Affinity Designer vs Clip Studio Paint

[FidgetyJester]

Hope this is allowed. 

Which one would you prefer to draw it in? And explain why.

Prefer if coming from someone who used both, and this is just purely for illustrations, no animation or comic or price involved. PC version alone, not mobile.

I did tried asking in Art reddit first, but no one answered me though so I'm asking here instead. Thank you

[sfriedberg]

OK, this analogy is not perfect, but if you are familiar with CorelDRAW, Corel PhotoPaint and Corel Painter, then Affinity Photo is like Corel PhotoPaint, Affinity Designer is like CorelDRAW, and Clip Studio Paint is like Corel Painter.  Affinity Designer and Clip Studio Paint have substantially different objectives.

If I wanted to focus on vector illustration, I would choose Affinity Designer over Clip Studio Paint.

If I wanted to focus on natural media illustration or manga illustration specifically, I would choose Clip Studio Paint over Affinity Designer.  (Actually, I would choose Corel Painter over both for natural media illustration.)

[lacerto]

On 11/7/2021 at 1:31 AM, FidgetyJester said:

Which one would you prefer to draw it in? And explain why.

It much depends on what kinds of drawings you mostly create and how, and then also how you are going to produce them. For technically oriented jobs, and ones that would be produced for press or multiple purposes digitally (using artboards), I would choose Designer but if you draw freehand and with a pen, ClipStudio Paint is far more versatile. It, too, has vector layers which basically resemble "vector" brushes of Designer (in that they are just vector-driven raster brushes), but ClipStudio has tools that allow reshaping and modifying of these strokes in many ways, and it generally works much more intuitively mimicking natural drawing (e.g., it does not clutter your canvas with separately created curve objects for each stroke yet allows to edit each segment with a node tool similarly as Designer). 

For pure vector based (freehand) illustration and genuine vector brush drawings I'd choose VectorStyler (or Illustrator, if subscription is not a problem).

EDIT: Otherwise ClipStudio Paint is much like CorelPainter and has similar natural media tools for pixel based drawing. CorelPainter does not have vector based drawing aid but as a pixel based drawing app is more versatile than ClipStudio Paint. But when comparing ClipStudio Paint and Designer, what was said above are the major points to consider. They are really pretty different kinds of apps even if they share many similar features.

[sfriedberg]

One of my favorite "lost" drawing applications is Expression from Creature House.  Microsoft ended up buying the IP, and then burying the application, at least in English-speaking markets.  Expression is based on the "vector-driven raster brushes" approach.  Basically everything in Expression is a vector stroke, but every vector stroke is rendered as a brush, and both the stroke and the brush properties can be changed at any time.

With this in mind, ClipStudio Paint is sort of mid-way between Expression and Corel Painter, because it has both vector-driven brushes and plain raster brushes, although it doesn't do either thing as well as the two specialists.

[Bad_Wolf]

Take into acount that ClipStudio Paint Pro (I have ClipStudio Paint EX) has a much steeper learning curve than Designer. I have both on this laptop and mostly use Designer. When drawing in ClipStudio Paint I need my drawing tablet, in Designer I can draw with the mouse too despite the fact the tablet is easier).

You can animated your creations with ClipStudio Paint which is not possible with Designer. But this will be of no consideration now, but maybe an option for the future?

Like other members said, both Designer and ClipStudio Paint have their own uses. If you like to create comic illustrated books, ClipStudio Paint together with Rebelle is a very good choice. Both have free trial versions, so maybe you should try the trial version first to find out which one you need in which case.

Chris

 

[R C-R]

1 hour ago, sfriedberg said:

One of my favorite "lost" drawing applications is Expression from Creature House. 

Back in the early Mac OS X days, I had what I think was the Mac version of that app. If I remember correctly, it stopped working around OS X version 10.5 Leopard or so.

[Dazmondo77]

I use both in my workflow, depending on the type of job. CSP is really great for digi-painting or comic type projects. the vector layers are really great, and for work like comic style t-shirts I usually find it really natural using vector brushes, the vector export is not all that useful, but the benefits of CSP vectors are that you can size your artwork up and still retain the quality, I usually export a high rez PNG then vector trace in either Image Vectorizer or Vecorize apps then paste into Designer (via Pub StudioLink) to finish the job off for sending to screen print, so I kind of work the old fashioned way whereas 20 years ago I would have used photoshop for any raster / painting, Freehand for all vector work and QuarkExpress for bringing it all together for output - my workflow now is mainly Publisher (as it covers most of Raster - Vector and Output) but I also use CSP for Natural feeling digi-painting or comic line work + VectorStyler for Vector stuff that Designer currently can't handle. I always finish off bringing everything together in Publisher for output ---- so I would recommend as it's worked great for me