Unlimited painting styles

Clip Studio Paint is perfect for a variety of painting styles, such as oil paint, watercolor, or cel-shading. Customize your brushes to paint in your favorite style, or add textures to your brushes for a traditional look. Go one step further and import Photoshop brush files (ABR) and create dynamic dual brushes that combine two types of brush strokes.

Packed with presets

Clip Studio Paint comes with a full selection of preset tools, including user-favorite brushes, so you can start painting immediately without the need to customize.

Easy color selection

Select, test, and manage colors with six color palettes, including not only the typical circles and sliders, but also palettes for similar colors, midrange colors, and your color history.

Traditional color mixing for the digital age

Connect your main computer or tablet device to your smartphone in Companion mode to turn your smartphone into your own digital paint palette.
Mix, blend, and add subtle changes to the colors on your palette, just as you would with a traditional paint palette.

AI colorization

Set color hints and let the AI color your art! Compare color schemes and test out new ideas in a fraction of the time.

Eyedrop colors from your desktop

It’s simple to eyedrop colors from your desktop or other applications and save them in Clip Studio Paint. You can even eyedrop from semi-transparent colors.

Realistic color mixing

From precise color mixing to running paint and wet watercolor style brushes, experience realistic color mixing rarely seen in digital software. Ver. 2.0 allows for more natural color mixing while maintaining color brightness.

Smart fill tools

Clip Studio Paint’s fill tools are smart enough to fill spaces without spillover, even if there are gaps in the lines. Drag to fill multiple spaces consecutively or fill missed spots all at once, all with our smart fill tools.

Set your ideal pen pressure

Simply draw a few times to let the software automatically detect the level of pen pressure sensitivity that enables you to draw natural and smooth lines every time.

Drawing the perfect line

Use the inbuilt stabilization functions to draw clean, accurate lines without shakiness or wavering, exactly how you’re picturing your creation.

Go wild with patterns! - Hundreds of decoration brushes

Draw repeating textures such as chains, accessories, textile patterns, and flowers with a single stroke. Multiple images can be applied to a single brush and randomized for a natural result.

Thousands of materials at your fingertips

Clip Studio Assets offers tens of thousands of ready-to-use materials such as brushes, patterns, and 3D models. Search from free commercial-license materials and download what you need at any time.

Fix vectors when and how you want

Experience new freedom with vector layers; layers that allow you to move, thicken, thin, and selectively erase individual brushstrokes up to an intersection.

Perspective rulers to help draft backgrounds

Set up ruler guides to draw buildings and interiors with perfect perspective using your favorite pen and brush tools. What’s more, access inbuilt and customizable symmetry rulers, ellipse rulers, and more to help you create geometric shapes with ease.

Simple and flexible masking

Create masks from selections to keep your painting layers organized. It’s easy to shrink or add to a mask with drawing tools for precise masking or to create interesting layered effects.

Test compositions with 3D models

Import your own files or download pre-made buildings, furniture, crowds, vehicles, and many other materials that are ideal for trying out compositions before you start drawing.

Arrange 3D primitives for reference

Set up simple 3D primitive shapes as frameworks for drawing objects and scenes, or even use them as building blocks for more complex materials.

View 3D materials from all angles at once

When placing a 3D material, you can view from four angles simultaneously. You can also change the position of the camera and the focal point on the 3D layer. When you change the camera position from the All sides view palette, the model also adjusts on the canvas.

Sketch human figures with ease

Clip Studio Paint comes with adjustable 3D models, great for sketching people. Freely customize pose, proportions, and body type. You can also attach props like hats, shoes, and more to the model to create a more concrete concept for your character design.

3D support for drawing faces

Create your very own facial reference with our adjustable head model.
Fine-tune overall shape, eyes, nose, eyebrows, ears, mouth, and other parts.
The base head can also be transformed into various styles, such as realistic, chibi, and anime.

AI posing from photographs

AI features enabled by deep learning algorithms allow you to scan a photo and have Clip Studio Paint automatically match its pose and apply it to a 3D drawing figure. Similarly, the hand scanner allows you to pose your hand via a camera and apply the pose to the hand of the 3D figure.

Extract line art from photos and 3D objects

Extract lines from photos and 3D models to create frameworks for your artwork that you can build from, boosting your efficiency.

Simple layer effects

Apply effects to entire layers with a single click, whether adding outlines to text or images, adding a watercolor edge, changing the line color, or creating a screentone effect.

Gradients how you want them

As well as basic two-color gradients, you can add and edit interval colors or create gradients into transparency. You can also apply gradient maps to instantly apply colors based on an image’s values, or use the Contour Line Fill tool to create gradients following a shape.

Clean up scanned artwork

Use dedicated features for removing scanner dust or extracting drawn art from a white paper background, helping you to smoothly convert your traditional art for digital editing.

Transformation tools for quick adjustments

Go beyond rotating and flipping the image, with mesh transformation and free transformation you can adjust your selection area with amazing precision. Mesh transformation now comes with the ability to select multiple grid points and move them at once. If you want even more precision, then use the Liquify tool so that your brushstrokes won’t be affected.

Experiment endlessly with tonal correction layers

Use Tonal Correction Layers to add finishing touches while leaving the original layer as it is. Adjust image brightness, contrast, tone, and more until you’re satisfied.

Boost quality with filters

Use a filter to blur, sharpen, add noise, mosaic and more to add effects to your piece. Make your images look like photos with a retro film filter combining chromatic aberration with noise. Or go with the hand-drawn pencil look with a pencil filter. More filters mean more ways to express yourself easily!

Convert photos to illustrations

Photos can also be converted into painterly styles with the Artistic filter. Here, you can also fine-tune line thickness and the strength of the effect.

Smart Smoothing to improve image resolution

Resample images and erase jpeg noise to reuse your past work as a larger image.

Get expressive with blending modes

Use blending modes on your layers to add a variety of interesting effects to your image. Select from 29 blending modes to create specific effects or compositions.

Text

You can input text, line spacing, letter spacing, rotate text, tilt it, flip it, align it, adjust it within the text box, control kerning, and even give it a circular layout.

Keep sketches and storyboards together

Create separate panels for thumbnails or storyboarding simply by dragging the frame tool. Save your canvas layouts as templates to recall them later on your next project.

Manage multi-page works

Keep multiple project pages together in a single file, add or reorder pages, and export as print-ready data.

See your work before you print with 3D preview

Before printing multi-page projects, check the final product's binding and finish with the 3D preview feature.

Supports CMYK color for printing

Clip Studio Paint supports the import/export of both RGB and CMYK data used for printing. With the CMYK preview, colors displayed in your workspace are even closer to their real printed hues!

Export anywhere

Supports Kindle and EPUB e-book formats, including commercial e-books and self-publishing.

Inbuilt animation features

With Clip Studio Paint’s 2D animation tools, arrange your storyboard scenes with audio, or even work on full-length animations.In PRO and DEBUT, you can make animations up to 24 frames (3 seconds long at 8 frames per second). EX offers unlimited frames.

Fully customizable workspace

Save and share your customized palette layout, shortcuts, command bar, and colors whenever you need them!

Reference images at a glance

Use a secondary window to have your canvas fullscreen while using a zoomed-in preview on the other! You now can also see the reference images registered in the Sub View palette in a preview menu and sample colors from it. In the Navigator palette, you can flip, zoom in, zoom out, and rotate your canvas easily and intuitively.

Streamline repetitive operations

Perform frequent or repeated operations with one click using Auto Actions. Customize shortcuts and recreate your favorite shortcuts from other programs.

Easy access to your most frequently used functions

The Quick Access Palette gives you access to menus, Auto Actions, tools, and colors from a single palette to customize your ideal virtual workspace.

Input and output in Photoshop formats

Clip Studio Paint supports input and output in Photoshop file formats, so you can deliver files to clients and printing companies without changing your existing workflows.
Load, edit, and save PSD and PSB data while preserving raster layers, and export files with text layers created in Clip Studio Paint for easy editing and in Photoshop.

Peace of mind with automatic backups

Unexpected crashes are every digital artist's nightmare. That's why Clip Studio Paint provides an optional autosave feature that you can set to autosave at precise intervals. Background saving allows you to continue working without waiting for the save to complete.

Back up your workspace to the cloud

Check and manage your saved works, and sync to the cloud. You can restore the software settings manually if needed, and synchronize your computer, tablet and smartphone data to take your virtual workspace wherever you go.

Drawing freedom with mobile tablets

Create on the go or at your favorite cafe with Clip Studio Paint for tablets and smartphones. With the same functionality as the desktop version, enjoy smooth drawing thanks to complete compatibility with the Galaxy S Pen, Apple Pencil and other styluses.

Optimize your creative flow with your smartphone

Connect your iPhone or Android smartphone to your main computer or tablet device over Wi-Fi in Companion mode and transform your smartphone into a handheld shortcut remote, for a better creative experience.
Companion mode makes use of your smartphone to get the most out of your creative process! It comes packed with multiple modes to shortcut frequently used functions, pick and mix colors, manage tools, preview projects in real-time, and even control the canvas with touch gestures, making it the perfect studio assistant for whatever you create.

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Optimized for touchscreens

Touchscreen mode allows you to use and customize touch gestures to speed up your workflow or reorganize your workspace.

Supports HD resolution displays

The interface and canvas displays clearly at the native resolution of Mac devices with a Retina display.

Compatible with Sidecar and Universal Control for Apple devices

Clip Studio Paint comes with support for macOS & iPadOS features like Sidecar to mirror or extend screens, and Universal Control, which enables the easy transfer of Clip Studio Paint files simply by dragging and dropping between your Mac and iPad devices.
The Clip Studio Tabmate shortcut device is also Sidecar-compatible.

Free user support

Our support desk is open year-round, offering technical help and advice free of charge.