#new pc new csp install new brushes lol

[1004knightingale]

she's obsessed.

[lilblucat]

I just saw the ask by slushysblog. In response you sent a gif that blew me away:

You see, I'm just getting into digital art, and my PC can only handle about 5 or 6 layers before my graphics environment crashes. (Ofc this forces me to restart my PC and lose anything not saved.)

I've learned to work around this, my art isn't nearly so complex as yours, but I know if I want to continue I'll have to get a better computer at some point.

I was hoping you could tell me a bit about the technical side of your work. What are your PC specs? What software do you use? That sort of thing.

Thanks in advance! I love your art!

My set-up is complete overkill for art. It's a heavy gaming-ready desktop PC I got a few years back that I've upgraded the RAM and storage on over the years. I was doing fine with 16GB of RAM but I always have open a lot in CSP and other stuff so upgrading was definitely something I needed to do. 16GB should be fine for most people though.

You can also see that I run Arch Linux and uh yeahhhhhh it's a long story. The short of it is that my old laptop broke its Windows install during an update and I was completely unable to fix it so I just.... switched to Linux lol. I started out on Ubuntu and switched to Arch after a while. I don't rec using Arch unless you know what you're doing, Ubuntu is way easier.

What you might find more interesting is my away from home set up on my laptop since it's an older gaming laptop.

The graphics card is actually a NVIDIA Geforce 850 or something. It's so old that you can't play some games on it. However, I have no issues with it for art. I can open my comic project files in CSP fine on it. It's also running on Linux Mint, which isn't showing up on the little image for some reason. Both of my devices run Linux, but that's a me preference/need thing and I don't rec messing with your operating system if you don't know much about computers. It gives me a bit of an edge since the system doesn't use as much RAM as Windows but yeah don't touch unless you're committed to learn. Windows will serve you fine. Or MacOS even.

As for my program, I use Clip Studio Paint EX. I bought Pro a long time ago and upgraded to EX because of the extra tools for comics and animation (I've heard animators don't like CSP though, it's the BEST program for comics however). It's a really solid program but the recent changes to pricing and updates is really stupid. Fun fact: I use only default brushes and materials because getting it to run on Linux breaks the store. I also use an older version of it because of how I got it working on this system.

For my tablet I use an XP-Pen Artist 12 Pro. It's a pretty solid screen tablet on a budget (I bought it on a sale) and I have no issues with it. I actually partly got it because I thought it was cool that XP-Pen carries official drivers for Linux too, and this helped a bit since this was before Windows bricked on me and I switched to that. It was kinda weird how it played out lol. I would heavily not rec a Wacom tablet unless it's an older one for cheap. Wacom is stupidly expensive and you can get a better bang for your buck at other companies. My first tablet is a Wacom and it's still holding up pretty well but their quality on their new tablets isn't great. Check out XP-Pen, Gaomon, and Huion for better tablet options.