I’m currently trying out IllustStudio, a new Japanese painting program. So far, it’s pretty amazing — but no English version. There’s a fan-translation of the key tools which works pretty well, but it’s not complete and it’s a bit fussy to install. Still very awesome, though.

It’s sort of a good middleground among Photoshop, Painter, Sai, and OpenCanvas — with even more features. I’m not too thrilled with some of them, but working in vector + perspective grid and the ability to twist the canvas around without working with funky line quality display’s just fantastic. It’s a godsend for lineart and looks far easier to work with than Manga Studio Ex.

The program’s cheap to register compared to the major programs out there (¥5,980, roughly $67 USD or ₱3,023 PHP to buy it), but the makers haven’t indicated any plans for a future English translation yet.

Here are two videos that go through the primary features of the program:

The watercolor brushes feel smooth, but it’s going to take me a long adjustment period. Got too used to Painter 7’s brush engine (which has unfortunately been abandoned by more recent versions of Painter).

The pen and pencil brushes react well to tablet sensitivity. Program’s pretty fast in general, there’s no lag per stroke that I can feel on an 8.5″ x 11″ 300ppi canvas (commence staring very pointedly at Painter 11).


Relevant links:

Go [here] to download the program (make sure to change Regional and Language Options of your Windows into Japanese for non-Unicode programs).

Go [here], click the orange button, and type in the generated code to get your trial version serial key.

Go [here] for the version 1.1.3 fan translation in English courtesy of denkikoiji (extract contents into the Tool directory of IllustStudio and overwrite everything, if the program version isn’t 1.1.3 check denkikoiji’s Gallery for possible updated translations).

Go [here] for a helpful thread on IllustStudio.

Hope someone out there finds this useful <3


Couple of rough doodles while playing around with IllustStudio’s G inking pen:

On another note, something I recently just learned about Corel Painter is that it doesn’t take advantage of multi-core systems (as of Corel Painter XI, anwyay — hopefully they’ll change this someday soon). Explains how much the program struggles with really large image files while Photoshop handles them with ease. The last artwork I made with Painter 7 was a 22″ x 17″-incher (300 ppi resolution) and keeping the artwork to as few layers as possible was a must. Despite this, I had one funky save (the background layer was half-corrupted, solved by pasting a previous save over it), three crashes, and constantly lagging brushes and response time. Woe.