Day 1 and the last day of our countdown. Pitch day is tomorrow!!! Reminder: You have until 11:59 tonight (Oct. 4) to load your pitches onto our website. Tomorrow at 8 a.m. EDT, agents and editors will have access to view your pitches. Our Twitter pitch for un-agented GN creators of MG and lower GNs will also start tomorrow at 8 a.m. If you are un-agented, you can join both.
Clip Studio has again generously offered a 12-Month license for CLIP STUDIO PAINT EX. See details below. Last Year’s Clip Studio Prize Winner, Dolo Okęcki, shares her thoughts on the product:
I’ve been using Clip Studio EX for almost a year now, thanks to the previous KidLit GN contest, and I found it really handy.
I was already used to the PRO version and worked with it daily for sketching, inking, and coloring comics. The perspective and parallel rules make the sketching process quicker. But it’s the color flatting stage where I save the most time. Much faster than Photoshop, once you find the right fill settings—a mix of the classic fill and fill pen do the trick. My only gripe is the CMYK exporting, it looks too yellow, but that may be me working with the wrong color profiles. One can always save as PSD and continue from there.
As for the EX version, its new PDF import is so useful! Most art directors give you PDF templates that I can now open directly there and convert it to clip. That’s comfortable as I don’t have to make the document from scratch or convert it from another app.
I could still go into other useful tools like 3d assets and vector and image layers, but the points above are, in my op, what makes this app worth it for comic artists. Oh, and the freehand balloon subtool is nice. You can do some nice, organic speech bubbles. The text tool can be a bit tricky, at least the non-Japanese version. But you can basically export the final lettered book from EX.
I am starting to use it on a regular Samsung tablet and the cloud service is another thing I now use, working from the trial version to the EX one without a problem. I will finally subscribe for the tablet once the trial ends.
For more information on Clip Studio, see Russ Cox’s post from last year or visit Clip Studio’s site.
To enter to win a 12-month license of Clip Studio EX, please comment below with your name. To enter more than once, share this post on social media, then reply to your original comment with the link to where you shared the post. You can enter as many times as you shared. This contest will close by end of day on Oct. 8, and the winner will be selected shortly after. Thank you, Clip Studio! THIS CONTEST IS CLOSED AND THE WINNER IS SARAH GILES. CONGRATS, SARAH!