How to Digitally Paint -- Paint with Clip Studio Paint (Udemy.com)

Great!

I left this stars to motivate the teacher to keep doing the best for his students!

Easy to follow lessons.

Very good!

good basic starting point

In my painting classes in College, one of the first things covered was the media the paint is applied to. In the digital realm this is the canvas size and resolution. Which, in this course (and others by Neil) goes unmentioned or is just commented on in passing. The main painting (or the first one in the series) is an absurd 2.5 by 3 inches (which I converted from the metric to english measurements, which can be set in Manga Studio, btw). I found this out when the painting Neil was working on just looked way to grainy and I couldn't figure out why he was zooming in at more than 100% most of the time.

Not covering the resolution and canvas size is a major omission and (unfortunately) par for this course (and others by Neil).

Another omission is that Manga Studio has awesome brush customizations. None of which, beyond size, opacity and blending mode got covered. It would be nice to know if the brushes Neil used were "stock" or if he changed some of the settings. There's things like the ability to have painting brushes smear/blend with the colors already painted and such that never got a mention.

Then there's the actual painting itself. Having done many video tutorials (and having taught digital graphics in a college level class) I know that things pop up and have to be dealt with. If you're working "live" you have to deal with them as they happen. When recording, the issues should be resolved off-camera and then the lecture should continue. It's jarring to have to listen to the same complaints that Neil has about his specific set-up time and time again. Get the darn sleeve/glove and then create the lectures. At best this is just a distraction, at worse this is just amateur-hour videos.

This is a very windows-centric course, those of us on Macs do not have a "print screen" button that we can copy images from (it's screen capture). Besides, most times saving the image to the desktop and then importing the image into Manga Studio works better. Case in point, at the later lesson when Neil's placing a bird flock into the background, the checkerboard pattern on the Google Search window indicates that there's transparency in the image. I saved the exact image to my desktop and imported it into Manga Studio and was able to skip a number of steps Neil had to do in order to use his copy&pasted image.

Now when the lectures begin, this is where Neil's knowledge and experience shines. His analysis of paintings, discussions about composition and explaining the 30-70 rule is one of the best I've heard, anywhere. It's just when he gets into the actual painting and using Manga Studio that he fumbles the ball.

It doesn't engender confidence when the instructor seems to be learning the program as the lessons progress. It's as if we're watching the rough draft of something that should be awesome, but isn't there yet. I feel that if some of the lectures had more planning and a second "take" they would be as good as the earlier lectures.

TL/DR capsule summary: Good info and lectures on basics of composition, color, contrast and basic painting. Little to no info on Canvas (file) dimensions and resolution. There's no info on how Manga Studio brushes work aside from the brushes Neil uses. When it comes to using Manga Studio, it's a superficial look at it, basically it's just a primer on how to begin to use Manga Studio for digital painting. We're told that the transparent Watercolor brush is good to use, but not really why it's "better" than other brushes (the oil or Airbrush for example). If one really wants to learn how to use Manga Studio for digital painting, there's other videos out there that is more complete and shows how to fully take advantage of what Manga Studio can do and not just use it as a faux-photoshop replacement.

Love this instructors courses.

The instructor does not teach how to think but hot to use applications

I have learned a lot.

Like the artists delivery method

With what I've seen so far this course is exceptional in explaining the concepts completely without slowing things down with too much detail. Looking forward to the rest of the course!

Neil is a great teacher. He has a way of infecting you with his passion. This is a great course for learning your way around Manga Studio