Clip Studio Paint is a comprehensive digital art application for artists who want to draw, paint, illustrate, create comics, design characters, or produce animations. The software is built around natural-feeling drawing tools while providing specialized features for professional digital artwork. It is available for Windows, macOS, iPad, iPhone, Android, Galaxy devices, and Chromebook. 

Drawing and Painting Tools

The app includes a broad selection of brushes designed to reproduce the feel of traditional media, including watercolor, oil paint, crayons, and colored pencils. Artists can customize brushes and use additional brushes and materials from the Clip Studio Assets library.

Smooth and precise brush strokes make Clip Studio Paint suitable for everything from rough sketches and line art to detailed illustrations and finished paintings. Vector layers also allow users to resize and reposition linework without losing quality, while intersection erasing makes it easier to correct complex line drawings. 

3D Models and Reference Tools

Clip Studio Paint includes customizable 3D reference models that can help artists work out poses, proportions, anatomy, backgrounds, and props. Models can be positioned, adjusted, and used as visual references while creating artwork.

Perspective rulers and other drawing guides make it easier to construct accurate backgrounds and environments. Tools such as Puppet Warp, Liquify, and Mesh Transformation also allow artists to modify existing artwork instead of having to redraw it from scratch. 

Coloring and Finishing

The software provides tools for quick base coloring, filling areas, blending, shading, filters, and other finishing tasks. Shading Assist can help establish lighting, while color previews and filters provide additional control when refining an illustration.

Layer masks, clipping, effects, and layer organization tools are designed to make complex projects easier to edit and manage. 

Comics, Manga, and Webtoons

Clip Studio Paint has dedicated tools for comic production, including panel frames, speech balloons, text, effect lines, and screentones. Artists can create single-page comics as well as multi-page projects for printed comics, manga, and webtoons.

The software also includes tools for managing page layouts and exporting finished projects, making it suitable for both web and print-oriented workflows. 

Animation

Beyond static artwork, Clip Studio Paint supports animation workflows ranging from simple GIFs to full-length animation projects. Features such as onion skinning and light tables allow artists to view adjacent frames while drawing and refining movement.

The PRO version supports simple animation and movie creation of up to 24 frames, while EX adds full-length animation capabilities.