low fidelity or was it representative of the early, rough handful of art apps? I couldn’t tell you. 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. Much like it’s current kin, the MobileStudio Pro, it felt like a device that wanted to be plugged in to a power source, set on a desk, and worked at in a tethered, stationary way.

Don’t get me wrong. I love my Companion. Well, loved my Companion. I used it for three or four years — daily — from launch until now. But, as dependable and capable as it was, it was never as portable as I’d hoped.

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.

The reason I bring this up, and there’s a reason I promise, is that digital artists haven’t had many tools where portability and capability overlap near-perfectly in a Venn diagram.

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?

Okay, okay. How well does it work?

I was down on the iPad Pro when I tested it years ago, but Clip on the Pro has changed my outlook on the Pencil’s competence and the iPad Pro’s viability single-handedly.

Imagine that Photoshop, Painter, and Sai were chopped apart and sewn into a Frankenstein-ian monster. That’s Clip.

Would that monster prove too beastly for the iPad’s hardware? I inked and painted at 11” x 17” and 600 dpi with brush sizes in the three and four hundred pixel range while the iPad Pro served up a video stream at the same time. 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. It’s choking a villager right now.

But every Rose has its thorn, right? Poison wouldn’t lie to me. 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. Opening files and moving tools via the Share Sheet menu in Drive or Dropbox is slow and requires more steps than I’d like.

Now, the toughie. Clip requires a $8.99 per month subscription fee. At the time of writing, they’re offering a six month trial.

I want to pretend the iOS version of Clip hasn’t fast become essential to my workflow in less than two days. But it has. Being untethered from my studio adds more than nine dollars of value to my life. I don’t want to give that freedom of movement up.

I’m not a fan of subscription based software, but I spend more combined on a Twitch sub and Discord Nitro per month. I’ll cope even if I’m not crazy about it.

Everything’s a service now. You may not realize it, but you’ve been paying me $24.99 a month for my opinions for five years. 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.

I’m straying. 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.

I’d maligned the Pencil in the past, but it wasn’t its fault it felt floaty and odd. What I thought were hardware limitations were apparently just the narrow ambitions of the art apps at the time. Those apps simply weren’t as good at complimenting the Pro as Clip is.

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. Doing so will help you experience the fullness of the Pencil’s pressure range and give the Pencil its proper due.

The Pen Pressure Setting is tucked under Clip’s logo menu (to the left of the File menu). Select it. Make a few strokes. The app will tailor its input curve to your hand’s heaviness and way of mark making.

Me? I set the curve to a straight, flat line. This allows the Pencil a full range of pressure un-massaged by the application. I adjust my brushes on an individual basis instead (with each having their own pressure curve tailored for a specific feel).

After telling the app to set a pressure curve that’s suited to you, you’re in the best position to feel the Pencil for what it is — a stylus with linear, predictable, and reliable output.

Where my Pencil touched the tablet my mark was made. There was no cursor offset to speak of. There was no stylus tip parallax that plagues Wacom’s Cintiq line. There was no laggy, laboring cursor trudging along behind my stylus to remind me those marks weren’t really coming from the end of the Pencil.

I hadn’t had this much fun drawing digitally — hell, in any capacity — in ages. I started to forget that I was using a digital device. I found myself treating the iPad Pro the way I do paper. I instinctively reached down to wipe away eraser leavings that weren’t there. I got lost in making art. I’m sorry I ever doubted you, Pencil.

So it works really well. What about that Venn diagram?

The iPad Pro paired with Clip Studio is a joy. I’ve written art hardware reviews for loads of digital tools. I have two Surfaces, a Companion, a heap of off-brand tablets and tablet monitors, and a few Intuos Pros and Cintiqs. If you forced me to keep only one, I might choose the iPad Pro and Pencil. It feels that good.

In the digital artist’s art-hardware-holy-grail-Venn-diagram of portability and capability mentioned earlier, the iPad Pro represents a near-perfect overlap.

My studio is empty as I write this. For over fifteen years, constrained in place by the tools required to do my work, I’ve occupied its spaces and brought the world to me through illustration. Now I’m bringing my illustration into the world instead.

In this article:
12.9‑inch iPad Pro (Latest Model)
Apple Pencil
Clip Studio Paint (iOS)
Clip Studio Paint (Desktop)

You can support my reviews by using my Amazon affiliate link or buying my digital art brushes for Clip Studio Paint.

Clip Studio 450+ Brush Super Set Update Over 100 new brushes!...

Thu, 24 Aug 2017 15:27:56 -0500

Clip Studio 450+ Brush Super Set Update

Over 100 new brushes! Over 450 brushes total! This update is over a 50% increase in set size. Reblog for a chance at a free set.

Many new inking, penciling, painting, and wash brushes added. Existing tools were renamed and sorted into brush families for ease of identifying your favorites and remembering them later.

Updates are free for existing users. Just re-use your existing purchase links. I’ll pick folks to receive a free set randomly throughout the next week.

GET THEM HERE.

Some orcish character art and process. Highlighted areas being...

Tue, 02 May 2017 12:13:27 -0500

Some orcish character art and process. Highlighted areas being more saturated is not only the generally correct way to render form, it conserves your value scale. You get a lot of mileage out of relatively similarly valued colors and it’s like free depth to describe the form with.

I pick highlight colors closer to the hue of the light source and my shadows closer to that of the ambient atmosphere (and usually a compliment to the hue of the light source). Here, yellow to blue/purple.

I’ve always liked less recognizably humanoid orcs. The best film orcs were probably the Fifth Element aliens if we’re real talkin’ here. Dad hat, cut and sew print tank, pin rolled jeans and CP3xs. He tries very hard.

I decided to add some hand lettering to that last doodle. Kawhi...

Sun, 23 Apr 2017 19:31:21 -0500

I decided to add some hand lettering to that last doodle.

Kawhi was amazing last night in the extremely tight loss to Memphis. He’s definitely part machine.

Warmup drawing. Kawhi Leonard as a cyborg. Because, let’s...

Fri, 21 Apr 2017 22:49:54 -0500

Warmup drawing. Kawhi Leonard as a cyborg. Because, let’s be real – he is one.

Some quick Twitch emotes for a client. It’s challenging to...

Sat, 08 Apr 2017 13:32:14 -0500

Some quick Twitch emotes for a client. It’s challenging to make things read well at the smallest size there.

Destiny metal-band thought experiment tee design. I...

Fri, 24 Mar 2017 19:10:31 -0500

Destiny metal-band thought experiment tee design.

I couldn’t sleep last night, hadn’t done any personal work in ages, and was making brushes for Krita, so I whipped this up.

After a day spent drawing character art for clients, I decided...

Sun, 10 Jan 2016 22:49:48 -0600

After a day spent drawing character art for clients, I decided to unwind by… drawing some character art.

Over 90 new Manga Studio brushes! Reblog for a chance at a free...

Thu, 07 Jan 2016 17:00:50 -0600

Over 90 new Manga Studio brushes! Reblog for a chance at a free set! Download them here.

This latest update contains new paints, pencils, and inkers with a focus on adding textured, gritty painters and expanding the core set of tools.

For the core tools, inking brushes, nibs, brush pens, pencils, pastels, charcoals, oils, and acrylics have been added.

For the advanced tools, painterly brushes with impasto canvas, wash, sponge, leather, and other textures were mashed together to create the most realistic tools for concept art and coloring I’ve offered yet.

The Grimy Gus brush family offers realistic textures and mixing with an emphasis on creating paintings that feel like chunky, old acrylic paintings the likes of which adorned ‘80s action figure box art.

Bristle Bob takes that formula and emulates wispy bristles for an even more varied and textured surface.

Sloppy Sam, Sponge Bub, and Filthy Frank push the impasto textures even further and provide extreme texture variance for some of the most analog looking strokes I’ve ever been able to create digitally.

A partial list of the updates can be found below:

Paints & Wet Media

Grimy Gus
Grimy Gus (Outliner)
Grimy Gus Bristle (Chunky)
Grimy Gus (Dry)
Grimy Gus (Chunky & Dry)
Bristle Bob
Bristle Bob (Outliner)
Bristle Bob (Sparse)
Bristle Bob (Dry)
Bristle Bob (Sparse & Dry)
Bristle Bob (Wet)
Sloppy Sam
Sloppy Sam (Impasto)
Sloppy Sam (Sparse & Dry)
Sloppy Sam (Dry)
Filthy Frank
Filthy Frank (Wet Impasto)
Filthy Frank (Impasto)
Filthy Frank (Dry)
Filthy Frank (Wet)
Sponge Bub
Sponge Bub (Dry)
Sponge Bub (Extra Dry)
Wash (Simple)
Watercolor
Watercolor (Simple)
Watercolor (More Opaque)
Watercolor (Gouache-like)
Watercolor (Random)
Watercolor (Wet Wash)
Oil
Oil Round
Oil Flat
Oil Filbert
Oil (Dry)
Oil (Wet)
Oil (Blender)
Acrylic
Acrylic (Dry)
Acrylic (Wet)
Acrylic (Blender)

Pencils & Dry Media

Pencil (6H)
Pencil (4H)
Pencil (2H)
Pencil (HB)
Pencil (2B)
Pencil (4B)
Pencil (6B)
Pencil (Flat)
Pencil (Digital)
Layout Pencil (Blue)
Layout Pencil (Red)

Pastels & Charcoal

Oil Pastel (Hard)
Oil Pastel (Med)
Oil Pastel (Soft)
Charcoal Square (Hard)
Charcoal Square (Med)
Charcoal Square (Soft)
Charcoal (Hard)
Charcoal (Med)
Charcoal (Soft)

Inkers

Nib
Nib (Soft)
Nib (Stiff)
Nib (Very Soft)
Nib (Sketch)
Brush
Brush (Soft)
Brush (Stiff)
Brush Pen
Brush Pen (Opaque)
Brush Pen (Dry)
Brush Pen (Extra Dry)
Lando Calbrusshian (w/Speed)
Lando Calbrusshian (Nib)

Download them here.

Updates are free for existing users. Redownload using your existing purchase links.

Some of my MST3K concept art has hit the wild over on the...

Thu, 10 Dec 2015 10:18:20 -0600

Some of my MST3K concept art has hit the wild over on the Kickstarter page. Here’s my first stab at Bobo as a puppet.

Plans called for an Aliens-style loader to hide an actor when Bobo needs to move around the set. That was my task. Bobo as a puppet, a loader to cart him around in.

The Kickstarter is perilously close to it’s 12 episode goal. Please support us if you like MST3K and have the means!

No app inks like Manga Studio 4 or 5. Not even close.

Sun, 06 Dec 2015 13:28:28 -0600

No app inks like Manga Studio 4 or 5. Not even close.

Here’s a free wash brush for Manga Studio. It’s not...

Thu, 03 Dec 2015 20:12:19 -0600

Here’s a free wash brush for Manga Studio.

It’s not available anywhere else. I have about fifty brushes ready to add to my big brush set as a free update for existing users soon. This will be one of them.

Make something!

My figures begin as a center line and three triangles. If they...

Wed, 02 Dec 2015 21:19:59 -0600

My figures begin as a center line and three triangles. If they work, so will the rest. I don’t see others use triangles.

Boxes and cylinders never worked for me, sketch mannequin wise. The triangles are less obtrusive and more open. Or something.