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Retool 0001 — Description

This is me in Clip Studio Paint. If Comic Life 3 ever goes away or stops working, I need to gain experience with this program to keep producing. While Comic Life 3 is fast, it crashes a lot. Clip Studio is a much slower but more methodical workflow, where everything is done in frames and layers. Comic Life tends to be the flashy app, and the text flowing is much better.

I can see how Clip Studio is the more serious tool, but the workflow is slow-going. Everything has a manual step, but you have more control. The frame division in Clip Studio is far superior. Clip Studio has issues saving to cloud or network drives.

Also, this is a Kindle-formatted comic. This is a 2560x1600 panel at 300 dpi that would import into their creation app without much pain, reformatting, or resizing. If Patreon and SubscribeStar ever get too censorious, I will need to go to Amazon and distribute there.

You will probably see more of this size and format in the future, even in Comic Life releases. This is the format comics are moving towards for most releases, just because of the massive Amazon market and the platform's freer-speech stance.

If I ever start rebuilding Vex's chronology, I will probably do it all in Clip Studio. The program is far better supported, future-proof, and professional. People are begging me for a complete "Vex master series" and release of all that work. those calls will increase, and I will likely ship it out to Amazon in this format. It will be years of work, but it will be worth it. The Survivor series deserves the same treatment.

This format has made me rethink comic sizes and images. 4K releases may be overkill, and this leaner, more mobile-friendly format may be the future. I love my high-resolution masterpieces, but if these platforms force me to use Amazon, why do all that work? Amazon will scale to 2560x1600, and the work will be wasted. The 2560x1600 format is still a super high resolution, but far more friendly for distribution and Amazon releases.

UV Mapped Cube is from a tutorial series I did on Blender. I am still using Blender because Blacksmith 3D finally stopped working. I need my texture paint tools.

-Ren