CSP has an unintuitive opaque UI that would leave you airless in a mineshaft if you weren’t too careful. ³ This is something that Procreate doesn’t try to do for good reason. Sorry and thankyou guys - I made some of my best art using your terrific stuff. The £60.99 annual subscription is now heading to the pockets of CSP. It also means that Astropad Studio is now going bye bye. ² Something I missed sorely while using Procreate for the 100+ images for the Dear Theo project - reordering and finding files in their folder system was quite tricky when I had to swap iPads mid-process.

¹ Using a variety of imported brushes from people like Frenden and DAUB. If you want to make it cheaper I won’t complain. Looking through completed artwork is way better - with CSP it is like pulling teeth and I tend to avoid it. The file management system is horrible - so many steps for exporting artwork. The myriad opaque UI choices are frankly bizarre (but don’t change anything yet because I have only just got things how I like them!). Although this makes me a little sad about great tech becoming redundant, the big screen is great for seeing the work put together. Affinity photo and my desktop copy of CSP exist for the sole purpose of being a big glossy compositional screen.

The artwork then gets exported via airdrop or directly through iTunes to my 5k iMac which gets used as a final layout platform. The brushes are all carefully imported ones that are limited to what I find useful⁴. I took ages adjusting the CSP user interface to reflect how I actually work. So far I have seen nothing to undermine this, and if you add in the point made by Frenden that an iPad Pro is a form of away-from-your-desk freedom, the cost savings become clear. The Apple Pencil translates immediately into a better-than-Wacom experience and the ability to import/modify custom brushes means that this app just stole the lunch money of a lot of crying competitors.

The iPad version of CSP is bizarrely as good/better than the desktop Mac version. It easily handles multi-page creation².

Clip paint studio ipad