ClipStudio Paint: Your Beginning to Digital Artwork

1. Introduction: Welcome to my class and clips. Studio pain. You're beginning to digital our work in this class. I'll teach you the basic tools to complete a digital pain in clips. Studio paint. This course is quick and to the point, so you can stay focused on creating the artwork that you have in mind and to keep the motivation going long after this class, I'll be creating a Japanese style artwork that you can follow on with. Even if you're not interested in Japanese art work, you can use the same basic information toe work on your own Are, as all these tools could be used for any style that inspires you. No previous knowledge is needed for this class. This will cover the step by step process that you can use with any are Rick that you choose to work on. Everyone can learn this program, so let's open a clip. Studio pain. Begin making artwork 2. Take a First Look at Clipstudio Paint: Welcome to the first look at clips to you Paint. This interface can be intimidating at first, but you'll quickly get comfortable with it. Way we're making your artwork. Let's start with the main menu. This is typical with pretty much any program out there, and I'll be keeping it simple today, as there is a lot of things you can use this top menu for. Right now, we're gonna look at file under file has important things like making your first and new files you can open recent. You can close stuff you can duplicate. You can export and import files. Next. Let's look under the edit menu. This has many useful things is you have undo and redo your copy paste. You can also edit your colors further down with colorize and changing the color of your line drives if you want to. And then further down, you have your change image resolution, your change canvas and your rotate invert canvas and also cropping. Next. I would like to talk about the interface. Sometimes clips do you a paint, especially when you first open it. We'll have a very condensed version of your workspace. I don't prefer this if you'd like to work with it, by all means. So what I've done is set up the interface the way I want to, and you can set up, save and use multiple workspaces under window in window. You have a workspace. And then in here, you have your different work spaces under here, you can see typical David and latest. I'm gonna use David as that's my layout and my preferred, like you just confirm what you would like to do. You can see it rearranges my workspace the way I prefer to work again. Once you set it up the way you want to, you can go up to your window workspace, and then you can register your workspace and name it. However you would like to name it and always have that workspace. No matter how many times you change it, you can always go back to your workspace that you registered blast. Okay, so now that we're on the workspace that I prefer, let's look at a few of the things that I prefer. Toe have quick access to the 1st 1 Usual layer panel layers are used to create art, and you can think of them like transparent film or tracing paper. You can add things they'll overlay or block out whatever's below. Depending on your layer settings, you can add a layer, your reference layer. You can lock layers. You can lock transparency and so on, and I'll go into that more in future videos. Next you'll see I have a color real down here. It's quick and easy. You can select whatever color you want. Rotate, decide That's quicker than double clicking on your color square down here. And then you'll have another way to do it if you prefer to not have a color wheel on your interface to make your interface more clean. But I do see that this is the quickest way for me to select different colors. Next, you have a tool panel with your magnifying glass, your hand, your arrow, your last will typical painting tools that you have, especially with the pen and the eraser tool. And I'll go more into details on how to use these in future videos. But you definitely want to have your tool palette open once you select a tool palette. As you can see when I scroll through these, my sub tool palette moves up here or changes up here. And once you select on a tool, you get more. So if I select my pin tool, you can see I have pen and marker. I do pencil. I could do pencil and pastel so you can actually select different tools under a tool. And I remember what you were last on. So you have to do a select what tool your work on. So if I jumped to a racer, you can see it's on Hard Eraser. But when I jumped back to the pencil, you can see I'm still on the dark pencils, so you don't have to select what you're using. The sub tool. Every time you can just click on your tool that you're working on. Once you select your tool, you can see. For instance, I have the dark pencil and you have the dark pencil here. Then you can change the breast size, the hardness, rush density and the stabilization of your tool. And then further down, I have brush sizes just opened as palettes like quickly select as I jump between 1 to 3 10 and so on for different things that I'm doing throughout the artwork. Alright, that's enough information overload. For now. Let's get to the class project 3. Class Project: welcome to the class project. I will be working on this art piece. And if I turn off all these layers, you can see that this started as an extremely rough sketch. Like so. And as I was working through the project, I built up to this final piece. You can download the sketch in The resource is or you can work on whatever inspires you. 4. Setup and Importing: No. Let's create a campus for drying an illustration. Let's go up to file in the main menu and new. This window will pop up and you will get quite a few different options. But we're going to stick with this orange icon at the start, and when you select on it, you'll see it says illustration or in my case illustration. Five. Let's change the size of our paper, so I go over to unit in a near. You have a few different selections. I chose inch and I do 11 by 14 or 14 by 11 as most of my art prints are that size or smaller, typically smaller. And then I also change the resolution of 300. It should default on this color under basic expression color. If it isn't, go ahead and change that. And I prefer to have a paper color. In my case, I do a type of gray, but you can do whatever background you want, and you can get rid of this late and then you click OK, and your paper size comes up. Now that we have our paper size, come on, you can look over on our layers palette and you can see there's the paper which weaken, turn off and just have a background of transparency or whatever background do you want later, and I also have the normal layer that gives you a place to start actually making your artwork up. Next, let's talk about importing. An image will go back up to the main menu, click on file and save file from library and what's this doing? Is pulling him from your computer or from your tablet into clips studio paint so we can actually drop it into our campus. So let's click on Save file from Photo Library and select your piece. You begin to write to file, and once it's written, you can see it's now imported. Once that's done, click OK and then go back up to your main menu, become final import image and select your image to import. And you can see that I have to resize. Depending on your image size, go ahead and scale that down the size you want, and then just click off of it and you're grabbing those corners to be able to resize. Now that we've done this, you can also look in your layers file and see that there's a new layer within your layers palette. Typically, what I'll do is locked my layer because I don't want to change it all and then also grabbed my layer, wanted just drag it out and then rename it whatever I would like to as I begin to work on my art piece. And that's the quick and simple of getting new documents started and importing the content you need to use to reference. 5. Creating Lineart: No. Welcome back to this clip studio class. Today we're gonna talk about Leinart. Now, when you're doing Leinart, there's multiple ways you can do it. You can just make a new layer and start drawing with any breast that you want, and that's what I'm gonna demonstrate. Now. If you want to just be extremely quick and simple, we could just make a new layer. And to do that we go down over to our layers panel and at the bottom of that panel is a white little button, and you click that button and that makes a new layer. So let's rename this later to Leinart. And once we do that, we can select our tool and I'll grab a Jeep in and you can start thinking right away you can jump right into whatever line are you want to be doing. All right, we'll put a few lines in here. There, fill in some of these arms and we'll zoom in and you can see that my lines are straight. I don't have a steady of stuff hands, and they just don't really look professional in art sense. And one thing about it doing it this way is cleanup can be difficult. We have to grab the eraser in the race down very accurately to get rid of these lines without digging into the next line. Same thing with cleaning up edges. If you want to get that tape of look, you gotta actually come in here and be precise about getting that taper look and getting really tidy up on racing every line. Plus, you can't really do anything about the wobbly lines that I have. So let's undo this. We'll get rid of this layer, and what you can do is make what's called a vector Leinart layer. And that's using more of illustrator style liner where you're actually using a mathematical equation for drying your lines. So then you can blow up your lines as close as you want. You can zoom in on him, and then I could be pixelated because the pixels will update from that math equation and keep the lines clear. So what we can do is make a new layer. We'll go upto layer new vector, and this will pop up and you want to name your liner. Everything else should default. Click OK, now we can select our pin next will draw a line and then we'll use the vector tool and selected. You can see all these points, and if I actually grabbed one of these points and move it, I can redo what the lines actually do. And I can correct things and you can see when I zoom in here, it's really clear. All right, let's delete that. We'll grab our pin tool, are deep in and start doing some thinking and all kind of demonstrate what's going on here . How to correct some things like my jittery line of work. Put him part of the storm again. Kind of redo what we had done before. This is where it gets fun. What we can do is use vector tools and our racer to actually control these vector lines. And if I go down to a racer and select vector on my sub tool palette, I can actually select these lines with my tool and automatically trim them down rather than me manually erasing each pixel. They can come down to our vector tool and hit control point and select those lines, and we can manipulate them, and that's just again doing what I showed you earlier. But the nice thing is, you can select these other tools in the sub tool like simplify vector line, and you can use this highlighter. The highlight your line. It'll actually get rid of those points, so you're able to get a cleaner line. The less points the less controller is, so the smoother lines will be. So if I draw kind of a wobbly line here just to demonstrate better and the highlight that line, you can see it got smoother. And if I do it again and get smoother and smoother to an extent, if you got a pretty good jag going on, it won't correct that. But you can change some of it with this simplify. I usually leave it on, too, but you can go home or less, depending on what control you want. But you can see there's not very many points in this line, and that was because we simplified the line. You can also change the taper, so these last two points change the tape forever. Whether you want to make the taper really harsh or almost round down to a really smooth hairline trim. See, this one was around because of that point that was really close to the other point. And then we can draw the shoulder and down into the arm and then select our eraser tool and just to race off that trim it. It's really quick and simple, and you can make really clean liner just like professionals. And it doesn't take that much more thought to do this. All right. Some definite time lives here because I do not want to bore you with all of this. I'm just working through the same techniques during my lines as quickly and smoothly as I can. Going quick makes most of my line smooth, so I don't have to use the correction. But that correction from the vector is still nice, and you'll see that periodically, me selecting and re sizing or selecting the points and change in the points. Don't be afraid to redraw the lines as you can see, sometimes I redraw line anywhere from seven toe 20 times until I get the right line that I want. And then I'm able to edit it from there with that highlight tool, also draw some lines and really like the line. But then I want to change it just slightly like right here. I thought I wanted to go out, decided I didn't want that, re selected the points. I still liked everything. I just wanted to reposition the life. So here I'm tryingto connect two lines together. Sometimes it works great. Sometimes it doesn't. But you do have that option that join the two lines together and then change some things through. Don't be afraid of just be messy for a while. You can always go back and clean everything up, but I just kind of working succession and clean everything up. Once you've drawn a line and you really like a line, you can always select it and then resize it accordingly by selecting that line and going up to edit in the transform. And you'll see that up there when you click on edit. So there you can see I'm drawing lines and then I'm kind of re sizing them. I like what I did just not quite the right size that I wanted to. And rather than manipulating every point, I just selected it and scale it to what I needed. And here I went to the pen tool and selected for effect tool. As I spoke about earlier on doing the hair and I'm just moving through cleaning up a zai Go . I've never really found a right purpose for doing Liner. In a certain order, I just work through and do what I need. Teoh as I see fit, I started a one side of the hair than I jumped together. Then I jumped another person's hair. Just kind of work with what flows great. And here you can see I'm really working on this line trying to get right, redraw and reposition it. Take your time on this line work. It really shouldn't be a rush. Getting the right lines takes time. And that needs to be understood as best lines really do look good when you taking your time to do him right? - I really had a struggle with this here. I knew exactly what I wanted the year to look like, and then it turned out not looking good. And that really bummed me out. So if you can't get something right just deleted or leave it and come back to later for me personally, I really struggle with the nose and the eyes, so you never really get to the point where I like it, but it comes fairly close. One thing about anime eyes is they look great on sketches, and sometimes they look pretty good. When ain't when you really try to process some of the kind of start looking weird, at least for me. So I try to keep these pretty much as simple as I can. I don't like to make a extremely detailed I just get the outlines there and leave it as simple as possible. All right, so here we finished the line work. Turn off that sketch in the background and kind of poke around. You can find some errors here and there with thinking, Just do a basic clean up and then you'll be good to go. 6. Filling in the Color Flats: No. Now that we have our line work done, let's talk about coloring. There's way too many ways to do this, but I'll show you the way that is quick and simple and keeps you moving forward. So what we want to do is make a new layer. And let's name this too, Phil there. And what we'll do is grab our any kind of pin tool in to grab the G pin again. No, but I would like a gray. I'm gonna fill in some of the bottom areas, and this will make more sense here in just a minute. So the only open areas I have or about four points here, So we'll fill in the bottom of this shirt probably right about here for his shirt behind and Phil in a couple of these arms. So the nice way about working with one I'm about to show you is I'm gonna take the time to make all of the coloring area very accurate, and we don't have to have a lot of clean up later. So if you come down to the bucket area and in the sub tool, you be able to select clothes and fill your able to circle your line work and it'll fill in the closed areas so you don't have to paint this by normal. So I begin selecting here, and it feels in my a whole area, and I don't have to do any kind of precision working. And then after that, I'll grab my eraser tool here and do some quick cleanup. Okay, now that that's done, let's drag that down just above our line work. And we can lock this file. Now what? We're gonna do it set up all of our layers to reference the boundaries of what this layer has. So I'm gonna make another layer, and I'll just name the shirt pro jacket. And when I select a color and a tool right now, if I were to draw, it goes everywhere on my canvas. But if I go over to my layers and at the top, you see this normal drop down well right below that, you're going to see an oval that's hollow on top and filled in the bottom. So select that, and it makes my layer red. And when I do that again, it only draws on what I have in my fill layer down below, and I'm able to just go for it and not have to worry about staying in the lines. So if I were to grab like my 30 here, I'd be able to just draw right in, and all of my lines will stay nice and clean. I don't do any kind of clean work. Obviously, you want to stay within the lines of the jacket, so if I go across the hands, that's not gonna help me any. But you can use the bucket tool and refer other layers and be a little filling quickly. This jacket where needed. There's a quite nice works quickly, so now let's actually do the colors that I want to do. But I'm setting up my colors. There are ways where you can just watch it on the paper and just reference those layers. But I actually like to use a really cool tool within clips studio, and that's up here in the window. And if you go down, you will see color sentence a little ways down. So color scent right here and it brings up this little window here and you can see already have a few colors in here because I send it up before. So once you have this window up, you can select this little wrench here and all, making me one just to demonstrate you want to select, add new settings, and then I'll let you name a new layer settings. Next piece I will be doing in the Future is on our Ruto piece and click done, and it gives me a whole new palette. Let me jump back to these twins here so you can set up all of your colors within here. And I do every piece of material or article of material on a different layer so you can see I have jacket. I have skin, I have the time. I have the whites of the eyes. I have the hair. I had the shirt colors and I had the eye colors. Once you've already set up your color for your jacket. You can come up here in your layers and you can select this little lock with these chequered squares and that locks what's in there so now can go to my base color of the jacket and select the pin tool. And I can just fill in what I've already done, so I don't have to redo that. So once you get your colors all set up on each thing, you can just like that transparency and be able to manipulate anything and not have to ever worry about it again. Next looks work on the hair, so let's make a new layer. Select that reference circle again at the top. Make sure there's red there and I'll select my hair color and I'll do the bucket on a few of these. But there's a lot of tight lines in here, so it's not really going to get everything, but it will get a majority of it, and I go get more precise with my pin. You can see I need to do some clean up. So if you want to, you can jump over your pain here and just fill that in because we're still referencing that Phil layer down below. It's like I need to killer that up, clean that up well in this area, fill in this area. I think that pretty much doesn't so let's hope back to the fill area. Unlock that, and if you grab the eraser tool, you can come in here and just clean these little bits up here. I want to fill that in. Come in here and select it. You want to make sure that you're not erasing from that because you'll lose all your color . So be precise when working with the fill layer. And I actually want to get rid of this hair here. So just fill it out. And that gets rid of both my fil layer and my color earlier. Let's make sure to lock that again. Go back to my hair. My tool. And I think that I want this to be colored. All right. Also be organized. Name this here. They didn't mess up here. We don't want this area to be filled. This is the skin underneath. All right, That looks good. So you'll continue on filling in all of these pieces and want you haven't filled in. We'll start doing some shadows and highlights 7. Rendering a Light Source: No. Now that we have our flats down, let's talk about light source for shaving and highlights again. There's many ways to do this. We're gonna be doing cell shaving today. Now you could just grab a brush and start filling in these areas where you want to be. But even with a good heart brush, getting those crisp lines of transition between dark and your mid Keller or made killer and highlights not as crisp as you want him to be so we can use this tool called the Lasso tool , and that has rectangle, eclipse, lasso, Polly line and so on. I usually only used Lasso and Polly Line for a majority, but definitely experiment and see what works best for you. Another thing is, it's best to use multiple layers for this. Me personally. When I start rocking and rolling, I'm usually only using one layer for every material or color line I'm using. So with the jacket, I'll just stick with that one layer, select my layer. It's like when darker colors and just jump right in. So once you've decided what your light source is gonna be, usually the easiest thing is to start dropping in those darks, So I'm on jacket right now. Grab the feel tool. And I didn't come in. And I know where I want the darkest points on this for sure. So I want a dark point there. Most all of this will be dark. This will be dark for me. That's probably good there. I'm gonna jump over to my shirt and drop in some darks here, here, and I know that I for sure want to have most of this dark. I find it's a kind of quick, fun way to jump in so you don't get stuck anywhere particular and also with my skin. I'm gonna toss in some dark points here. Actually, I need to fix this there. You always miss something when you're doing this. I know that for sure. I want a dark point of skin here. We'll just leave that for now. Gonna hop over to my hair. It's like the dark point. And I know for sure that I want these points to be darker, even not necessarily the darkest. But I do want to have that feel of it being behind. It's fun way to get started. Let's do the ties that's gonna be quick and simple. Let's hopping too. This tie here, make sure we're on the tile layer. Choose our darker color of our tie. And again I'm gonna jump to lasso We're gonna do then and I'm going to reverse my selection . Gramma pin tool. Fill this in and then de select. Now, when you're using this last one tool, the furthest left is the de select. And then you have another icon, and the third icon is your reverse. And that's where you can get your reverse from fill in Mississippi. Fill in this area and then we'll talk to my other side of the tie and D select. So this is nice because I already have my layer locked I can't draw outside of for my tie is it makes it very quick and simple to be able to work through this. And for the last point, it's grab her last two again. An invert and color again. That tie looks good to me, would do the same thing here for this time very clean cover pin and fill that in. And then, for the last part, we'll do. Don't learn these lengths and fill that in there. I'm gonna call the tie done. So once you finish a layer and you decide to dio blue Von from it at this point where you think you're done locking it kind of helps you check it off. So as you're going through your layers, you can check off your layers and just see that progress happening should actually lock our line are as well. Okay, let's finish up. This color here is gonna swoop in right on the edge of this. Try to get a smooth line going on. I'm gonna fill in this whole caller here. You know, I can come back and correct the little stuff here, back to our lasso. Select your wife killer set in and then we'll see that the lights catching right about there getting select class. Ooh, Get that nice, smooth contour. There we go. Just keep switching back and forth in it. All right. That covers a majority of the basics. One thing I do want to show is adding very few, but really nicely added radiant maps. So if I select start color and then come down to my color wheeled in with the bottom, I can select my background color in Select that not as Dark Killer, and I'll select my dark one again and I'll come over to my greedy int map and I will do foreground to background. So actually, first we need to goto our magic wand. Select this area and make sure you say reference to all layers and then try select this area again. You can see I've selected just this area. Now I'll go back to my great aunt map and start at the top and dragged down to the bottom. So first, make sure your jacket and then try to dragon release and you can see it's got really dark up here. And then it comes out to a nice fade. That kind of gives a nice transition between that really super dark area back there and then the less dark area rather than go back to so she and I like to use radiant very, very few times. But it's nice, a little touch to kind of add a little bit more depth to your drawing, so I'll jump into a time lapse and work through pretty much all the rest of the painting until probably the very end 8. Painting Timelaps: No, this is the time light portion of the painting. Not much to say here except put in your time and get it done. I'm using all of the same techniques that I showed you in the last video. I'm basically just applying it to the entire painting. - All right, This is the only place that I did something a little bit different than what I showed. You originally actually selected the area the hair, and they did some airbrushing kind of give a better highlight from where the sun's hit. And that pretty much wraps up this time lapse. Let's move on to the final touches of this piece. 9. Final Touches: No, it's time to work on finalizing this piece of art. So what we want to do first is make sure that all of our layers are locked. So we'll lock this last one here and I'm gonna drop down to the jacket, make this new layer, and I'm gonna name it Highlights And as well, we want to make sure that still referencing that gray layers, we're gonna see that red bar next to it. We'll grab a pin here and start doing some highlights around this arm in the elbow. And then let's do it down on this arm as well. And I'm also doing some reflecting light back here. I wouldn't necessarily be getting the sunlight here, but any kind of reflecting light coming from the environment around them will be bouncing off some of these edges. So we want to make sure you stick those in there. I definitely like to catch the sleeves. It kind of gives a pop, even though there's some white sleep going on there. But having that white on the jacket really helps in the pot and giving the separation on this collar appears gonna really help to give that separation between his brother behind him. Then you just want to keep moving on and kind of grab those edges. Basically what you see fit. It doesn't necessarily have to be accurate, as long as you're highlighting details that you want to your kind of catching the eye and leading it around your artwork. One thing that will help you is to highlight different parts of it with your magic wand. So then you're not painting on anything, you don't want a pain. So right here, I'm highlighting just his arm with the magic wand and then going back to the pin and using it on this elbow here and as well on his shoulder. So I'm not getting anything else and then de selected and continue working on because we have that referencing the gray layer below. We can't go outside of this jacket, but you can draw over the top of his brother behind him. Keep working around, basically want to bring out areas that you want. So right here on this part of the jackets, really gonna pull that out and you can see how much more three d that is, rather than just having the white right there. One thing you can do that's fun is grabbing your vector layer and rest arising it just right. Click on that and rest of the layer. And then you set the Alfa Channel lock where the little grids are, and you can sample the color around for your lines are and paint over the top of them. And that's going to kind of push your line back rather than having them bold. It really starts to wash away your line work, and that's how you start to veer away from line work. If you won't do that, I typically only do it on the hair. But it does look really good. Cleans it up. It gives a little bit of a different pop or a completely different feel to your art piece. All right, that wraps it up for this quick start to clip studio and getting into digital painting. I hope you enjoy the class post. Any questions you have? I'm happy to help and interact with you. Thank you