Kenno Thinks

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)

One thing I think is not talked about very much is that straight men live pretty much desexualized lives if we’re not actually having sex at that moment, and then there’s not much room to be the object rather than subject.

As I’ve said before, we men don’t have clothing options for “dressing sexy” in masculine clothing (there is cross dressing but that is different). There’s no male equivalent to the short skirt or low cut top. There’s no male lingerie that isn’t seen as a joke.

Further, we just don’t get validation for our sexuality outside of a sexual partner. We are almost never complimented for our looks or sexiness from platonic friends like women are, especially same sex friends.

There really aren’t many straight male role models for raw aesthetic sexiness in mainstream culture (besides unnaturally muscled men). In fiction, male characters are almost never attractive for embodying sexiness but rather for doing things (saving the world, being extremely witty, being a genius, winning the tournament, etc.). Their sexiness is non-aesthetic and sometimes is in spite of their aesthetics.

Anecdotally, it seems like a lot of men aren’t even called physically hot and sexy by their own sexual partners, who themselves focus on personality. There’s not much room to fulfill the role of passive sexism object for you partner for many/most men.

I think it is telling that a lot of porn for men ignores the man’s personality and has a woman just throwing themselves at the man, overcome with lust.

Also there the fact that women seem to rarely approach men and some seem to often expect the man to do most of the sexual escalation, especially in the early stages.

The answer always seems to be some combination of slot machine mentality (“maybe this one will like it, and make the other 50 worthwhile”) and a desire for witness. Surprising numbers of people admit that it’s validation even if the reaction is negative, simply because they’re still being viewed in a totally sexual context.

At the very least that has obvious consequences for people trying to reduce dick pic sending. There’s some core of people who can’t possibly be reached with “it’s not attractive to women” because that was never their expectation.

More broadly, I think efforts to get (Western?) men to emphasize with objectification wildly underestimate the challenge they’re facing. It’s not just a sympathy shortage, it’s a totally unfamiliar feeling. Making things even harder, it’s a feeling a lot of men say they wish they could have.

The usual narrative on not (politely) complimenting the appearance of unknown women is “sure, it’s nice if it happens once, but think about how annoyed you’d be if it happened all the time”. Fine in general terms, but I think a lot of men don’t have any way to intuit the emotional difference between too-frequent compliments and being pestered with too much of something totally innocuous like requests for the date.

The comments on those articles are frequently from men saying they’ve literally never received a single compliment from a stranger on their appearance, and can’t imagine what it would be like. The ones who have are often talking about a single, years-old compliment they still cherish. That’s not a framework that supports more than a purely theoretical understanding of what’s it’s like to be valued for your appearance too heavily - or at all.

https://www.thrillist.com/sex-dating/los-angeles/we-sent-a-preemptive-v-pic-before-dudes-could-send-dick-pics-heres-what-happened

Let’s be honest: while I enjoy penises, I don’t necessarily want unexpected visual boners intruding on my day. I wondered, “What would guys do if I turned the tables and sent them an unexpected vagina pic?” And so, in my own twist on revenge porn, I sent 40 unexpected vagina pics to men on Bumble.

This … didn’t work out the way she apparently expected it to:

Overall, I was surprised that I didn’t get my, “Gotcha!” moment. I’d initially hoped the guys would see how invasive it is to receive such intimate photos from a stranger. When I’m excited to get to know a guy, his penis isn’t the first part of him that I want to know. But given that men like to send dick pics, I suppose their enthusiasm for v-pics makes sense.

So, basically, women experience dick picks as a net negative, as an intimacy violation, while men experience v-pics as a huge positive, as validation and an indicator of interest.

This seems consistent with the above discussion, where it’s a pretty common male experience to basically never receive any sexual attention ever and thus respond really strongly positively to whatever scraps come their way (or to start trolling for attention - with the point of some of these dick pics apparently being to get any attention at all, no matter how hostile), while a common female experience seems to be more like being flooded with unwanted sexual attention and wanting a way to make it stop -

resulting in an absolutely massive inferential gap - with the result that if you’re on one side of the gap and try to describe your feelings and experiences to the people on the other side, whatever words you have will just fall on deaf ears because the feeling and experiences you describe are … not just unfamiliar, but outright alien, to the ones on the other side.

For women, it feels like all women are sexy to men.

i wish it was more common to compliment people– especially guys– in a casual way. but when you live as a woman you can spend a lot more time dodging men’s attention rather than soliciting it… 

You remember that post about the homestuck t-shirt design contest collaborating with hot topic? And how Hot Topic are the biggest art thieves?  This is recent.  As you can see above, I stumbled upon Hot Topic’s website and they are selling a very popular fan art put on a t-shirt, and did not ask permission from the original artist (rismo).

BY AGREEING TO TERMS AND CONDITIONS ON DEVIANT ART.

THEY SOLD IT TO A THIRD PARTY ROYALTY-FREE.

———

3. License To Use Artist Materials. As and when Artist Materials are uploaded to the DeviantArt Site(s), Artist grants to DeviantArt a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive license to do the following things during the Term:

a) to prepare and encode Artist Materials or any part of them for digital or analog transmission, manipulation and exhibition in any format and by any means now known or not yet known or invented; (DA  can post them on their website and edit them in any way they see fit)

b) to display, copy, reproduce, exhibit, publicly perform, broadcast, rebroadcast, transmit, retransmit, distribute through any electronic means (including analog and digital) or other means, and electronically or otherwise publish any or all of the Artist Materials, including any part of them, and to include them in compilations for publication, by any and all means and media now known or not yet known or invented ; (They can publish your art in any media, use it to showcase their website or even promote certain groups without your knowledge. For all you know, your art could be promoting the KKK.)

c) to modify, adapt, change or otherwise alter the Artist Materials (e.g., change the size) and use the Artist Materials as described in Section 3(b); and

d) the right to sublicense to any other person or company any of the licensed rights in the Artist Materials, or any part of them, subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement. (They can edit, change, or otherwise modify your artwork in any way they want, as well as sublicensing it  to third parties, such as Hot Topic.)

e) Artist acknowledges that Artist will not have any right, title, or interest in any other materials with which Artist Materials may be combined or into which all or any portion of Artist Materials may be incorporated. (By posting on FA, you forfeit your right to dispute any third party profits or copyright infringements upon your art.)

f) During the Term, DeviantArt’s licenses under this Agreement include the right to use any part of the Artist Materials in the promotion, advertising or marketing of the DeviantART Sites. (DeviantArt can use your art to advertise anything they want.)

g) As used in this Agreement, the term “Artist Materials” means any content uploaded to the DeviantArt Site(s) which may include without limitation Artist’s name(s) (including professional names), trademarks, trade names, likenesses, photographs, biographical materials, audio-visual materials, artwork, liner notes, and other graphical, textual, video, film or audio materials and any and all “skins,” computer-generated images or other artwork or images that Artist submits to DeviantArt in any medium or format whatsoever. (ANYTHING you submit to DeviantArt belongs to DeviantArt now. Including  your drawings, your photos, videos, your stock materials, your music/audio, your written stories, and your artist name.)

This is both a really personal, and also a really universal issue. Let me answer you in a bit of stream of consciousness here, bear with me.

1—”Breaking thru” and “Big Deal” are completely arbitrary concepts, depending entirely on your POV. I am friends with artists who were (and still are) heroes to me. They’re so famous, and so goddamn good, that you’d think they could rest on their laurels and finally relax and just go about being great and enjoying it. But it’s not true, because that feeling of never being where you want to be, not having made it yet, never goes away. It doesn’t matter how far you climb, that feeling climbs with you. So get used to it. In a way, you need it. The artists that don’t have that drive never rise above mediocre. It’s that dissatisfaction that keeps you striving. Unfortunately it can also make you miserable. Each of us needs to find a way to balance and walk the tightrope between being dissatisfied enough to keep growing, while letting ourselves be pleased with what we’ve accomplished at the same time. 

Go ahead, listen to some interviews with some artists you admire - they’re all going to talk about having this feeling. 

And remember, no matter where you are on the ladder - you’re only looking up the ladder to your heroes. Remember there’s also people below you on the ladder looking to YOU and wishing they could be where you are.

2—Don’t fall into the trap of comparing the 100% of your life that you know with the 10% or 25% or even 50% of someone else’s life that you can see. Social media and the internet in general is the worst for this, but it happens in real life too…you’ll see someone’s successes and not see their hardships. We do this naturally as human beings. We don’t put our chronic diseases, our divorces, our depressions, our failures, out there for the world to see nearly as much as we celebrate our wins. You see the artist suddenly getting all the book cover commissions, but you don’t see that they’re stuck in the house 5 out of 7 days with Crohn’s Disease. You see someone get into Spectrum or American Illustration, but you don’t see that they’re going through a period of depression and intense dissatisfaction with their work to the point that they haven’t made anything new in six months. You see the concept artist working on a bunch of big movies, but you don’t see them struggling with overwork injuries. The key here is to just assume, just know, that you’re not seeing the whole story. Don’t compare your lows to another person’s highs.

3—Goals are both critical to your success, but at the same time, can defeat you before you begin. Instead of setting really big goals that immediately overwhelm you with how far you have to climb to get there, try setting priorities instead. This exercise might help. 

4—The solution is to stop caring about what everyone else is doing, how young or old everyone else is, and especially worrying that you’re too old, too late, not where you want to be yet, haven’t hit an arbitrary goalpost. Just put your head down and make great work. Show it to the right people. Repeat. You’ll get there. Everyone who has gotten there ahead of you got there this way.

I live in Sillystan.

Sillystan’s primary export is oranges.  People from around the globe love our oranges and we simply can never produce enough to satisfy everyone and ourselves, so every citizen of Sillystan owns an orange farm.

Now oranges are okay.  I eat an orange from time to time, but what I really like are apples.  The problem is, nobody in Sillystan grows apples, because they’re too busy producing oranges.

So a few years back I decided to plant apple trees.  Those trees grew pretty quickly and whenever I want an apple I just go outside and pick a fresh one.  Sometimes they’re green, sometimes they’re red, each apple has its own flavor and texture, even though at the core they’re all just apples.  I’ve got an orange tree around here too, among other types of produce, but I don’t tend to them as often because if I want an orange I can just go nearly anywhere else to get one.

It turns out that other people like apples too, and I’m happy to share.  Some people like the red and don’t like the green, some prefer just the yellow, some like them all.

There are also people who don’t like apples.  Their reasons vary; some people don’t like the look, some people don’t like the color.  Some people tried to grow apples themselves, but all they grew was sour.