Bobbins dot horse

I know that a few people will be keen to use the new Sidecar feature in MacOS Catalina with Clip Studio Paint. I’ve seen a few early impressions (from Brad Colbow amongst others) who thought it was a bit rough and ready.

I did initially struggle to connect to Sidecar, getting “your iPad has timed out” messages, but I opened the Music app and with my iPad recognised in that, it played ball thereafter.

I use Clip Studio every day – both the iPad version and on my Mac with a Cintiq. The iPad version is great (once it came out, I ditched Astropad Studio because it was unnecessary), and using the desktop version with Sidecar is inferior to the native app. You can kind of pinch to zoom, you can three finger swipe to undo and redo, but neither of those feel as good as two-finger tap undo or the fluid gestures of the iOS version. You can’t go landscape, either.

The iPad’s native pressure curve is very stiff, so you need to adjust the pressure curve in your Mac installation of Clip Studio (CLIP STUDIO PAINT > Pressure settings). You need to set it to look like the curve on the iOS version… like this…

Problems

I’d seen reports of “blobby” strokes but I struggled to produce these, only getting one or two. I did have to turn stabilisation up to 15 (something I have to do on the iPad version of Clip too) – I don’t use it on the Cintiq. But the lines I produced with these settings were pleasing and didn’t feel any less natural than my other set ups. I’ve not tidied any of these up. I am quite a fast draw-er normally so I tried doing slow ones too.

These are only first impressions but I hope the pressure curve tip is useful. Until next time (there will not be a next time) – GOODBYE.