Clip Studio Paint comic templates for beginners.

I've been asked about how to use CSP comic templates often so I wanted to make a post about it. It's quite confusing at first but you'll see they're really easy to understand.

I've learned all of this by trial and error, drawing my own comics. But CSP has a lot of useful tutorials, which I really recommend reading. This will be a guide for beginners, and I hope it will be useful. Let's go!

These are my settings when I start a comic, I always go with the basic a5 template. I think a5 size is very convenient, usually is cheap to print that size, is easy to carry to conventions, and also cheaper and easy to pack for online sales!

Since it's not very big it allows you to work quicker when drawing. I really recommend this size for beginners and impatient people like me.

350 dpi is good enough to print comics in grayscale or color. (If you plan to use screen tones, you should choose in your settings monochrome and 600/1200 dpi. But I don't have a lot of experience with screentones and, I think shading greyscale is easier for beginners)

And here's what your page looks like:

What?? What are all those lines? Don't worry, it's super easy!

I separated all the areas in different colors so it's easier to understand

The yellow area will be your comic page. That's all the visible area for your art. I recommend you to put the most important stuff in the orange box! You can also use that box as a guideline for your panels.

The bold pink area is the bleed width. The bleed width is a security margin of a few millimeters that the printing service needs when they trim the comic pages. When cutting the pages, they might cut a bit more up or down than intended. So if your comics pages have art that goes to the limit of the page, you'll need to draw there too. That margin of error usually is just 3 millimeters.

The pink screen tone area will be cut out entirely, so you don't need to draw on it. (Why is it so big then? I don’t really know… I think CSP templates use the same template as professional manga paper in Japan, and I think it’s because it's easier to sketch backgrounds that go beyond the cutline if you have plenty of space… but I’m just guessing! I use it for that, and I also write a lot of notes for corrections, in that area... I still have a lot to learn myself, haha)

Here's an example page! As you see, all the dialog is inside the main box, and the art goes beyond the bleed width. (And also you will notice I should have drawn all those flowers also in the blue area, a mistake I'll have to correct if I plan to print this!)

So, when I work, usually I have a black mask in a separate layer, to cover all the area that will be cut out, and also I use a 9 box grid as template for my panels.  It's something like this:

When I start a comic, I always try to place text as soon as possible, before any polished sketches. Text takes a surprisingly amount of space. Lately I'm using Sara Linsley's fonts! Which you can find here: sara.pizza  Another font for comics I like is laffayette comic pro, which is easy to find and I believe is free to use? Here's also a good directory of manga fonts that can be useful: mangafonts.carrd.co

Here's another important piece of advice if you plan to print your comic later. You need to mind where the spine will be placed.

And here's the settings for exporting the pages and getting rid of all the unwanted areas. (I use CSP EX and I don't know if this exporte range options are available in all versions, tho...)

And that would be all! If you have any questions I'll be glad to help (if I can! I'm a terrible teacher...)

Also, as I've said, CSP website has a lot of useful tutorials for beginners, I recommend you to read this one! tips.clip-studio.com/en-us/series/1