Drawing Webtoons: From Planning to Publishing

1. Introduction: Hi, I'm cluvious, a self-taught anime artists and content creator. While I originally started as an illustrator, I decided to pursue my dreams and switch my path to creating comics, specifically drawing work tones. I've always been inspired by Anime and Manga there the reason I fell in love with creating my own stories and characters. Yet for the longest time, I didn't know what would be the best format for me to tell my stories is through, until I stumbled upon leptons, I found reference format to be the most inspiring to me as I love making colorful digital artworks and the creative possibilities are really endless with this medium. At a first glance, drawn web to as might seem like a daunting task where you don't know where to start from. But I want to tell you that it's not it's actually a simple process. Once you get the hang of it in my class, I'll break down the process of drawing and creating complete chapters from the planning to the publishing stage. I want to show you how you can storyboard your chapters, preparing, organize your work files, used techniques to escalate your drawing and coloring process, and how to use assets and 3D models to create a quick anesthetic backgrounds while doing quick color adjustments to give you are seeing that beautiful finishing look through my class. You'll learn how to create your own complete chapters and hopefully be ready to publish your own web tone on the suitable platforms. I'm really hopeful that you will come out of my class well equipped with the knowledge on how to draw with tunes so that you're ready to kick start your own journey of making your dream story come to life. 2. Setting Up Clip Studio Paint: Clip Studio Paint has become the favorite software and app among the majority of artists nowadays, especially if comic creators, as it's packed with tools and features that really easier way and save time while producing high-quality artworks. Clip Studio Paint is available for both computers and smart devices. It comes in two versions, Pro and eax. They're very similar in almost everything except that e x comes with more features, mainly for handling projects with multiple pages like comics, exporting lines from images and 3D models, and unlimited frames for animation. There could be other differences, but these are the main ones. As we're up to an artist, is perfectly fine to work with. If you choose to, you can come up with pretty much the same results and you can upgrade to eax anytime later if you change your mind. Personally, I have the EX version and it's the one I'll be using in this class. But throughout the lessons, I'll let you know where you need to do things differently. If you are a pro user, of course, that will be to the best of my knowledge, as I never used it before. So forgive me if I miss something and do let me know now whether it's your first time using Clip Studio Paint or not, I won't give you a onetime introduction to the tools and features of the software because I understand that it's a lot of information to absorb at once. Instead, I'll explain to you the tools that you need as we go. So you can try them instantly and retain them in your memory and gradually get experienced with the software as you use it. So for now, let's just talk about setting up your Clip Studio Paint and customizing it to your preference. First things first, after connecting your tablet and running Clip Studio Paint, open a new file from File new. It's fine to choose any of the options. Now, I'll just go for illustration. Now with this step, we're going to set the pen pressure settings so that they're the most suitable for your own usage. To do that, go to File, then pressure settings, and then grab your pen and do multiple strokes on the screen. Do strokes with the pressure that you feel comfortable with. I would advise not to press hardly on your pen because that can hurt your hand on the long run. So keep your hand light and you can see that the graph is changing upon the input I'm giving it. Once you're done, click check, adjust the settings, and now you can try it on the screen. If you're comfortable with the settings at this stage, click Done. If not, just click, go back to previous screen and do the thing again. And that's it. Click Done to close this window. So that was the first thing. The second thing is the user interface. As you can see, everything in Clip Studio Paint is made up of Windows. So e.g. if I click and hold this, I'll take the window out. And if I click and hold again, I can bring it back to where it was and resize it and so on. Everything over here has a window and you can drag and change things as you like. So for this step, you'll get to know what's your most comfortable user interface as you go, because you'll be changing and continuously based on your needs. But for now I wanted to let you know that since everything is made up of Windows and you can drag them and see them pop up like this. And maybe you click close by mistake. Don't worry when that happens, you can restore anything you closed by going to Window. And for now, I'll choose Navigator since that's the one I closed just now. And here it is. It's back. So I'll just drag it and put it back to where it was. Personally, I've almost kept the Default Clip Studio Paint user interface, but I put the layers here on the side as a long window because as I work on the web tune, I use a lot of layers. So for me I found that it's easier this way to navigate between them. And also over here I put the color palette for easy access, which I'll talk about in more details as we start the coloring phase. And also the navigator overview shows a preview of your canvas. So sometimes I find it helpful to just enlarge this so that I can jump between the panels more easily and see my work file at a glance. Lastly, I put the brush size over here. Usually I guess it's located here and the default user interface. But I put it here on the side so that it takes less space and so that I can pick the brush size more easily. Now let's talk about this thing at the top over here is called the command bar. And as you can see here, there are so many shortcuts. Some of them come with a default user interface, and some of them I added myself. I find this command bar very helpful. It really helps you save some time and use some tools quickly. So to adjust the icons here you go to File command bar settings. From here you can see different things. There are menu commands, pop-up pellets, options, tools. To be honest, I haven't used everything, but I want to show you what I have put. Additionally other than the default user interface, which are the zoom in and out and fit to screen and rotating the canvas to the left and right and resetting the rotate or inversion. I also put this flip horizontal button to make it easy and quick for me to flip the canvas and see if my artworks proportions are fine. By the way, these buttons already exist here, but as you can see there on the side of the window. So I found that putting them on top over here makes it quicker for me. You can set those settings from the command bar, settings under the menu commands go to View. And then this is the Zoom and you drag and drop here. This is the zoom out. And as you can see, it has put a separator between the two tools. If I want to get rid of that, I just right-click and delete separator. So now they're all in one place. And then there's also the Fit to Screen button. Under rotate or flip. There's the rotate left. Rotate right. I'm going to just drag them and the separator will be automatically gone. And this is the research rotation inversion. Finally, the flip horizontal. If you want to remove any of the icons, then right-click it and delete, and that's how you can clean it up. I'm going to remove the ones I put just now since I already have them. The other two icons I've added are the free transform, mesh transformation. We'll talk more about these tools when we're in the sketching phase. But I want to show you where you can get them from to put them in the command bar, go to edit, transform. And then over here you can see all the transformation options. For me, I drag the free transform and mesh transform, and I'm also going to put the scale rotate because it is a helpful quick tool as well. So that's for command bar settings. Finally, I want to talk about a very important thing, which is keyboard shortcuts. Setting keyboard shortcuts to your favorite tools will really, really save you a lot of time on the long run. So whichever tool you notice yourself using frequently, make sure you set the keyboard shortcut for it, or a command bar shortcut for it. But anyway, make it easy and quick for you to save yourself a lot of time on the long run. So e.g. I. Have the N key set to my pen tool and the E key set for my eraser. V2 for my brush, the sea tool, for my blending water tool, and be key for my blur tool and so on. So I want you to take note of that to set shortcuts, go to File Shortcuts settings. And from here, like in the command bar settings, you can choose where the thing you want to set the shortcut for is. Most of my shortcuts are under the tools category. So e.g. as I told you earlier, the n shortcut is set for my pen tool. The pencil is f, air brushes a, and so on. You can also go inside the tools themselves and such shortcuts for sub tools, e.g. both the brush and watercolor I just showed you are under the brush tool, which is this one over here. So these are the two tools, but I set a shortcut for each one of them separately, as you can see here. So that makes it easy for me to navigate between them. So that concludes my introduction to setting up Clip Studio Paint. Of course, it was a very brief introduction. And as I told you, we'll talk more about the tools that we have as we need them throughout our progress. In the next lesson, we'll talk about planning your chapter through storyboards so that we can kick-start our chapter production journey. 4. 1-2 Setting up Work Files: Now that we're done with the storyboard, it's time to take it to the next stage and put it on and drawing canvas to set up our work files. But before we get into that, I want to first explain the canvas size guide. And based on what did I choose, the dimensions that I'll tell you about. When it comes to Canvas Size guide, Web tones are long, vertical scrolling comics, and they consist of multiple pages. Let's say the dimensions of one of those pages is really dependent on the platform you're gonna put it on. But in this course, I'll be mainly focusing on the main platform for publishing for indie creators, which is Web two in Canvas. For worked on Canvas, the required dimensions for one page or one image is 800 pixels in width by a maximum height of 1280 pixels. This is the maximum height of your image can be smaller, but it can't be bigger. So based on this page requirement, I usually set my drawing canvas to have seven pages of this page. That means it would be 800 pixels in width times 1280 pixels times seven pages. Which is this number, 8,960 pixels. But then again, this number is just for screen size. And since you're putting a lot of work in your web tune, you might consider printing it later and making it into a book format. That's why it's highly recommended that you don't just draw on this side specifically, but go a little bit higher and size up your canvas. For me, I draw on a canvas that is three times the size of this seven pages canvas. So that means 800 pixels times D3 and width, which is 2,400 pixels. And this number times a three, which gives us this number 26,800 pixels. So in summary, the file size I'll be going for is this one, this number by this number. So let's make use of these numbers already. Let's create our work files are drawing canvas. We'll go to File New and then choose what doing over here. Personally, I name it by the name of the chapter. So far now I'm working on Chapter 14 and alcohol. Just that. When you click on this button, you choose the directory where you want your files to be saved. And over here, under the canvas, this is where we're going to make use of these numbers that I mentioned here. The width of the canvas will be 2,400 pixels by a height of 26,880 pixels. Make sure the basic expression color is set to color. The paper color I usually leave it as it is in white. Now for this page settings over here, this feature is only available for X version of Clip Studio Paint. I set it to a number of six pages. And when I click Okay, it's going to create me six long pages of the dimensions that I've set. So it's like a page management file has been created. That means that if I right-click any of these pages, I can see options of opening the page, deleting, adding, duplicating, and so on. And to show you how it looks like in the file format, a file is created for me here called Chapter 14, which is the page management file of Clip Studio Paint. And then it created another six pages. So if I close this now and open up Chapter 14, I'm gonna get this page management file. And as you can see, it has created six files for the six pages that I specified. So if you are an X user, then you can follow this and get the same result. But if you are a pro user, you can do exactly the same thing by going to File new web tune, then creating these files separately. So basically you're going to create them without having a binder to combine them. That's why it's not gonna make much difference when it comes to the work files themselves. The x version only makes it easier for you to manage your pages. Now I'll open up the first page of my chapter and I'll go back to the storyboard file and drag it here. And then I'll keep my pages on the left side over here so that I can see what's going on. So as I mentioned in the storyboard, I drew every column of it on a separate layer. I'll go to the first layer and you click Control a to select all and then control C to copy. Or you can also go to Select, Select All, and then Edit and Copy. I'll go back to my page and click Control V on my keyboard, or Edit and Paste is the same thing. And now I'll click Control T to bring up the transformation box. As you can see, I have handles that allow me to resize my storyboard. If you don't have a keyboard and want to bring up the transformation, there's this button that we set up earlier and the command bar. When you click on it, it will also bring up the transformation box. Or you can also go to edit, transform, scale rotate, and it will also show up the same thing. Now I'll zoom out a little bit and hold the space bar to pan my canvas. And I'll drag this box on the corner to resize it. Now, to resize it with proportion, you have to make sure that over here Keep Aspect Ratio is ticked. If it's not ticked, then you have to press Shift on your keyboard and resize. So I'm going to bring it back. I resize my storyboards so that it fits my canvas size. And then click Okay to apply transformation. One really cool thing we can enable is going to View and then selecting onscreen area web tune. With this enabled, we can see how the view looks like on one wife Joan page. So that means that we can adjust the distance between our panels and check how it would look like on phone. So basically this rectangle is the phone view. By the way, you can adjust the settings of this onscreen view by going to View onscreen area, setting swept tone, and then adjusting the ratio from over here. But I usually keep it as is. So I'm just going to click Cancel. Now I'll zoom out so I can have a better view. And I'll go for the Marquee Tool over here. And using the rectangular selection, I'll select starting from this Canvas and then go to the Move tool over here and move this down while holding Shift so that I only moved the panels down and the vertical side and not in the horizontal side. After I'm done, click this button to de-select. And I'll go ahead again and select the following panels. If you want to select other stuff, then you can make use of the Lasso Tool over here. And make sure that you have this button on the selection that you add to the selection that you currently have. And if you chose this button over here, then you can subtract from the selection. These settings are available for all the selection options, so keep them in mind to make good use of them. I'll go back again to the move tool and hold Shift and move it down. I'll use the lesser tool this time and move down again and then click this. Or you can also click Control plus D on your keyboard to de-select. And finally, this last panel, I'll hold Shift and bring it down. As for the first panel in this chapter, I'll be reusing the last panel from my previous chapter. So I'm gonna go ahead and copy it from here and paste it over here. So I'll go to Edit, Paste to show in position so that it's pasted in the right position. I'll move it a little bit to adjust it. With the arrows on my keyboard, I can zoom in and check that everything is looking fine. So now when I zoom out, I can see that this panel is taking almost the majority of page one. I'll scroll down with the pen tool to check how the chapter is coming together. I felt that this panel was too close. So I'm going to change the distance between them and move it down a little bit more. The distancing between panels is very important because it also contributes to the pacing of your storytelling. So the bigger gaps you leave between panels, the more breaks between the scenes. So e.g. over here, I want to introduce some sort of fearful emotion. So I want to give this character more space to show her fearful emotion. That's why I'm going to leave bigger space between the panels before and after it. I'll scroll down. And I'll have the panels over here closer to each other because I want them to seem quicker. And I'll check the pacing again by scrolling. I'm going to bring this last panel a little bit closer to the previous panel so that the pacing feels a quicker. Since I want that guy to quickly grab his sword and transform. And now since I finished transferring the first column, I'm gonna do the same thing for the second column. So I'll choose Layer two, and since everything is still selected, I'll also Control C again to copy. And I'll go Edit, Paste to Sean position so that I can see it. Because if I just paste it like this, I'm not going to see where it is. I don't know. It's lost. So I use paste to Sean position instead. But anyway, if you lose any of your layers without finding a trace, just to click Control T. And then the transformation box will show up. And then you can drag your layer. You know, find it again. Edit, Paste to show on position. And I'll also transform this and resize it. As you can see, I'm approaching the end of the page. So it looks like I'm going to discard the next few panels and leave them for the second page. Again, I check the pacing by scrolling and adjust accordingly. So I decided to keep this panel only. So I'm gonna select the next one and click this button over here to delete or click the Delete button on my keyboard. Or go to edit, delete, and then Control D to de-select and bring this panel little bit downwards. Now if I want to remove this excess space and crop this canvas, I can do that by simply using the rectangular selection tool and selecting my canvas up to where I want to cut. Then go to Edit crop. This way. This first page ends here. And if I want to change the dimensions of the page and make it longer than I can go to edit, change canvas size. From here I can change my dimensions. E.g. let's put 28,000 pixels. But as you can see, when doing this, extra canvas size is coming on both the top and the bottom of the canvas. That is because the reference point is set to the center in this case. So I don't want that. I want the extension to be on the bottom side only. So I'm going to click Reset and choose the reference point to be the top over here. And now I can type the height I want again. And as you can see, the extension is coming at the bottom, but I'm going to cancel and I'm going to keep it as it is. Now. Since I'm done with this first page, I will merge those layers of the storyboard by clicking on the storyboard layer and holding Shift and clicking on all the storyboard layers I have. And then right-click and merge selected layers. So now all of my storyboard is on one layer. I'm going to rename this layer to storyboard. That extra step I also do is click on this button over here to change the layer color to blue so that it's easier for me later when I'm sketching. If you don't see this button, by the way, your Layers window might be too small just to drag it a little bit and it should show up. And if you still don't see, you can get the same effect as well under the layer properties by clicking this button layer color. So clicking it would enable and clicking again with disabled it. And you can play around with the color you want from here, any color you want. But I usually keep it to the default to blue. For the rest of the storyboard, I do the same thing to transfer all of my rough drafts to their work files. And then once I'm done, it's time to create frames for my panels. And we can easily do that by going to the frame border tool over here. And then choose rectangular frame. You can pick the color you want for the border of your panel. I usually go for solid diblock. Now click and hold to draw the panel over your rough draft. Once you've released, you'll see over here that a frame layer has been created. It comes with a raster blank layer and a frame background. So I disabled the frame background so that I can see the storyboard beneath it. Now that this frame has been created, if I click on any layer inside it and draw, anything I draw will be inside the frame. But if I drag the layer outside the frame, then I can take it outside and it's no longer bound by the frame area. To edit the settings of almost anything includes Studio Paint. You make use of the object tool under operation. So when using the object tool and clicking on the panel, you can immediately see the settings over here. You can either keep the border or if you don't take this, the order will be removed. You can change the color of the border from here to whichever color you want. You can also change the size of the border. I usually go for size eight. I find a suitable for my dimensions. Now the border of the frame is basically a vector. A vector layer properties apply to it. We'll talk more about vector layers later when we're in the line art phase. But for now I want to show you how you can edit lots of the settings of the border by treating it as a vector layer. First of all, click on the correct line button over here and choose the control points up tool. Over here, you have multiple settings. The border of the panel is made up of control points. So if I click on Move control points, I can move them. And therefore, i just the shape of the panel. If I click on Add control point, I can add another control point. And now if I move this new control point. Then I can get a new shape. If I click Delete control point, then that control point will be removed. And if I click on switch corner, then it's going to make it into a smooth corner instead of a sharp one. If I click on adjust line with an click on a control point and drag upwards, then I'm going to see that the thickness of the border is increasing. So as you can see, I have a variety of thickness created. And if I click and drag down, then the line width gets smaller and almost non-existent. The last two options don't seem to work with frame borders and we don't really need them anyway. So for now I want to adjust the shape of this panel while I can just move this control point over here, as you can see, the line is not perfectly horizontal and I want to keep it horizontal. I don't want to mess that up. So what I'll do is I'll add a control point over here where the slanted line ends. And then I'll delete the control point over here. And as you can see, a slanted line was created while keeping the horizontal lines straight. But I'm going to change it a little bit because it was too slanted. And I'm going to put it here and delete. Now I usually do an extra step for my storyboard with a pen. I go around and number my panels because that's how I keep track of them so that I can rename my frames as well to the numbers of panels. And it's also the way I keep track of my progress in a document that I'll introduce to you later. So now since I numbered my panels, I'll go ahead and rename the first frame. I add it and call it one. So that every frame algebra from now on we'll have a number. You can also use the object tool to quickly move the control points. In this case, I don't have any horizontal lines to worry about, so I just drag them and adjusted this land. I'll continue adding frames for the rest of the panels in this page to show you the process. I found out that using slanted lines for some scenes make them look more dynamic. Especially if you have phi teens in your comic. I find that it really makes them more lively. That's why I decided to go for slanted look over here. And maybe I'll make them even more slanted. For this panel, I decided to go for a full view so that different fills the screen. I'm going to have it as a big panel and continue drawing the character later. Probably I'll draw more of the body of the character so that this last panel number six will come on top of it. Also to move your panels around, well, you could use the object tool to move it around. If you had content inside the panel, moving it around with the object tool doesn't move the contents inside it. That's why when you want to move a panel, make sure to use the Move Tool instead so that you can move the whole thing together. So that's all about how to add frames or panels. I'll repeat the same process for all of the other pages until I have all of the storyboard transferred to my work files. In the next lesson, we'll move on to add speech bubbles so that we can see our characters finally speaking. 5. 1-3 Lettering: Alright, now it's time to add speech bubbles to our panels. But before we get into that, let's talk about the different types of speech bubbles. Speech bubbles come in a lot of shapes and varieties, and they really helped deliver the emotions of the character. Help us understand the tone of their speech better. Here I present to you six of the main types of speech bubbles. The first one is the most difficult one you can say it's just a normal circle indicates normal speech. So you can say that it's used the majority of the time. But for a speech bubble that looks like a cloud, H represents the inner thoughts of the character. At rectangular speech bubble can be used for the integration of the story or for a monologue of the character. A spiky speech bubble indicates shouting, screaming, or a loud voice in general, as trim line to speech bubble with lines going towards the center presents sort of tension for the character. And usually it's used for monologue, not for dialogue. And finally, the cloud slash goes kind of borderless, are boundless. Speech bubble represents kind of dark thoughts or despair or a low mood. Of course, these are not the only types. There can be countless speech bubble types. The more you read comics the morning you get exposed to more interesting stuff. But I would say these are good for a starter pack. Now that we've covered the types, let's get started and add speech to the chapter we have attend. I usually put all the texts and lettering into one folder to keep things organized. I'll create a new folder on top of all the layers. And I'll call it text. And on the left side here, I'll go down to this button tool. And once I click on it, I'll say multiple options. For each sub tool of these, there are settings under the tool property. You can change the shape of the speech bubble, the brush size, the default colors, and how pixelated or soft you want the border to look like. And you can even change the brush shape from over here. There are so many interesting varieties. What I usually do for my dialogues, I use the last sub tool, which is a rounded button. I choose a rectangular figure and make the roundness of the corners to be 100 per cent. And I set my line color to always be black, the fill color to always be white. Unless I wanted to change them, then I would do that manually. So with this selected, I'll go ahead and draw the speech bubble. And once I drew it, I can still edit the settings again by using the object tool. So from here I can edit the border size and the fill opacity. I usually set my full opacity to be 90 per cent so that it's not completely covering the artwork. So we can see a little bit beneath it. And once the speech bubble is added, you can add a balloon tail. And again, play with the settings over here. E.g. I. Have mine set to straight line with the width of tails set to 100. But I can also use a fall in line. And this is how you can create a longer tail for the speech bubble. Or I can also use a spline, which is how to create those curvy tails for speech bubbles. There is also the third bedroom tail over here, which you can ask thought bubbles to your speech bubble. Or you can use the balloon pen to draw your own balloon bubble by herself. E.g. in this scene, I don't want it to be a perfect circle because I want to include some sense of fear. So it's gonna be a hazy mobile. For my balloon pen, I use the default settings except that I changed only two settings to better match my usage. I'll show you these settings right now. But by the way, you can change any sub tool settings by clicking on the wrench icon over here. Once you click on it, you'll see this menu. There are all kinds of settings and these come for every single tool in Clip Studio Paint. So try to get yourself familiar with it. So what I changed is under brush size, I click this arrow over here and made the minimum value of the pen pressure to be 20 or 20, 1%, so that I get this pen pressure effect when I draw. The second thing is under correction. I said stabilization to be 50 per cent because when this is low, the shaking of the head is going to show up. So I'm not always desiring this very shaky look. That's why I set mine to be 50 per cent. By clicking the I over here. I enabled it in the quick access over here so that I can change it quickly whenever I want. And you can do this also for any setting. You can enable or disable any of the settings you want to have in the box over here. I changed my mind and I'll draw it with a lower stabilizer to make it more shaky. Now if you look at the layers panel. You'll see that we have a balloon created and it's outside all the folders. I'm just going to drag it and put it inside the text folder so that I have my speech bubble inside and well organized. Now since I drew my speech bubble, I want to adjust it just slightly as you can see. There are some additional stuff over here. So I'll go again to the correct line tool and I'll delete the extra points. Speech bubble borders are also vectors and the same operation is applied to them. So it can play around with our speech bubble and adjust it to how we like to remove any excess control points that we don't like. I'm going to change the opacity to 90 per cent so that I can see what's beneath it. Now, after the speech bubble is added to type our dialogue, we go to the text tool over here and click on the speech bubble and start typing our dialogue. Notice how I introduced the new lies behind every word to match the shape of my speech bubble. I'm going to use the object tool to drag it and center it in the speech bubble. But I want to introduce an important note about text. When you write your text inside your speech bubble, make sure it follows the shape of the speech bubble, e.g. now, if I see the edges of my texts, they're kind of giving a circular shape. So always try to go for circular shape. Our diamond shape, something that starts small at the top and then gets bigger, then gets smaller, and then that makes your speech bubbles more pleasing to the eye. Now the text I added was immediately joined with the speech bubble layer. That means that now when I move them around, they are on the same layer. And that makes it so easy to change the location of your speech bubble. Now for the text tool, you can save your settings and different sub tools so that you don't have to change your phone type and size every time and you just immediately apply the settings. E.g. over here I have a monologue, so I'm just going to select everything and click on the monologue sub tool that I created over here. And once I click on it, the monologue texts effects have been applied. I'll just reduce the size a little bit to match my speech bubble. And I'll also make it italic to make it more impactful and also to double indicate that this is monologue, it's not speech. Now how do you save the settings? Basically just right-click any text tool that you have and duplicate it and name it anything you want, Let's call it dialogue. And after you set your settings of font size and other stuff, click on the wrench icon over here, and click Save all settings as default. It will ask you on a message like is it okay to replace the current settings? Just to click, Okay? And there you have it. You have very easily to create it the default settings of your tool. For me, I have one for dialogue, one for a monologue, and one for negation. And I could add more later if I saw a necessity, and that's what I would advise for you to do as well. Another handy tip is that you can create a list for your comic fonts so that you don't have to scroll through all the list of fonts available on your PC, e.g. these are all the fonts I have on my PC. I created this comic list that only has a handful of the fonts I personally selected that I use in my comic. And the way to do that is by clicking on this gear icon. On the left side under font list, click on this icon to create a new font list. Name it anything you want. Then while clicking on the list, you can scroll through your list of fonts and take the ones that you want to include in your list. Once you're done, click Okay. And when you click the drop-down next to font, you'll see it added over here so you can quickly access your fonts. As for the fonts I use in my comic, I mainly use comic fonts, which are royalty free fonts that can be used for both free and commercial projects. That I'm on the safe side and there is no worry of any legal liabilities when using the font. They come in many varieties and I find them very handy and expressive in comics. But if you still want the other fonts to search, you can search on this website, one-on-one fonts.com. And the way to search for phones that can be used for commercial purposes is by clicking on this button over here so that all the results that show up we'll be okay to use in commercial projects. Now why am I mentioning commercial projects? Because this is a big project you're making and you might consider monetizing your work so that you get some payback for your efforts. It's very important to be on the safe side when it comes to copyrights and stuff like that. But there's also a website that is called the Lambert, which they make fonts exclusively for comic creators. As you can see, they have so many interesting fonts and they are the default that is, I think, generally used in the comic industry when it comes to the fonts of land, but they support independent creators. That's why their phones are free of charge for India creators or personal creators who do not belong to companies or don't work with mainstream publishers. So it should be okay to use their phones. If you are working on your own, you have their license granted for you. Alright, let's come back to our file. Let's say you had another speech bubble over here, and you want to connect the two speech bubbles so that there is continuation and speech. You can do that by simply using the balloon tail. You can either use it as a straight line or as a polyline, like we showed earlier, or even as a spline. This kind of connection would be especially great if your speeches across the comic as you scroll down so that you provide continuity in the speech. The speech feels connected as you scroll down. Then my current chapter, I don't have such conversations, so I removed them. Let's talk about customizing the speech bubble through the object tool, you can change the line color, e.g. to read the fill color e.g. to black. For changing the text color. You can change it by selecting the text and changing the color. So you can do a lot of customization. You can even create a new layer and clip it and maybe add a gradient. The possibilities are really endless. So the more tools you will learn and Clip Studio Paint, the more creative combinations you can come up with. Now in this page I have two other speech bubbles over here. So any speech bubble that I'll add can be on the same layer of my previous speech bubble or on a separate layer. Usually I keep everything on the same layer. And that is done by making sure that under the sub tool settings over here, under how to add, make sure that you have to select a layer selected so that they come on the same layer. Otherwise, if you want every speech bubbles you create to be on a separate layer, then choose Create a new layer. I'll keep it on selected layer. And I'll add more speech bubbles here and adjust them. For this character. I decided to reverse the speech bubble color to be black fill and white outline because this is an antagonist, n is a dark character, so that gives a more scary feeling to the character. The same thing for the font. I use the creepy looking font to give that scary vibe. Another important thing to note is that makes sure that you break down your speech bubbles into multiple bubbles so that you don't make it into one big chunk of texts. That would be not so pleasing for the reader to read. The shorter the texts bubbles are, the easier it will be for your reader to follow along. And it also gives more dynamics to your chapter. Finally, let's talk about the other speech bubble types that we discussed earlier. So far we've only dealt with basic shapes, but sometimes we want to use other speech bubble types, like the panel I have here, e.g. the character is raising her voice, so I need a spiky speech bubble. Well, I could certainly draw it with my hand through the balloon pen. I don't always need to do that because it Clip Studio Paint comes with a lot of materials for comic creation, and it comes with a good variety of speech bubble shapes. We can access them by going to any of those windows over here and clicking on it, you will see that the materials window will show up. There are all sorts of materials here, whether it's brushes, poses, image materials. We'll talk more about the others later, but for now let's head straight towards the speech bubbles. So go to manga material and click the arrow next to it, and then click on balloon. And then over here you will see different types. There is dialogue, there is feeling, there is narration. Usually I use the dialogue ones. So e.g. over here, I can simply drag this jagged curve over here. And once I drag it, I don't know why it goes straight inside the panel, but for me, as I mentioned, I keep my speech bubbles in one folder above everything. I just drag it and put it over here under the text folder. And I'll resize it, rotated a little bit and I'll type the speech in the same manner that we did earlier. I'll change the brush size a little bit. And I saw that doing the text this way is better. It's okay to put the question marks on a new line. It looks fine and still conveys the same meaning. Now let's say I want to play around a little bit with the thickness of the border. Well, I can do that through the control points that I showed you earlier. There is also this tool called correct line width. Over here we have multiple settings. You can either thicken your lines. So by choosing the appropriate brush size, I can brush over the border and see how the thickness is increasing. So I can either do that or I can choose the narrow one. And I can also play with the ratio of how much I wanted to narrow down or thicken it. I'll choose the narrow one and I'll play a little bit with the thickness in the middle to give that pen pressure field. So as you can see, we made this speech, but we'll look more interesting than just having uniform border thickness. So Clip Studio Paint comes with those shapes, but sometimes they might not be enough. The good thing is that you can download so many stuff from the Clip Studio Paint assets, e.g. I. Downloaded these extra speech bubble options and I'll show you how I got them. So when you're on your clip Studio window, go over here and click on Clip Studio assets. And you can search here for anything you want, speech, bubble, e.g. and now you can see so many options coming up. Or you can just click on the detail button here and click on balloon. Then you'll see much more options because you're seeing the whole category of the balloons. And it's very interesting the more you look at stuff, the more you want to download more stuff. Over here, you can check the newly added ones or you can check the popular ones, which are usually the most downloaded once. So under the popular ones, you'll find this smooth speech bubble flush set, which is the collection I just showed you. And really these are also interesting to use. Well, there are so many assets that are free on Clip Studio assets. Not all of them are, some of them are paid. So if you want to see only the free results, again, click on detail and you click on free under price. This way you don't have to check whether every item is free or not. All the items that we're seeing right now are free. So do your search and see what interesting things you can download based on your needs. And anything you download from Clip Studio assets will show up under download here. You can easily drag this stuff and drop them on your canvas to add them. So that's it for this lesson. And the next lesson, we'll talk about adding sound effects to your panels. 6. 1-4 SFX (Sound Effects): Let's talk now about adding sound effects to our panels. Sound effects are considered the audio of the comic, since the comic is just images, sound effects help deliver the world of the comic to the reader and get them emerged into what's happening, feeling the atmosphere surrounding your characters. We can say that in comics, there are two types of sound effects that can be added to the panels. The first type is those that express the sound of the event happening. The second type is those that express the action that is happening. In both cases. They can be really beneficial to add and also help your reader better understand what's going on in the panels. So let's talk about how to add them. To keep things organized, I keep my sound effects in a separate folder. I'll create a new folder and call it s f x, which is short for sound effects. Let's work on this panel as an example. And this panel I have the thumps sound effect, which is basically a strong heartbeat. You can either type the sound effect or handwrite it. I'm going to show you both cases. So for this panel, I'll type the sound effect. So I'll grab the text tool and I'll type it out. The texts layer was put inside the panel itself. So I'm going to drag it and put it in the sound effects folder. And now I'll change the font. I usually use Comic-Con display caps for my sound effects. I'll increase the size of it. And I'll rotate it a little bit. And I'll also make it italic to make it look more effective. And I'll give it a red color since the heartbeat is usually affiliated with red color. And I'll create a new layer and clip it using this button. Now select this area so that I can add a gradient. I can add a gradient of a color that matches red. I'm going to try going for light yellow. Maybe something a little bit darker and more orange-ish. Choosing colors that are closer together on the color wheel makes the sound effects look more interesting. We'll talk more about colors. When we talk about color theory. I'll temporarily change the background to black so that you can see what's happening. I'll reduce the opacity of the storyboard. So as you can see, it's already looking cool. But I want to also give it an outline. I'll hold shift and select both layers and drag them towards the folder icon to put them inside one folder. Or I can also do that from layer, create folder and insert layer. So now this whole thing is inside one folder. To add an outline to this effect under layer property, click this button called border effect. Over here you can adjust the thickness of the border. From here, you can change the color of the border. If you click this button, it will use the color that you already have selected. But I think I'm gonna go for a little bit more yellowish color and see how it looks. Maybe something lighter or maybe something even darker. Let's try it out and see how it looks. Yeah, this looks more effective. Now to make this effect look more dramatic, we can do certain transformations. I want to show you what we can do with the text as it is. Select the text and go to this wrench button over here for the settings, and go to transformation settings. Over here, there are these two interesting effects, which is the SKU. This one's cuz the text into the horizontal side. And this one is cuz it in the vertical side. We can also do this going through the handles by clicking this drop-down menu next to the mode and choosing the SKU. So now with the handles, you can play with it with more freedom. What you can also do with this is a play around with the font size, e.g. let's have it start big N goes small. So I'm going to increase the size of these following letters just a little bit for each letter. And I'll increase the size of the textbooks so that I can see what's happening. Increase this to. And finally, the tea. Maybe you could use this one a little bit. Let's move the whole thing up so that we can still see our gradient. So this is looking cool already. I like how it turned out so far. But I'm going to type it again and show you another example of what you can do. Let's say we had this text layer. We can't use much of the transformation tools right now. We're very limited by the tools that we have. So what we can do is we can rasterize this by right-clicking on the layer. Then clicking Rasterize, then we can use these cool transformation options. If you remember, we put them in the command bar settings in the introductory lesson. So e.g. I. Can use the free transform tool by clicking on it or by going to Edit transform, free transform. And I can drag the handles and I can do much cooler effects with this transformation options. I can also change the mode from over here. So I have the free transform which I just showed you. I have the distort option, which can maybe provide a little bit different functions. There is the SKU option, which is similar to what we did earlier, is already available in the text properties. And then there's perspective, which is a great to add depth to your sound effect. However, rasterizing the layer means that you can't edit the text anymore because it's now an image. So only take this step after you have finalized the look of your sound effect. What you can also do to make an interesting sound effect is that you can type each letter on a separate layer. So e.g. I'll type the same sound effect. Having each letter on a separate layer. I'll write the first letter and then I'll duplicate the layer by right-clicking on it and clicking Duplicate there. And I'll drag it here. And I'll read the next letter. And I'll duplicate again. And I'll write the following letter. Duplicate again. And the last letter. Now I can easily play around with the placement of the letters and adjusted to however I want. I'll reduce the textbook size so that I can control them easier. So by putting one liter up on let her down, I'm giving this feeling of shakiness. And I can put all the letters inside the folder. And again, add a border to them. And again, I can add a gradients like I did with the one before. I can also play with the size of each letter and the angle of it, and the rotation of it. So really the possibilities are endless. Just really do a lot of experiments and see what you can do with it. As I mentioned earlier, you can also handwrite your sound effects. So I'm gonna do that by creating a new vector layer. A vector layer is basically a layer that doesn't lose its quality, which we will heavily use in line arts. But it's also effective to use it in sound effects. So e.g. I. Can hand-write this sound effect with my own handwriting by just using a very basic brush. And it's totally fine. It doesn't have to look perfect. It still looks cool and matches the scene that I want to draw. And I can still play around with it as much as I want. You can also download some ready-made sound effects From Clip Studio assets. Some people have uploaded interesting sound effects so you can make use of them instead of doing them by herself. But personally, I enjoy doing them, so I don't mind doing them every time. Well, we have added the sound effects at this stage. We can also leave it up to later, after we are done with drawing the panel so that we can customize the looks and the colors of the sound effect to better match the panel so that it can be more effective. So whether you want to add them now or add them later, It's totally up to you, but I hope this lesson gives you a good idea on how to play around with sound effects and make them look interesting. As for knowing and having the knowledge on what sound effect to use exactly in your panel, I would say that it comes with experience. And the more you read comics, the more you can pick up sound effects from here and there. And you'll start using them without realizing because there'll be obvious to you by now, if you've followed all the steps we've talked about, you should have a complete rough draft that is ready to read and feels like a complete chapter. And all that's left is to draw those panels and color them so we can see the web tune coming to life, which is why in the next lesson, we will finally start with the drawing phase. We'll go over tools and techniques that can help you escalate your sketching speed. 7. 2-1 Sketching Techniques: Alright, the time has finally come now to start sketching what I usually do when I'm at this step, I heard the sound effects and texts folders so that I can see my sketch clearly. And I also lower down the opacity of the storyboard layer. Anything that makes me see clearly. I'll start sketching on this layer that is already available. I usually sketch with a custom made a brush I made for myself, which is basically a modified G pen. You can download it from the Clip Studio assets. I have put it up there. So to control the brush size, I use the bracket keys on the keyboard. The writer bracket is for increasing the size and the left bracket is for decreasing it. I don't have a specific brush size that I sketch with. I just pick anything that looks good with my panel. As I sketch, my hands are continuously on the Control Z on my keyboard so that I can quickly undo my lines if they don't look good. Or you can also press this button over here to undo. Or you can go to Edit Undo. And if you undo a step, you can redo it by this button or through Edit redo, or Control Y on the keyboard. Now in this step, you can see why haven't heard of draft really helps in sketching. Because this is already laid out there in the panel. And I don't need to think about what to draw, but I just come and sketch immediately on top of it. So that saves a lot of time effort as well. As I sketch I fix the mistakes I see in the rough draft so that I come up with a neater sketch. I click on the E to bring up the eraser tool. So as I sketch, my hand is always on the Control Z and E buttons. Sometimes it helps to create a new layer and sketch certain areas on it. E.g. here I'm sketching the eyes on a new layer so that I can position them easily if their location doesn't look good. It's very essential to flip your canvas as you're drawing to see if things are in the right place. You can flip the canvas either from this button in the navigator window or from this button up here that we set up in the command bar. So I usually opt for this button at the top. Now when flipping my canvas, I can see that this eye is out of place. What I'll do is I'll enable the frame background here so that I can just see my current sketch without the storyboard. And now I can select the eye with the Lasso tool and move it with the move tool and de-select. So as I sketch, I make a lot of use of the selection tools. E.g. I. Have the lasso tool that I just showed you that helped me select a certain portion and move it with the move tool. I also make use of the selection pen and eraser selection tools. They're super-helpful to quickly select portions of your artwork. E.g. I want to adjust the cheek so I'm going to select it with the selection pen, which by the way, I have put the S key as a shortcut for it on my keyword. And then I can move the cheek a little bit with the move tool. But what I want to do now is I want to transform this. So there are multiple transformation tools that I find really helpful when I'm sketching. I want to introduce them to you one by one. The first one is the Free Transform tool, which you can bring up by clicking this button that we talked about earlier, or by clicking Control T on your keyboard. And then holding the Control button on your keyboard to quickly activated. Or by changing the mode from here to free transform. This is the first tool I'll continue sketching now and then introduce the second tool. Make it a habit to continuously flip your canvas and spot your mistakes and correct them. It's absolutely normal to have mistakes as you draw, so don't worry about it. There's nothing wrong with that. Let's talk about the second tool now. I feel that higher proportions are a little bit of. So in such case, I used two very useful transformation tools. The first one is mesh transformation, which is the one we put a button for it up here in the command bar. Or you can also access it from edit, transform, mesh transformation. So when you activate this tool, whatever you had into your selection will be divided into equal rectangles. By dragging these control points, you can easily transform your layer. But I'm going to undo that. I'll merge both layers and then activate the mesh transformation again. You can increase the number of divisions by changing the numbers here. The tough one changes the number of horizontal divisions and the bottom one changes the number of vertical divisions. But in my case, I'm going to keep them as they where. I'm going to use it to quickly edit my sketch and make it look a little bit better. Fixing mistakes quickly. I also keep flipping the canvas to make sure things look right. I'll change the position of her mouth to make it look more interesting. The mesh transformation is also very helpful and adjusting the eye shapes. Personally, I don't always draw a perfect circles so many times I adjust the eyes with the Mesh Transformation Tool is much easier. The transformation tools are also useful for adjusting the mouth as well. Especially again, mesh transformation is very helpful. The last very useful transformation tool that I want to introduce is the Liquify tool. You can find the Liquify tool under the blur or blend tool. And you can find it on top over here called Liquify. This tool is like a brush. It comes with multiple settings. You can use it for quickly adjusting your sketch, e.g. the brushes now set on the first setting, which is push. By brushing over here, I can push the pixels easily and therefore very easily adjust my sketch. You can play around with the strength and the hardness. Personally, I keep it on the default settings. I sometimes also use the expand, which enlarges your sketch. And sometimes I also use the pinch one, which is the opposite to the hand tool. So play around with the Liquify tool and see how you can adjust your sketch with it. Now, let's switch to this panel and talk about another very convenient tool to use, which is the symmetry Ruder. The symmetry ruler is great for drawing front of you faces because they are symmetrical on both sides. So I can grab this ruler from here. This ruler icon under those soft tools, click over here on symmetrical ruler to draw the face. Now, keep the number of lines to two and come to your artwork and drag to set up your ruler. If you want to rotate it a little bit and adjust this position, then you can do that with the object tool. By clicking on it. I can rotate it from here and adjust this position. I think this is good enough. Usually I set it to cross the nodes of my character because that's the point of symmetry. Now I can easily sketch the face of my character without having to do the effort twice. I usually sketch just the eyes, face, and ears while having the symmetry rules are activated. And sometimes I also sketch the neck, but in this case I don't need the neck because the neck is not symmetric. So once I'm done drawing the symmetric part, I right-click the ruler icon here on top of the layer and then untick sure, ruler so that I can continue drawing without the effect of the ruler. And then I continue doing the same process I did earlier, doing transformations and selecting stuff and moving them based on my needs. And also making sure to flip the Canvas so that I can see if my artwork is coming out right. Sometimes I feel I drew the head too big or too wide. So I just selected by itself and use the normal transformation tool to scale it down until I find it looking. Okay. So we finished another panel. You can make use of the symmetry ruler for other uses as well. E.g. let's change the number of lines to four or five and draw a line. Now you can see that we have five symmetry lines. This is very useful to quickly draw. Patterns are e.g. lace and things like that. You can make so many interesting stuff in this, so effortlessly. So sketching can be a really fun experience. And with all those tools I've introduced to you, they make this phase much, much easier as you've seen. But sometimes you can still find it challenging to get your sketch right. Especially when you have heart poses that you're not used to draw or find it hard to imagine how they look like. In such cases, you shouldn't worry too much. Just search up some photo references and draw your pose while looking at them. And if the photo is yours, there is absolutely no problem in tracing over it because that can save you a lot of time on the long run. I mean, drawing comics is not an easy task. It's a very time and energy consuming task, especially if you are a publishing creator and want to keep on bringing updates in a timely manner, then you absolutely need to take shortcuts in this process. Personally, ever since I started working on my web tune, I made my motto to be work smarter, not harder. So wherever I can cut corners, I wouldn't hesitate to do that. But you should care about the most is bringing your comic in a clear way that is also fun to make and not to stress over. So wherever and whenever you can make use of those amazing tools that technology has provided and make drawing a much easier experience than ever before. And don't worry about your skills. Your drawing skills will naturally improve with time anyway, as you're drawing your comic. Since for each chapter you are drawing at least 30 artworks. So you'll find that with time, you're sketching skills and your overall drawing skills will improve a lot. But of course it's very important as well to do practice sessions every now and then of gesture drawing. Drawing while looking at photo references. It can help enrich your memory and introduce you to a new catalog of poses that can be stored in your mind. So you will find that drawing certain poses will become easier with time. The more you practice. Speaking of photos and everything, I want to give you a very useful quick tip. When you have had pauses that are really hard to draw or you want to save time, instead of having to guess them. Just take a photo for your hand, copy-paste it Ontario panel and resize it according to your panels composition. Lower the opacity and just draw over it and save yourself a lot of time instead of having to guess, I want you to know that doing this is totally fine and okay, because it's your own photo and that is perfectly fine. But you need to be careful, of course, is that you use your own photos or you use copyright-free photos for this. In order to avoid trouble. If the photo is yours, There's absolutely no problem with this. Now I will disable my hand photo and play around a little bit with it to make it resemble my rough draft. I'm also playing around with the thickness because I'm going to use this as my line art immediately since it's a clean sketch. I'll also adjust the dose little bit with image transformation tool. I don't always trace hand photos as they are. I do some adjustments to them to make them resemble my art style butter. So give this a try. If you have a hand shot in your chapter, take a photo of your hand and make it easier on yourself. And there you have it. I finished this panel so quickly. So that's all for this lesson. And the next lesson we'll talk about the Clip Studio Paint 3D figure, and how we can make use of it to draw hard poses. 8. 2-2 Using 3D Figures: Let's talk now about using the 3D figure and Clip Studio Paint to insert the 3D figure in your Canvas, open the materials window. Clicking anyone is fine, just go to all materials. And then under 3D, go to body type. And from here, you can pick the body type, whether you want a male or a female model. These four figures come with Clip Studio Paint by default and the rest I downloaded them or made them by myself. I'm going to grab a male figure and drop it on the canvas. When you drop it on the Canvas, you're going to see this toolbar. From these controls, we can quickly adjust the position and the camera angle of the figure. The first button on the right tastes the camera. The second one pants the camera, and the third one takes it further or bring it closer to the camera. If you have multiple figures in your 3D model there, then these first three buttons control all of the 3D objects in the layer. However, the last five icons control the objects individually. E.g. if I click on this, I can adjust the position of the figure and the environment. This one rotates the figure in all directions. This one rotates it right and left. And this one rotates it around itself or around the z-axis. And this one controls the position of it and the distance. To delete any model on your Canvas, just click on it with the object tool and then hit the Delete button on your keyboard. By the way, you can also control the camera settings more easily and precisely through the settings. You have them over here under the tool property. Or you can also click the wrench button and go to camera and play with the positioning from the sliders over here. You can also play with the position of the figure from the allocate. So you can easily move the character in the x, y, and z direction. And by the way, if you want the figure to be less laggy, go to preferences and change display settings for editing too fast. It's gonna be a little bit less lucky. Now. You can also play around with the location of the figure by double-clicking on it and then controlling these sliders over here to move it in the x, y, and z directions. If your character is a floating, you can always press this button over here to ground it so that it's back on the ground level. You can also play around with the light direction on the figure by going to light source. Then playing around with the lighting on this bowl. Now to change the pose of the figure, there are two options. When you are on this view, you can move around these control points so that you can easily adjust the position of the pose as you had. Just rotate the camera so that you can see how it's looking like from different angles. The control over here changes the direction where your character is looking at. So it's like an object the characters looking at. This is the easy way. But you can also go the more sophisticated way. You click on each body part separately to adjust them. The way to adjust this figure is not as straight forward. You would need some understanding of the muscles of the body because the way it moves is basically dependent on how muscles move. E.g. to raise the arm, you need to raise the shoulder. And lowering the shoulder also lowers down the arm. So it's not very straightforward. And sometimes it can get very frustrating to get the pose right. Which is why I highly advise using poses that have already been made, which you can find the clip studios default materials or download more from the Clip Studio assets, e.g. let's go back to the materials window that we had opened earlier. Under 3D. If you scroll down a little bit, you'll see pose. And under pose there are pauses for the entire body and there are pauses for hands. So e.g. for the entire body, there are all those pauses that come by default with the Clip Studio Paint to apply them just to drag and drop on your model. And you can also change the hand pose by dragging and dropping. If you just drag and drop both hands, poses will be changed. But if you want to change one hand only specifically then select the hand and then drag and drop the pose. Now I have different poses for the hands. Now, let's apply this onto one of my panels. I have this panel of my character running. So I looked up on Clip Studio assets and downloaded this model that I found suitable. So I'm gonna go to downloads in the materials and drag the pose inside my panel. Now I didn't go for our body type this time because oh, pose is by default will be made into a male body type. So I didn't need to change that. But if I want a female body type denied, make sure to drag the female body type first and then apply the pose. I'm going to adjust the angle and position of this 3D model to match that of my scene. I'll play around a little bit with it to shape it into the more intense pose that I'm looking for. As you can see, it's much easier to adjust your post if you have a ready-made pose. It saves a lot of time and effort. Now under the settings, there's something called manga perspective. If you enable it, it's going to enlarge the objects that are close to the camera. For a little bit of an exaggerated perspective, though the effect is not always obvious. So to exaggerate the perspective, we can go to camera and then under perspective, bring this slider over here and enlarge it. Now I have a more dramatic looking pose. Now this figure is how it is too tall for my character's proportions. So I'm gonna go to 3D drawing figure, reduce the height of the figure to somewhere around 162, which is the close to the height of my character. And I'm going to decrease the head to body ratio because I usually draw heads bigger. Now since almost everything is ready, I want to reduce the opacity of this 3D figure so that I can draw on top of it. But if I reduce it as is, the opacity is not going to change. And the reason is that because we set under preferences, we set the display settings to be fast. Just change this back to normal. And as you can see, it's transparent. Now. I can play around with the opacity as much as I want. Now as I sketch on top of 3D figures, I don't always exactly follow the 3D figure as it is, but they use a combination of my rough draft and the figure as well to correct my pose because I don't want to lose that original impact and emotion that I put into the rough draft so that my sketch doesn't look stiff. As you can see, I'm following the rough draft while also taking notes of the 3D figure that I have. I disabled both every now and then to check how the artwork is coming together. And I also of course, to flip the Canvas so that I can see if my artwork is looking right. And then just anything that looks wrong. I'm going to bring the body a little bit to the right to have an exaggerated run that has more impact. I don't always exactly follow the 3D figure as is because I have an art style of my own. And I find that sometimes by following the 3D figure as is, kind of takes my art style out of the way. I use it just as a base reference. Sometimes going over it just like I'm doing now. And other times just putting it on the side and just to refer to it by eyes as I do my sketch. Since this sketch is almost done now, I disabled or both. And I'm going to work on correcting things by eyes and make use of the transformation tools and selection tools that we talked about in the previous lesson. Sometimes using a 3D figure would not be enough. So in such cases, it's also a good idea to refer to real life photos or other comics or artist pieces that have this specific pose that you're looking for. I'm going to enlarge this hand more to give it an exaggerated Look. I love doing dramatic camera angles and it's really fun to play around with them. I can enable the 3D figure every now and then to use it as a reference. As I adjust my sketch one last time. But it's somewhere where I can see it. Use the liquify tool again to do quick fixes. And I think this sketch is good to go now. I'll just check the speech bubbles to position everything in the composition that matches the sketch. I decided to flip these two and raise the sketch a little bit. Yeah, this panel is now considered done. The next lesson, we'll talk about how you can customize the 3D figure and then just as proportions to match your characters and art styles proportions, and save it as a material so that you don't have to adjust your settings every time you use a 3D figures. 9. 2-3 Creating 3D Figure with OC Proportions: Let's now talk about how you can create a 3D figure and set its proportions in a way that really matches your art style so that you save it and register it as a material such that you don't have to recreate those proportions every single time. So e.g. here I created a 3D figure that matches the proportions of my female, Saqqara. And I saved her body type as a material here. So that whenever I want to draw a pose for her, I just drag and drop and then adjust the pose. So let's do the figure customization from scratch for doing this step, it would really help if you have a drawing with a frontal view of your character. My case now, I want to make a 3D figure that has the proportions of my male lead, Hideki. I did a quick front of you sketch of him using the symmetry ruler that I talked to you about earlier. And I came up with this very quick and rough sketch. It doesn't matter if it's messy. All that matters in this part is that you capture their proportions which define the essence of your art style. So what I'll do is I'll pick a color that's easy to see. E.g. I'll Procreate color. And I'll go to this tool over here, which is the figure tool. I'll use the Ellipse tool and I'll set it to create line from here so that I can draw a circle. I'll hold Shift and draw a circle that encapsulates his head because proportions of the body are usually measured with the head size. I'll adjust this circle slightly so that the whole head is correctly encapsulated. And I'll zoom in to double-check. Okay, It's looking good. Now what I'll do is I'll duplicate this circle and drag it down. Because I want to measure his head to body ratio. Or in other words, how many heads is his height consisting of? I'll keep duplicating the circle until I cover the entire body. Now I'll merge those circle layers by holding Shift and then right-click and merge selected layers. And I'll make a new layer, and I'll choose another color, e.g. loop. And I'll go back to the same tool, but I'll use the straight line tool. And now I'll hold Shift and draw a line over here that separates the circles. I'll move the line just a little bit upwards so that it's completely between the circles. And now I'll duplicate this line and have lines separating all the circles that I've drawn. The last line will be until the end of his feet, which is less than a full circle. Now I will merge the lines layers as well. Let's rename them just to keep everything organized. Lines and circles. And the original layer is sketch. For consistency sake, I forgot to add another line on top of his head. I'll copy paste this and move it upward here, and click this button to merge it down with the lines layer. Now I'll make a new layer just to scribble on it. So I'll pick another color. So now I'll just count the number of heads. So from this distance to this is one head, and then up to here gets two heads and a tail here is a 345. And lastly, we can say that it's a total of six heads. So now that we know this information, let's open the materials window and go to body type under 3D. And then let's drag a male 3D figure, since the character is a male here. Now the first thing I'll do is I'll go to the settings and I'll go to 3D drawing figure. And I'll set the head to body ratio to B6. And I'll change the height so that it matches my character. Just the position. Now let's start adjusting each body part to match that of our art style. So let's do that to each body part separately. Let's start first with the head. So click on the head over here. And we have this plus sign that we can move. If you move it towards this side, the horizontal ratio increases. And if you move it towards this side than the vertical ratio increases. Or you can also play around with it from these handles over here. I'm going to change the head to make it match the size of my art style. I usually draw the head bigger than what the figures come with. We can decrease the opacity of the 3D figure so that we can see the sketch beneath it. I'll drag it a little bit. Make it on top of the face of my character. And let's zoom in a little bit. I'm focusing on matching the chin and the top of the head. And I decrease the horizontal ratio. I think it's looking good so far. Now let's adjust the neck. I'll decrease the horizontal ratio. Since my character has the neck. We can increase the opacity every now and then to check out come together. I'll decrease the horizontal ratio of the head again and change the neck one again. Okay? Now the shoulders will do the same thing. I'll decrease the shoulders width match the shoulder of my character. And the torso. Same thing. But I believe it's already looking good. I just reduced it by two points. Same thing for the arms. I'll reduce their thickness a little bit, although they're not on top of each other, but I can compare the thickness. I think this thickness looks good. That's for the length of the arms out. Keep them as they are because I think I didn't get them right in my sketch. Now as for the legs, I think it's also looking good except maybe reduce their length a little bit and drag it on top again. And finally, the feet, I'm going to increase their horizontal size a little bit. It's almost done. I'll just do some checks again. I think the length of the neck really needs to be adjusted a little bit, just a little bit longer. So I'll put this figure over here and I can consider it done. It might not look perfectly like it makes sense, but that's okay because you're just going to use it as a reference and you're not going to use it as is, as you saw in the previous lesson, we just use this 3D figure as a means to make drawing much easier and quicker. But I would say that the figures are still not very highly customizable in this software. So that's why we can get the exact measurements of our character. But having this as a base should suffice and make our sketching experience smoother. Let's save this as a material. Go to the object tool. And then the toolbar over here. Click on this button. Save body shape as material. Once you click on it, you can name it what you want. I'll name it Hideki. And you can set a photo for this. If you click this button to select a file and have a preview image for it. But I'm going to skip that step. And over here you can choose where to save this material. So click this arrow. I'll save it under 3D body type so that everything is in one place. So once I click Okay, now when I go to my buddy materials, I can see that I have a new Hideki 3D figure. So I can just drag it and apply any pose I want for it. And then I can just lower the opacity, create a new layer, and start sketching on top over it. I'll do a very quick sketch just to show you how useful it is. Because I need to do less modifications now since all the proportions are matching my art style already. Now see how quickly I could sketch in my art style. And I just need to do a quick modifications to make everything look good and convincing. The next lesson we'll talk about another technique that really helps speeding up your comic sketching, which is creating asset sheets for your characters. 10. 2-4 Asset Sheets: Now, the more panels that you draw off your story, the more you'll realize that certain phase angles of your characters gets repeated over and over. So instead of having to draw them every time from scratch, he can actually make an asset sheet where you save those repeated angles are repeated shots in one place. So that when you run into a similar angle as you're sketching your comic, then you can just copy paste it and either use it as is or do slight changes our sketch over it altogether. But it would also save your time because you already have a base. Your sketching process will take less time. E.g. over here, I have saved the three shots of my OC harm, which I used more than once in the comic. The way to do asset sheets is you don't have to open a file and draw everything, but you make it as you go with the comic. I only compile those shots after I felt the need to use them again in one of my chapters. So that means when I feel like I need a shot, I just copy paste it and put it here. And for me, I don't copy paste this sketch, but I copy-paste the line art. As you can see over here, the lines are very clean because I just went back to my previous chapters and copy the line art and pasted it. So I'll make another sheet like this for my character Hideki. I'll just create a new file. I'll call it Hideki. I usually go for A4 size with a resolution of 350 dpi. And then click Okay. Now I'll go to some of my already completed chapters and I'll copy some shots of Hideki, e.g. this view is a very common one. I'll just go to the line art file and copy paste it and just put it over here. I can also resize it because it's too big. And since this is a vector layer, my resizing won't affect the quality of the line art. I'll also copy this panel because I feel that this angle would also be useful in another shot. But I'm not going to downsize this one since it's a raster layer. We'll talk more about those layer types in the next lesson. Finally, I'll grab this panel as well and copy paste it on my asset sheet. Since I have a similar shot that I want to draw on my current chapter. So I'll go to that shot and I'll paste this. I'll go to Edit and Paste to Sean position. Move it a little bit and scale it down. And just play around with it and transform it a little bit to match my scene. I'm using the free transform tool. Modify the angle of the head a little bit by showing the chin. And I'll remove this part. I want to use the Liquify tool, but I can't use it on the layer as is since it's a vector layer. So I'll rasterize the layer by right-clicking and then rasterize. And now I can pinch the eye a little bit and push it a little bit. I'll redraw this. And now change the position of the eye and fluid. Modify the eyebrows. And there you have it. I finished the panel so quickly without having to redo it from scratch. So that's why I'm making ss sheets is really helpful and saves a lot of time on the long run. And by the way, SHE is don't have to be just sketches. They can also be colored acetate sheets. E.g. my characters have salts and those sorts have a lot of details. So instead of having to draw them every time from scratch, I just drew them and color them so that I can just copy paste them without having to draw them every time from scratch. And I can even use portions of them and transform them based on my needs. And that is not just applicable for sorts or weapons, but you can also do that to any kind of item that your characters we're, that has details and could take some time to draw and color in every single panel. So you can draw that as well separately and color it. And then you can just easily use it to repetitively on your panels. Or you can also use brushes as well. To show you an example, my character Sacramento has a pearl necklace. Pearl necklace is part of hair character design. And if I want to draw this pearl necklace and every panel, that really drives me insane on the long run. So what I did was I just created a brush that I can use easily. So that means I can give my character so many parallel layers without having to worry about it. There are so many ways to make your brushes. What I want to show you how I made this specific one, it was very easy and simple to make. What I did was I drew a parallel on a separate Canvas and colored it and then merge those layers so that the pearl is on one layer. And then I went to edit register material and then image. And I called it pearl necklace. And then I make sure over here to take on the use for brush tip shape and choose a place to save this image. So I'll save it under Image material and brush and then click. Okay. Now I'll go to the declaration tool, then go to the ruled line. You see over here there are so many brushes you can use for decoration. What I did was I went to the dotted line brush and I right-click and duplicate this up to, let's call it a pearl necklace. And then I click the wrench button. Then I go to brush tip and choose material, and click this button over here. Now I'll search for apparent Nicholas. Just by typing parallel. I can already see all the pearls I have. So I select this one which we just saved and click on it and then click Okay. And there I have it. The extra step I did was I set the brush size to be affected by pen pressure. So the minimum value is 49 or 50. And now my brush is ready to use. It was so simple and easy to make. Of course, making brushes is a big world on its own, and it's out of the scope of this course. But of course, you can always explore and try different stuff. And if you don't have time to explore than just a browser through the Clip Studio Paint assets. And you'll find lots and lots of interesting stuff to download from there. Make acids sheets, and make use of assets, whether black and white or colored. You will surely, surely appreciate it a lot on the long run. Now we're done talking about techniques to escalate sketching speed. So starting from next chapter, we'll align our sketches and color them. So in the next lesson, we'll talk about how to do line art for your panels. 11. 3-1 Lineart: Now that we're done with the sketching phase, it's time to align our panels. But before we start with that, I want to explain the difference between vector layers and raster layers, which I've mentioned multiple times in the previous lessons. Under the Layers window, we have to create a new layer buttons. One says a new raster layer and the other says new vector layer. Let me show you the difference between the two in an example. Let's say I have two artworks. The one on the left is drawn on the raster layer, and the one on the right is drawn with a vector layer. Now both line works look fine on this level. They look like they have a good quality and there's no problem. But the problem comes when you resize these two up. So e.g. if I size both line works up. The one on the right is going to retain its equality because it's of a vector layer. But the one on the left, as you can see, has really lost its quality and has become pixelated. That is because a raster layer works on pixel basis, while a vector layer works on a vector basis are kind of like mathematical basis. So this is why generally I would say it's better to work on the vector layer when it comes to line arts. Vector layer is also coming Clip Studio Paint with other amazing features that make it a breeze to do line arts, which we're going to talk about in a bit as we align our panel. So now that we understand the difference between the layers, Let's start inking this panel. I'll change the color of the sketch layer by clicking on this button and then reduce its opacity similar to what I did in the sketching phase. And I'll create a new vector layer. And I'll choose my line art color to keep the style uniform. I've been using the same one color for the line art throughout my story and only change it to one really necessary. But as a base color, I use a dark violet color for my line arts. As for the brush, I have two brushes that I use. Sometimes I use this crisp worked on pen, which is the same one I used in the sketching phase. Sometimes I use this smooth web tone pen, which is also a brush I created. It depends on my needs and the seen. Lately I've been using mostly the smooth web tune pen. And I keep the crisp work tone pen for action scenes or scenes that require some hardness and the lines. You can find both the brushes available for download on the Clip Studio Paint assets. If you just search for my name cluvious, I have made them available there. So for this scene, I decided to use the smooth web don't pen. As for the brush size, I don't have a specific brush size. I just change it to match that of my sketch and try it out until I feel that I've selected a suitable brush size. Flipping the canvas really helps when doing the line art and also rotating the canvas. You can rotate the canvas left and right through these buttons that we added in the command bar. Or you can also use the buttons and the navigator window. But as I told you, I put this up here in the command bar because it makes it easier for me to rotate my canvas as I drove. And also the research rotation inversion is a useful button to quickly reset your view to the original one. As you draw your line art, don't press too hard on your brush. This will end up with you coming up with British stiff lines. Instead, keep your hand light. Do the line art and multiple quick and light strokes. It also helps not to be too zoomed in on your lines because you can really get lost into the slightest details that really don't matter. So always works zoomed out. If you need to zoom and just zoom in just a little bit to make it easier for you to draw certain stuff e.g. I. Zoom in when drawing the facial features. Now for the brush size, I don't vary the brush size, but I play with it through pen pressure because my brush settings are set to have a minimum pen pressure of zero. So that means the lighter I press, the thinner the line, the stronger I press, the thicker the line. One really important tip when doing the line art is always have the outline or the circumference of the object and the thick line. But any details that you put inside, draw them in a smaller brush size. E.g. I. Reduce my brush size you to draw the teeth and the tongue and smaller brush size. This adds a nice variety to your line art and it makes it look more interesting and dynamic. I hide the sketch layer every now and then to check how my line artists coming together and zoom out as well. One really interesting feature of vector layers is the ease of getting rid of any extra lines by using something called the vector eraser. If I use the vector eraser and erase over those parts, they're immediately going to be erased because my vector eraser is set to get rid of intersecting lines. There is a vector issue that already comes with the Clip Studio Paint. You can play around with the settings. I set my settings to be over here as weak, and then I click this button and just spend pressure. And then make sure this is selected. Erase up to intersection. Now just come and erase any intersecting parts. But be careful sometimes you could lose some important details of your line art when using the vector eraser. So e.g. when I deleted this small line, I have a different thickness now because of the lines. So I'll just undo that. And if I want to get rid of this, then I'll just use a normal eraser and erase it. But anyway, this is extreme. I don't usually do that for my Web two in line art, I just worked zoomed out and only erase the lines that look obvious even when zoomed out. You could also do simple shading while doing your lines. It That's a nice variety to your line art. A few shade, extremely shaded areas like the coroners and places with extreme shades under the hair, you can see how it adds some depth. Another useful line art tip is to always remember where your light sources. So e.g. my light source is gonna be somewhere on this side at the top. So I'm keeping this in mind. If I have a scene with a strong lighting, then I can play around with my line art by setting the lines that are towards the light direction to be thin and the lines that are opposite of the light direction to be the thickest button this scene, I'm not going this extreme. I'm just slightly having the areas in the shade a little bit thicker than the ones in the light directions. Notice how I draw the details of the hair and a smaller brush size. Sometimes I draw the eyes on a separate layer just in case I wanted to change their position later or do some transformation to them. And I can of course also select any part that I want and transform it easily. Without worrying about this equality because it's a vector layer. I do that sometimes to the eyes. But what I can also do is increase the stabilization from over here so that my hand is less affected by the shakiness and I can draw a cleaner curves. If you don't see the stabilization option available here, then go to the settings and under correction, click on the icon next to stabilization so that you can see it. I'm going to reduce the stabilization back to 11 and, or the sky and the shaky way. And adjusted a little bit with a few other strokes. So I keep repeating those same steps over and over until I align my full artwork. I also draw the eyebrows on the same separate layer with the eyes so that I can edit them however I want easily later. As you can see, it's much easier to edit them this way than if they were on the same day or on the whole line art. So as I draw the line art, my hand is constantly on the Control Z buttons, as well as the EE button to quickly bring up the eraser. For such cases, if you can't erase the intersecting line, then just do another smaller line and now you can erase them both easily. You can also share some parts under the neck because they are extremely shaded. And any muscle details of the body grow them and thinner lines. Let's talk a little bit now about the vector layers features. If we go to the object tool on a vector layer, we can select every stroke that we have done on our line art separately. And by clicking on it, we can drag it or resize it, or rotate it, or apply transformation settings to it. There are so many options. We can also change the brush size for each of these and change also the color. If we have each selected individually and if we have nothing selected but are still on the object tool, and we change the color. Then it changes the color of the whole thing. The eyes didn't change because I have them on a separate vector layer. You can also change the brush size for everything without selecting anything. This is useful sometimes e.g. you made the lines too thick and you want to make them thinner. Or for the opposite, you want to go a little bit thicker. And also on the object tool, you will see control points for each line, like we did earlier and the speech bubbles and panels. So you can edit every lines, control points. It's useful for sometimes correcting certain strokes, e.g. I want to close this curve over here. I can do another stroke to close it or select this stroke and play around with the control points so that I can just easily close it. Now, those are the options under the object tool. But remember that we have other options under the correct line tools. We have the control point option, which we also talked about earlier, to add control points or delete them or move them. I want to introduce those other interesting vector tools, e.g. we have the pinch vector line. If you have this selected, it can work a little bit similar to the Liquify tool. You can pinch certain vectors with it, though it's not easy to control, I would say. But it helps sometimes correct certain curves. You can reduce the effective range so that you can play around with the smaller areas. You can also decrease the pinch level. But I usually have it set on the highest and play around with the effect range. So e.g. I. Can adjust the curve of his hair easily with this tool. There is the simplified vector line tool, which helps to simplify your line. I'll just do a quick shaky line. If we check the number of control points, there are a lot now. But if we use the simplified vector line, then you can see how it has really reduced the number of vector lines. This is sometimes useful to correct certain shaky lines. There is the Connect vector line. And I think this one helps connect separated vector lines, e.g. if I use it on these hair strands, then it's connected the hair strands. And after connecting them, I can just adjust the control points to the object tool. There's also the correct line width, which is very helpful. We talked about it earlier in the speech bubbles. So if I use the thickened one, and so the ratio of how thick I want my lines to be, then I can easily play around with the thickness of the lines. And the narrow one would narrow down the thickness of the lines. The scale-up width will increase the width of the brush. The scale down width would decrease the width of the brush. And the fixed width, I think you can set any width that you want and then brush over your strokes and then it changes them to that certain width. There is also the redraw vector line. If you use this tool, you can redraw your vector line and correct it however you want. Though honestly, this tool hasn't been very easy for me to use, but it's good to know, but there's also the redraw vector line width, which you can use it to easily change the width of your lines. So it's good for adding shading, like we talked about when there's extreme lighting conditions. These tools are quite useful sometimes and can save you from a pinch instead of having to redraw all of your lines. But honestly speaking, most of the time while drawing my web tune, I don't use all those tools because I just need to line, line, line on the left or panel. There isn't enough time to spend on so much of those details, but it's good to know of those tools and keep them in mind anyway. Another important tip I want to give is the one doing the lines. He can add this sense of depth by playing with the thickness, e.g. over here, this hand over here, is it closer to the camera? So for anything that is closer to the camera, draw it with a bigger brush size to really make it feel that it is actually popping and feels a close to the camera. So if I zoom out and disable the sketch, you can see how this variety is making the line art look more interesting. And then reduce the thickness as you go farther from the camera. The opposite thing is applicable over here. This arm is going farther from the camera. So I'm going to reduce my brush size as I align it to give it that sense of depth. Also, the closer things are to the camera, the thicker they look and the more details they have. And the farther they are, the thinner and less details. To give you an example of depth, this is one of the panels that I previously did. So as you can see, the character that is tending farthest has the thinnest lines. The lines increase in thickness as the character gets closer to the screen. So this character has the thickest lines and the most details in her hair because she is the closest to the camera. So even though this panel is not colored, you can still feel the sense of depth just from the lines themselves. Now, just a little bit is left before I finish this line art. So I'll speed it up a little bit. As far as necklace, I have a brush that I downloaded from the Clip Studio assets sell immediately use it right now to draw the necklace and delete any extra parts. And that's for the sort, I'll just copy, paste it from my asset sheet and transform it accordingly to match my scene. This way, I didn't need to draw it from scratch. The lines for this panel are done. Sometimes if my sketch looks generally clean like this one, then I skipped a line art phase altogether and just clean it up a little bit with the eraser tool to save time. And also the dynamic look of the sketches sometimes makes the panels look more interesting. So it's absolutely fine to jump steps and save yourself some time. As I clean up, I redraw the lines that I feel need to be withdrawn. And there you have it. I finished the line art so quickly because the sketch was clean. And now I can immediately jump into coloring this line art. And don't worry about the quality is totally fine. Most of the time, you won't be able to tell the difference between a line art at peace and sketched piece, e.g. this panel that I have over here, it looks really neat when zoomed out. This was actually a sketch that I cleaned up and colored immediately. You're only going to see these sketchy lines if I zoom in and show you the details from up-close. But most people are not going to see that anyway. Web tones I read on small screens generally. And most of those details are really going to be not visible to the naked eye. So as much as possible to save yourself time. If you find that you drew a clean sketches, then just clean them up a little bit and make them into line art as well. Before we start filling in the colors. And the next lesson, we'll first talk about basic concepts of colors and color harmony. 12. 3-2 Colors & Color Harmony: Now that we're done with the sketching and lining parts, we're about to delve into colors. But before we do that, I would like to talk about colors in general first and introduce you to important basics that help you understand colors and color harmony better. So let's start with the color wheel over here. You can see how the colors are distributed on the color wheel in an organized way. Generally, we can divide this color wheel into two-halves. We can call the colors on this side as warm colors, and the colors on this side as cool colors. Mixing and matching warm and cool colors into your illustration really gives it a nice contrast and makes the colors look more interesting and appealing to the eye. We'll talk more about this later. But generally, when shading your artwork, it's good to go towards the cool colors. So e.g. if your base color is yellow, That's a great idea to jump two steps and shaded in orange instead of just using a darker color. To illustrate, let me show you the colors over here. So let's say this is the yellow. Normally one would choose a darker color of yellow to shade it. As you can see, that doesn't look so interesting. But if we choose the same yellow, shade it with the orange instead, then that makes for more appealing colors. And this applies to all the different colors, e.g. shade red or orange with purple, shade yellow, green with pure green, shaded green, pure green with blue. But we would need to make it a little bit darker. So you see this is how we can come up with interesting combinations. Anyway, we'll talk more about these concepts later as we shade our characters and do backgrounds, and do the lighting and color adjustments for our scenes. But let's talk about these three important concepts for understanding colors. The first concept is the hue, and basically it's just the different colors. E.g. red is a hue, yellow is a hue, green is a hue, and so on. So basically by shifting the hue, you change the color. The second concept is saturation. And to put this into the simplest, worst possible, It's basically how grey hair color is. E.g. over here, this is the highest saturated color because it's the brightest color. But the color over here is pure gray and it has the lowest saturation. Usually picking colors that are a little bit less saturated makes your piece look more natural so that you allow the space to add a brighter things in your artwork by using the highest saturated colors. Finally, the value, which is sometimes called the brightness or lightness. It's basically how light and dark your color is. So e.g. over here, the lightest color is white. And then goes into pink to reach the red color, which is the base color. And then goes into black, which is the darkest color. So this is applicable for any color. The higher the value, the brighter the color is, the lower the value, the darker the color is. Under the colors window over here. If you go to this window, let me drag it here and enlarge it so we can see it more clearly. So these are the three concepts that I just talked about. If we choose the red color, we can shift the hue from over here, the top slider. We can change the L, which is the lightness or the value from over here. Dragging to the right is the highest value and gives me white. Dragging to the left is the lowest value and gives me black. Bringing it back to the middle, restores it to the color I originally had. The last slider is the saturation slider. As I drag to the left, the color becomes more gray until it reaches pure gray at the very end. If I drag it back, then my color becomes saturated again and becomes bright again. It's good to play around and change your colors quickly from these sliders over here. Or you can also play with the colors from the color wheel itself. So by shifting the slider over here, changing the hue by going through these two directions here, playing with the value. So this is the lightest, which is white and then goes into blue color. And then if I drag it this direction, then it goes to black, which is the lowest value. And saturation can be played with horizontally. So e.g. this is the brightest blue, but if I drag it to the left than the saturation is changing. And as you can see, the color is going towards the gray until it becomes pure gray. By the way, I set my color wheel to be triangular because I found it more useful this way. But the software usually comes with the square view, which is not so different. You change the value here by going through these directions. And then you change the saturation vertically instead. And then all of this is the same black. I guess. There is a slight difference in the saturation, as you can see here. But I guess the color itself doesn't change. It's still pure black. But anyway, I switch to this view because I found it more suitable for my needs. You're free to use whichever one you prefer. You can also play around with the colors and edit them quickly by going to Edit Tonal Correction, Hue, Saturation, Luminosity. So again, these sliders are just like the ones we just explained. Changing the hue slider changes the hue of the color. Dragging the saturation slider towards the left makes the color more grayish. And dragging it towards the right makes it brighter or less a grayish. And finally the luminosity, which is the value or brightness or lightness. That is another name for it. So if you drag it to the left, the color will turn darker until it goes to pure black. And if you drag it to the right than the colored gets lighter until it goes to pure white on the very right. So it's a very handy tool to bring up if you want to quickly adjust your colors while seeing a preview, you can also bring up this menu by hitting Control and U on your keyboard. Lastly, let's add black to the color wheel to talk about certain color combinations. To make your artwork or character design interesting. There are certain things that you can do to make colors look harmonious. The first thing is using colors from the same hue itself. So e.g. you can make your piece look harmonious in terms of colors by using just yellow shades. So we can pick different colors from this yellow. They would still look good together. If it's a monochromatic piece, you know, these combinations are called monochrome and you can perfectly make a homogeneous, monochromatic looking artwork. Well, just choosing shades from one hue. But to make your piece look more interesting is good to choose colors that are adjacent to each other, which are called analogous. So we can pick shades from these three and they would still look good. And the same thing is applicable for any three analogous colors. It's easy to make an interesting looking piece by focusing on colors that are close to each other. I find this especially useful in character design. E.g. I. Followed this concept. Why design my character is Saqqara. So I gave her brown hair, which falls under the orange and red colors, since the brown is basically a dark orange. And I gave her a pink address, which is still analogous to these colors. And it falls somewhere between red and purple. And the same thing for my character, he Dickey. I gave him a blue violet here, which falls under this color. And I gave him a green shirt, which falls under this color. And I gave him darker blue pants which fall under this color. They are harmonious. And by moving through the color slightly yellow still looks good with the green. So I chose it for his undershirt. That's how the colors are harmonious. But there are other interesting color combinations, e.g. there is the complimentary colors, which are the colors that are opposite to each other on the color wheel, e.g. this is usually nice and shading and lighting. So if I want to add lighting, I make it look yellowish. And for the shades, I make them violet. But this can also be applicable for other colors and could also really help in character design, e.g. from the color wheel, I can see that orange is the opposite of blue. So I can make an interesting character design based on these two colors. Also, reddish orange works with the green, and purple works with yellow, green. You can of course, play around with the colors, values, and saturation to make them look more in harmony. And there's also the triad combination, which are the ones that form such a combination on the color wheel. So e.g. yellow goes great with red and blue, which are basically the primary colors. But also orange would look good with violet and green. Those are not my favorite combination, but it still works. E.g. purple works with green and works with yellow. So this is another method to pick up harmonious colors. There are of course, other combinations that you can draw from the color wheel. But I think the ones we've covered are really the most important and the most likely you are to use and also the easiest to control. Honestly, the world of colors is amazing. And every now and then with experimentation and practice, you'd find that so many interesting stuff that you can do with them. And hopefully in this course we'll go over a few of these interesting things that you can do. The next lesson, we'll start by filling the base or flat colors of our characters. 13. 3-3 Flat Colors: Alright, now we're ready to fill the base colors for our panel. What I'll do first of all, is I'll select all the line art layers and drag them towards the folder icon to put them inside one folder. Or I can also go to Layer, Create folder and start layer. Or I can also do that by right-clicking and selecting, Create Folder and insert layer. This way all of my line art is inside one group. So to quickly fill in the base colors, I'm gonna hit this button over here, set as reference layer for the whole group. I reference layer is basically the layer that my tools will refer to when I use them. Now, I'll create a new layer and go to the fill tool. There's this amazing tool that I downloaded from the Clip Studio assets, which you can find over here. I'll put the link for you in the class notes. So once you download this tool, choose any color that you want. I usually go for gray color. And what I'll do is I will surround the character to fill its silhouette. Once I did this, my whole character is filled. I found this method to be the easiest in order to separate characters and know how much space exactly they're occupying, especially when you have a background. Filling the silhouette of the character really allows you to fill in the flat colors with ease. Unlike if you fill them one by one through the normal bucket tool. Once you have filled in the silhouette of your character, you'll notice that there are some parts that need to be filled and some parts that need to be erased. So let's start by erasing the extra parts. I'll go for the auto select tool or magic one tool. And you'll find three sub tools over here. But we need to use this one, refer other layers to select so that we can make our selection while still being on the silhouette layer itself. So this tool, I kept it on its default settings except the area scaling. I put it to eight. So I'm going to select this extra part that I want to delete. By clicking on it. I selected it, and I can click this button to delete or hit the Delete button from the keyboard, or go to Edit Delete. Once I'm done, I'll hit this button to de-select. I can also use the eraser to erase certain parts that I don't want. Now this part was not selected with the silhouette. And the reason is that because there is an opening. So it can either close the line art itself or you can close it with a brush tool. I'm going to use the same crisp Web two in pen that I told you about earlier. And I closed the gap. And now I can go back to my fill tool and select it once more. And now it's filled. One zooming in, I might find some areas that don't look okay. So I'm going to just erase those parts and fix what I can. Again, don't fret too much about those small details because most people are not gonna be able to see them anyway. So with this, we have easily filled the silhouette of the character. Now I'll create a new layer and clip it to the silhouette layer. One layer is clipped. Basically, anything on that layer will be inside our base layer, e.g. this layer is clipped so it's not crossing the area defined by my silhouette layer. But if I remove the clipping, then I can see the full layer. That's why clipping the layer really helps coloring within the boundaries. Now I'll start filling in the colors. I first of all full and the skin because it comes beneath everything. Fulfilling the skin, I just use the CRISPR work, don't pen to fill them in. Now I'll create a new clip layer and I want to color the hair this time. I'll go back to the same fill tool and choose the hair color. Then now, use the full tool again while selecting only the hair to collect it. Now if we zoom in, it did a great job, except that we need to fix some parts. I'm going to color this part with the Chris Webb tone pen. And I'll use the magic one tool to select any areas that should not be colored to erase them. And now I hit delete. If I remove the line art, you can see that the tool also colored the eye. So I'm just going to enable the line art again and erase whatever can be visible because I don't care about the rest. And also erase those corners that were cut up. The tool and fix anything extra that has been erased. I most of the time keeps the hair as the top layer of all the flat color layers. That's why I'll create a new layer beneath it. And on this layer, I'll color the eyes and the mouth. I color them both on the same layer to make it easy for me to know where everything is, because it's like a system I follow for all of the characters. Usually when I do illustrations, I would rename every layer, e.g. I. Would call this layer as hair, and then this layer as face, and this layer as skin. But ever since I started drawing with tunes, because there are so many layers involved in each panel. I just stopped naming them altogether and started following this system so that I can quickly recognize what my layers are. Now let's go back to the face layer. I want to color the teeth and the backside of the mouth. I'm gonna go back again to the fill layer, but I'll choose other layers tool, which comes by default with the Clip Studio Paint. And I'll choose the color e.g. for the backside of the mouth and I'll fill in to color it. Now before we continue talking, I just wanted to talk a little bit about the fill tool. I also left all the settings as they are in their default, except the area scaling, the areas killing for the fill tool, I put it up to 20 per cent, which is the maximum value. And I put it up to darkest pixel. I don't remember which one was the default, but these are my settings. And I want to show you the difference. If I turn off the area scaling and fill this area again, then you can see when we zoom in that the fill color did not really color beneath our line art. And that's why there are some transparent pixels might not look so apparent, but sometimes it can really ruin the quality of your artwork when you zoom out or size it down. That's why enabling areas, Kelvin for me is really important in the field tools and made my overall experience of coloring and Clip Studio Paint much better. So I'm going to fill in the mouth. And now you can see that I don't have white pixels are uncolored pixels. Now I'll just use my pen to color that extra part. And I'll color the teeth as well. In the same way by filling and fixing with the pen in case anything needs fixing. Now I'll create a new layer beneath the face. And using a white color. The eye whites are the white part of the eye. Firstly, I just draw a circumference. Once that is decided. Then I go back to the same fill tool and select it and fill. Select and fill, and erase any extra parts that were colored. Next, I'll color his shirt. So I'll create a new layer. And also color the shirt in the same way. Color any missing parts, and erase any extras. I'll create another layer beneath his shirt because he has another shirt underneath with a yellow color. So I'll feel that on another layer. I'll go back to the green shirt layer and use the refer other layers bucket tool and fill this part of his shirt. But dependent of the sword is coming in the way and it's not allowing me to color this properly. So I'll go back to my reference folder, and I'll disable the sword and disable the necklace. And I'll color it again. So now I could color it easily. But as you can see, there are some green parts here underneath the necklace because it was also in the reference layer when I color the shirt. So I can just erase them even though they're not really visible. But sometimes it's good to clean everything up. I forgot this other part of the yellow shirt. Now fix this shirt from here. Finally, I'll create a new layer beneath everything but above the skin. And color. It depends. Also on the same layer. I'll color the watch. Now all the flat colors of the character have been filled. But I want to tell you about this part. So it was very quick for me to fill the base colors of the character because I have all the colors saved here in my palette or my color set. I also highly advise you make such a list for your characters because it will save you so much time and you don't have to go back to your character sheet or other panels to refer to the colors. The way to do this is usually color sets come with this preview, the standard color set, and our set here with all the other colored windows. Find this color set window and drag it for me. I dragged it and put it under the navigator on this side here for easy access. And if you can't find it anywhere, then go to Window color set. Anyway. So to create a new color set for yourself, click on the wrench icon, and then click on Create a new set. And call it anything you like. I'll call it web tone just for the sake of this lesson. Then click Okay. So you'll see that now you have a new color set with your Dropbox. Then you color set will come by default with transparent colors. So all of those are transparent colors. And by the way, transparent colors are basically like an eraser, which is also over here. If you see I have the foreground color and background color, and I have this transparent colors selected. So if I have this selected and I use it on the hair, e.g. it worked exactly like an eraser. So this transparent color is very convenient because it converts any brush into an eraser. But anyway, so then you set will come with transparent colors. And to add your colors just right-click. And you can either add color, which will add a new color and push everything forward. You can right-click the color to delete it. Or instead of adding color, you can also right-click and replace color so that nothing gets pushed. The way I constructed my color set is I added for each character the skin color, the skin shading color than the hair color and the hair shading colors. The hair highlight colors than the colors of the eyes, the colors of the mouth, the colors of their shirt, and so on. And I put a separator of a transparent color between each character just to make it easier to tell apart between the colors. Or I can also select the transparent color and add more colors. This way I can separate my characters by lines. So these colors are for one character and these colors are for another. And add more transparent colors to separate the other characters, and so on. It's totally up to you to arrange the colors however you see possible. By the way, there is also one thing I want to talk about. Let's say my character had the striped shirt. And I want to draw the stripes on his shirt without crossing the boundaries. The easy and simple way to do this is by going to the shirt layer, which is this one, and clicking on this button, lock transparent pixels. Now the layer is locked. So anything I draw on top of it will stay inside its boundaries. It's very similar to how Clip Layers work, except that you can draw on the layer itself without crossing the boundary. This is the quick way to add details to your character is a close. Lastly, I want to talk about the group panels. If you have multiple characters in one panel, then you can separate their silhouettes, each on their own. But to be honest, I found that that takes more time to fill the flat colors. So what I started doing is I fill all the characters, silhouettes on one layer and then color their skins on one layer and color all the other details as much as possible on one layer. I found that this method is much more time when it comes to group panels. So it's a good thing to keep in mind. Now that we're done to link the base colors, the next lesson, we will talk about coloring the hair and eyes and how to prepare everything else for shading the character. 14. 3-4 Coloring Hair & Eyes: Let's now talk about the fun part, coloring eyes and hair. So for coloring eyes, there are countless ways to color them, and each artist has their own style. So it's totally up to you how you want to color them. But I would say try to keep it as simple as possible and have predetermined steps to color them. I'll show you the way I colored the eyes and my comic. And you might want to apply the same thing, or you might take it as an inspiration to come up with your own style. So I chose this I panel to explain it for you in a clear way. What I'll first do is lock the layer through the lock transparent pixels. And I'll choose a darker color than the base color. And I'll color the upper part of the eye and a curvy way to indicate the roundness of the eye. By the way, for this step, I'm still using the crisp Web two in pen on what tones to save time, you can leave the eyes as is and only finalized by creating a new layer on top of the line art layer and with a white color. Just to add the light reflection on the eye, you could have one or two. I usually go for one big 1.1 kind of oval-shaped one. For me, I like to give my character's eyes a little more depth. I just another darker color. I'll hide the light reflections for a bit to show you. The darker color. I shade the top part of the eye, and then I draw a pupil. Then with a small brush size, I just do these kinds of scratches to define the shaded part of the eye with the unshaded part of the eye. And I take the same color that I used in the first part. With a finer brush. I add those strokes to give the eye more details. And finally, I pick a lighter color. With a big brush. I add highlights at the bottom of the eye. So these are my steps for coloring the base color of the eye. You can also go a little bit further and add light reflection, e.g. by using a pink color with the air brush. I'll go to the airbrush tool and I'll choose the soft airbrush. Then I can just to brush a little bit on the top with a pink color or blue color. But that's an additional step if you want to make the eyes more shiny. Anyway, I'll enable the light reflection layer again. Now I'll color the line art a little bit to make the eye look more interesting. So I'll go to the line art layer and lock it. And what I'll do is I'll pick the color of this base Eichler. I quickly choose colors by hitting the alt button and then clicking on the color that I chose it. Again with a soft airbrush, a lightly airbrush this bottom side of the eye. To make it look softer. The top side as well. I'll choose the dark color and airbrushing to make everything London. I also use a kind of a vibrant pinkish red color. And with the air brush, I airbrush the size of the eyes. I find that this makes them look more interesting. Finally, under the eye, I'll create a layer for the eye whites, which we did in the last lesson. But let's do it again for this panel. The last step I'll do for the eyes is a lock this layer, and choose a grayish blue color. And then with the crisp line tool, I'll just shade the eye from the top. So I did that with a crisp Web two in pen, but sometimes I also do it with an airbrush. But I modify the settings of the airbrush a little bit. So I said the hardness to somewhere around here or here to make it harder. And then airbrush to give the eye a softer look. That's it for coloring the eyes. But in this panel specifically, and most of the panels and my current chapter, the characters are having strong emotional reactions. So when they have such a strong reaction, don't color the eyes as I do here. But rather I just leave the eyes with the pupil only. And maybe a slight gradient on the base colors of the eye that gives the characters a shock look and it makes the scene feel more intense. This is why in my panel over here, the eyes are also small because the character is shocked. So what I'm gonna do for his eyes is I'll just add a pupil. Was the darkest color of my ice sheets. And I can also use the lighter shade. And with an airbrush ringing settings back to soft, just lightly airbrush at the top of the eyes to give it a softer look. I'll also shaped the eyes with the same bluish gray color. Now let's move on to the hair. At this step, I don t really shade most of my characters features because I'll do that in the next step, which I'll show you in the next lesson. But in this step, I just to prepare all those base colors so that they look more interesting when I add the shapes later to them. What I mean by Prepared is lightly airbrushing the character to make the flat colors look less flat and add some sort of a gradient to them. So what I'll do is I'll select the airbrush tool and set it to the softest hardness and increase its size. And I'll choose the color of the shape of my character's hair. And while looking the layer likely airbrush the bottom sides of my character's hair. To give it a gradient look. On the top side, I'll choose the highlights color, and lightly airbrush. So as you can see, the hair now has more dimension. For dark haired character. I go one extra step and choose an orangeish or pinkish color, a light color that is a little bit darker than the skin. And the air brush the hair that's on top of the face. This gives the hair look like it's fading and it's showing the skin beneath it. I can do an extra step and also use the shading color of the hair and just color the hair that is at the back to push it backwards and give it more depth. So now with this simple step, this darker hair feels like it is on the back. And this brighter one feels like it is on the front. And now I'll also go for the skin and lock the layer and choose the skin shading color. And also with the air brush. Lightly airbrush the edges of the face. To avoid this kind of airbrushing, like when it's overlapping through the edges. I can just use the auto select or magic wand tool and select the portion that I want while making sure that my line art layer is set as a reference layer. And now I can air brush without messing with the face. I also airbrush a little bit around the nose and a little bit around the cheeks, sometimes. An airbrush, the rest of the skin. I can also average all the other clothing items. Sometimes I do that and sometimes I skip it. But let's do that for the scene. For both shirts. Airbrush, for the pants as well. I'm going to airbrush Nike. So that's all for this step. We haven't added any major shadows yet, because in the next lesson, we'll do all of the characters shading in one single step. 15. 3-5 Quick Shading: Now we can go ahead and start adding shades to our characters. For this step, the first thing I do is I'll select all the layers I have so far from the line art of the character to the silhouette. Select everything and put them into one folder. And then I'll create a new layer and clip it to the folder. And I'll change the layer mode to multiply. And I'll pick usually a pale, light purple color. And with the Chris Webb don't pen, I can easily shade all of my character at once on one layer only. Now for this panel, I'll enable the background that I have already prepared for it just to check the overall balance of the colors and to remind myself of the light source direction. So far my panel, the light source is on the top. So all the shapes will come at the bottom side of the character. Now when shading, I found that first of all, blocking the main areas that are shaded just roughly to see the overall balance of the shades is really useful and helps you place your shades better before getting caught up with the small details and large rough sheets. And then I'll adjust each of them. Since the necklace is jumping, then there would be a little bit of a distance between the object and the shape. Now that I've locked in the main shadows and adjust each part separately and clean up the shades and add more details and refine them. So for this, what I'll do is I'll open the group that contains all my layers. And then I'll hit the Control key on my keyboard. While holding the Control key, I'll click on the hair layer. So by doing that, I have selected only the hair layer and I can shade and erase as much as I want without affecting anything that is outside the boundary of the hair. You can also create a selection from the layer by right-clicking the layer thumbnail and going to selection from layer create selection. I'll zoom in and start adjusting those sheets. For this step, I use the crisp web tone pen and the eraser to fix the sheets. If you want to work while you're zoomed in. But also want to see how the panelists coming together without zooming in and out continuously. Then simply add another view. You can do that by going to Window, Canvas, new window. And now you can drag this new view window, which is basically a duplicate of this one. But you can have different views. So as you drag it, you can just adjust the view so that you can see the full picture as you adjust your shades. You can also rotate the canvas to easily adjust the shape, especially for curvy areas like the hair. Also flipping the canvas helps to color with more ease. I generally stick to heart shades or cell shading in white panels. But sometimes I like to blur things a little bit or blend them. And the tool I use for that is this watercolor tool that I downloaded from the Clip Studio assets. So I use this tool sometimes just slightly blend some of the edges of my shades and make things look a little bit smoother. I also use this side Brush tool that I also downloaded from the Clip Studio acids to add those scribbles that follow along the roundness of the head. Just as a way for me to add more details to the hair and make it look more interesting. Now that the hair is done, I want to start coloring this kin. But if I just select the skin color from its layer, then I'll see that the selection is not properly for the skin, only because I color the skin by hand with a brush tool so that it flows beneath everything. So to select only the skin, what I do is just go back to the hair selection and click this button to invert the selected area. Now the selection is inverted and everything is selected except the hair. So I can easily adjust the shapes of the skin without worrying about it ruining the shapes that I've already done for the hair. And I also blur our blend the shade of the nose. I can either do that with the water tool that I just showed you or I can also use the blur tool, which you can find here under the Blend tools. And choose this blur tool and just lightly brush over this to blur your shades. I also blur the shade that exists because of the head, because the head is a little bit far from the body. So the farther the object is, the more blurry the shade is. I also shared a little bit the edge of the chin to give the face more dimension. And I can also slightly blurred this to make it look smoother. You can also make use of the lasso fill tool by going to this figure tool and then selecting lasso fill. With the Lasso fill. You can easily just select any area you want and fill it. This way you can add a quick and accurate shades. But of course it needs some accuracy so that you can master it. I don't use it all the time, but sometimes I find it useful to use. I'll just fix the necklaces little bit here because it was incomplete for the shades of the necklace. So this is jumping. Then I can also indicate that by making shades as soft instead of hard, I can use the air brush for that. Instead of using the soft one, however, I'll use the hard one with the small size of paying the shades. And also the shape for the sword. If I want to fix the edges, then I can just select the transparent color to switch my tool to an eraser and erase those parts to make this shape resemble the sword. I said the J keyboard shortcut for quickly switching between transparent color and foreground color. I'll also blur the sheets a little bit. I also have the V key as a shortcut for the blur. Since I'll keep repeating the same steps for now, I'll speed up the process a little bit. Well, I could select every part on its own like I did with the hair. I find that it's not always necessary to do that. The hair is like the most sensitive part and needs the most attention for details for me at least. So that's why I selected on its own. But I find that I can manage to shade the close altogether with the skin without the need to select each of them individually. When you're done shooting, click this button to de-select. Click Control D on your keyboard. Now you can keep your panel as is with those shapes, or you can go an extra step and add a new layer and clip it again and set its mode to multiply again and add another layer of shading to give more depth to your panel. But for me, I stopped doing that most of the time because it takes more time and effort and I want to reduce the amount of steps I do for each panel. I do that step only for scenes of high importance. But let's say I wasn't convinced with how the colors look like. And I want to play around with the color of the shading. I can hit Control U to bring up the hue saturation luminosity and drag the hue. To play around with the shading colors, e.g. I. Found now that this color looks better for my character here, usually to make your character blend better with the background, it's better to choose a color that fits with your background. So if I change the layer mode of my shading there back to normal to see the new color, then I can see that the new color is a grayish pink color instead of the one that I chose. And it looks better on my character. And overall, I really like how it looks, except for the hair and also the pants. I don't like how it's looking like a warm color. So I want to change that. The quickest way to change that is by selecting the hair layer and then hitting Control U and play around with the hue. I can also decrease the value and make it look darker and play around with the saturation. This is a very nice way to quickly adjust your colors and make them look more interesting. If I undo, I can see the difference, the color, it looks more vibrant. Now, I'll do the same thing for the pants. Just drag it a little bit towards the bluish colors. You can also make your shading there and look more interesting by looking the shading layer and choosing an airbrush and going for some light color, e.g. like light orange. Then will the soft air brush, slightly airbrush the edges of your shapes? If I bring them all back to normal, then you can see that I created a gradient. So I'm going to add that to the edges of the shapes to give them a softer look and to give them a sunlit look since the sun is shining from the top. And similarly, I can also use a cooler color, e.g. this pale blue. And I can also airbrush certain parts of the shades, especially in the shaded areas, to make it look darker. And more interesting. If we take a look at our shading there, it looks like this right now. But as you can see, we shaded the full character in an interesting looking way while using just one there. By the way, I mentioned earlier that if I hit Control and select the skin layer, then it's going to select everything. And I can just have the skin by itself. But however, I can play around with this selection. I can add selections, detect simply by using the Shift and Alt keys. So e.g. if I hold the Control key while holding Shift and click on the hair layer, then the handler gets selected with my selection. However, if I want to remove it from my selection, then hold the Control button and hold the Alt key as well, and click on the hair layer. Now you can see that I got rid of the hair layer selection. And I can do the same thing to also get rid of the shirts since they are coming on top of the skin. And now you can see that my skin layer selected on its own. E.g. I. Can go back to my shapes and play around with its color if I want to make it look different. But I think I'll keep the color as it is. Now to finalize this panel, the only thing that's left is to add highlights to the hair. To do that, I'll create a new clipped layer above both the group and the shading there. And I'll change this layer mode to add a glow. And that's because the color of the hair. And I can use the brush to add the highlights myself. Again with scratches while following the shape of the head like I did with those shades earlier. But to save time, there's this really convenient hair highlights brush pack that you can immediately use to add highlights to your characters. Here. I got it from the Clip Studio assets and I'll leave the link for you as well. The one I prefer using is not the brushes themselves, but it also comes with a few Curve Tools. And I like to use this one to show you how the curves tool works like I'll just click somewhere here and then drag while still holding on my pen. And then release and adjust the curvature of the curve. The brush size looks big, so I'll reduce it a little bit. So again, I'll hold and then release to adjust my curvature. While you could do this in one shot. I don't like how this looks like because I want to follow the roundness of the head. I do it in two steps. I do it first on the right side, and then I do it on the left side. So this way I can control the shapes of them better. And if I want to adjust them further, e.g. I still want them to follow the curvature of the head. This side over here, it looks good, but this side doesn't match the curvature that I have. I'll select it with the lasso tool and use the mesh transformation tool to easily and quickly adjust it and make it match the curvature of my characters had better. The color looks too vivid style just reduce the opacity. E.g. I. Found 33 to be good enough. I can also lock the transparent pixels and use an airbrush and maybe likely airbrush with another color to make it look more interesting and add a gradient in the colors. You can also go crazy with the colors and different stuff. But I'll keep it as is. This looks good enough. So we're finally done with shading our panel. In the next chapter, we'll finally start talking about backgrounds. So in the next lesson, we'll first start talking about the principles of perspective. 16. 4-1 Perspective Principles: Since we will start talking about backgrounds in this chapter, There's very important to first talk about the principles and basics of perspective. There are two important concepts to know when it comes to perspective. The first is the horizon line, or also called the eye level. And the second is the vanishing point. Basically, with our human eyes, when we look at objects in space, they don't look like they are in the same size. But we can see with our eyes that objects reduce in size with the distance. That's why the whole concept of perspective is relevant to our eyes. The eye level line is basically the actual height of the viewer's eyes. We're looking at an object, or it's also called horizon line because it can be used to refer to a physical or visual boundary which separates this guy from the land or the sea. And the vanishing point is basically the point where all the lines go towards so that everything vanishes towards this direction. Let me show an example to simplify things. Let's say we have a square that I want to draw as a cube. So since I drew this square with its four corners, to draw it in perspective, I'm going to draw lines from each one of its corners to go towards the vanishing point. So this is the first line. This is the second, and this is the third. And also, let me draw this on a new layer. This is the fourth line. I'm going to reduce the opacity since this line is behind the object. So now if I want to give my cube some thickness, I can just draw a straight line here and another straight line here and erase the rest of the lines. And now I have a cubed that is in space. And because it's above the eye level, then I can see the bottom part of this box. I erase this fourth line because if this cube is opaque, then I'm not going to see that fourth line. But if it was a transparent cube, then I can just draw the line again and then draw a straight line from this bottom to this diagonal line and then continue this line from here till here. And now I can see that I have a transparent cube. I can just erase the rest of the lines. I can do another example below the horizon line. If I draw the object bigger than is gonna be closer to the camera, let me draw lines towards the vanishing point. And then cut it off to get a box and then erase those extra lines. Now I have a bigger box that is closer to the camera because it's size is bigger. And I can see the top surface of the cube because it's below the horizon line or below my eye level. If an object is drawn on the horizon line itself, then we're not going to see any of the top or the bottom surfaces. Because as you can see, as we draw them, they're going to collide on top of each other. And if we cut this box and it is those extra lines, then we can see in either the top or the bottom surfaces of the box because it's on our eye level. Now since there's only one vanishing point in this case, this is called one-point perspective. If we add another vanishing point, then this becomes two point perspective. And to draw an example, again with the cube, I'm going to draw a straight line here below the horizon. And I'm going to connect this site with both vanishing points. And then I'll cut it off. And because I cut it off here, then I'm going to draw lines from the corners again and connect them with the vanishing point to complete my cube. And I'll erase the extra lines to finish my cube. By the way, drawing things in perspective becomes much, much easier when you use vector layers because you can erase the extra lines so quickly and easily like I just did. But as you can see, the cube looks kind of skewed here. And that is because the vanishing points are close to each other. So to make objects look more natural, we just need to separate the vanishing points and have more distance between them. I'll draw a new box now above the horizon level after I adjusted my vanishing points. And as you can see, the cube looks more natural now that I've distanced the vanishing points. If we add another vanishing point, say at the top here. Then this becomes three-point perspective. If we draw our cubes again, I'll start by drawing a straight line from the vanishing point. Then connect the sides with the horizontal vanishing points. Now to define the dimensions of my cube, I'm not going to draw vertical lines like I did with two-point perspective, but those vertical lines will become slanted instead. I'll connect them with this vanishing point over here. And then I'll connect those extra coronaries again with the horizontal vanishing points and erase the extra lines. And as you can see, I drew a cube, but it looks so skewed because it's very close to this third vanishing point. So let me actually draw another cube again. But I'll drag the eye level below to have more distance between the three vanishing points. So let's do that again. I'll start with a straight line. Then draw lines that connect with the horizontal vanishing points. And now I'll connect with this third vanishing point. Connect the other corners or the bottom corners with horizontal vanishing points. As you can see, this cooling is much less now because there is a bigger distance between the vanishing points. So these are the most important basics of perspective you need to know. In this class. We're not really going to delve into drawing backgrounds from scratch because that is very time-consuming and it's an art form on its own. And as wept on artists, we want to keep our process to be as fast as possible. That's why I'm going to keep the explanation up till this point. But if you are interested to know more than I definitely urge you to read more about it so that you can learn more. And maybe you can also practice sketching with perspective in your free time so that you have better understanding on how backgrounds work. But one last thing I want to mention in this lesson is that Clip Studio Paint comes with a perspective ruler, so you don't have to draw lines manually like we did in this lesson. I want to show you how to bring up this perspective ruler. Simply go to Layer Ruler frame and then select Create Perspective ruler. From here you can easily select one point or two point or three point perspective. And since we're already talking about three point perspective now, now I'm going to select three points perspective. You can choose whether we want to create the ruler on a new layer or have it be created on your current layer. I'll just keep it on the current layer. So now I have this ruler icon over here, which is just like what we had with the symmetry ruler. If I don't want the ruler to be on this layer, then I can simply just click and drag it to another layer. And this way you can easily transfer your ruler. But anyway, the perspective ruler, if you zoom out, you can see that we have three vanishing points. This is the first vanishing point, and this is the second, and this is the third. And these lines are like guidelines towards the vanishing point. So you can change them however you want. Now you can adjust the perspective ruler through two different methods, either by changing the location of the vanishing points. E.g. I. Want to drag this vanishing point to be on top of this one. But if I drag it as it is now I can't really move it. The reason for that is that this option is ticked fixed IP level. So as fixing the eye level, That's why everything is locked. But if you want to adjust the perspective ruler to match your scene or artwork, then untick this. And now as I click on the vanishing point, I can easily change its position. So I'm going to put it on top of this vanishing point. And I'm going to drag this vanishing point to come on top of this one. And finally, I have this last vanishing point. I'll drag it towards here. And I can change the angle of those guidelines by clicking on the circle in the middle. So this is one way. But another way is, let's say I only had the drawing of the object and I want to know where the vanishing points for this object exists. To do that, I can play around with those handles, are those guidelines through these blue points. And by playing around with the angle and the positioning of these blue points, as you can see, the placement of the vanishing point is changing. By playing around with those guidelines, I can easily have my perspective ruler match my object. It could take some time to adjust everything and can get quite tricky sometimes, but it's very helpful to determine the perspective of your image if you don't know it. So now that I have adjusted the perspective ruler, I can simply draw any object or any lines, and they will still follow those perspective lines and vanishing points that I have adjusted. And this way it becomes less tedious to draw with perspective without having to check with straight lines and vanishing points each time. The last thing I want to talk about is that the horizon line doesn't always need to be horizontal. You can always rotate the horizon line and draw objects and connect them with vanishing points. But your objects will also be rotated with rotating the horizon line. Rotating the horizon line helps make this even more dramatic. So it's an interesting concept to keep in mind as you draw your scenes. E.g. rotating the horizon line in this panel of mine made the scene look more interesting than if it was just horizontal. So it's a good thing to keep in mind at this step of storyboarding your panels before you even start sketching so that you build your whole scene based on it. The next lesson, we'll talk about techniques to add depth to your panels without really using perspective, but by just playing around with the shapes of the objects in your scene. 17. 4-2 Techniques to Add Depth: As we grow, we're trying to predict the three-dimensional space onto the two-dimensional canvas. So it can be tricky sometimes to introduce an actual feeling of depth into your artwork. However, there are a number of techniques that can easily help give a sense of depth and make your panels or artworks look more interesting. In this lesson, I'm going to talk about six of those methods. So let's tackle them one by one while showing examples for each. The first technique is varying the object size. So let's say these three walls are of the same size. The closest ball to the camera is the biggest insights. The farthest ball from the camera has the smallest size. To give you an example, take a look at this panel. The characters are going downstairs. So the closest character to the camera has the biggest size, and the farthest character from the camera has the smallest size since she is on the top. The second technique is very in line weight, which we talked about already during the line art phase. So if we make the lines of the object that's closest to the camera thicker and make the lines of the objects that are farther thinner, then we can immediately feel a sense of depth. And to give you an example, take a look at this panel. The closest character to the camera has the thickest lines. Well, the farther we go from the camera, the line weight goes thinner. The third technique is by varying the object details. So the closest object to the camera would have more details than the farther objects. E.g. take a look at this panel. The closest character to the camera has both thick lines and more hair details, then the farther characters. So if we take a look, these two characters are somehow in the middle ground. So they have somehow more details than this character that is the furthest behind. He barely has any details of drone except for those office permanent character design. The fourth technique is through varying the depth of field. So in this example, we can divide this into three components. The closest object is in the foreground, which are the leaves in this example. The object in the middle is the character and is it placed in the middle ground. And the farthest objects are called the background. So by introducing a depth of field, we can focus on our character, which is the middle ground. We can do that by blurring the closest object to the camera. So by blurring those leaves, we can have the sense that those leaves are so close to the camera that they're out-of-focus. And our focus would be on the middle ground character. A similar thing can be done oppositely. E.g. here, I want my focus to be on the foreground itself. The foreground is the crisp easiest, but the middle ground is a little bit blurry. The background is the blurriness of all. When I look at this scene, my focus goes directly towards the leaves. I especially like to use the depth of field technique when drawing series of forest with a lot of foliage. I really like to blur the closest to plants and sometimes make them in darker color than the rest of the scene. To give the sense that these objects are close to the camera and the lighting is kind of darker here, so that the focus of the eyes goes towards the middle ground. The fifth technique is through playing with a brightness. So we can make our scene look interesting by making the objects that are the farthest from the camera as the darkest and the objects that are closer to the camera to be brighter. I like using this technique. Also when I do forest scenes, e.g. this panel over here, I have two trees that are closest to the camera, and they are brighter than everything that is in the background. The trees and foliage get darker. To introduce this sense of depth, that this force is dark and deep, and this is only the front and close side of it. The last technique is by playing with color temperature, which can also be called as atmospheric perspective, which is an effect we can see with our own eyes on a daily basis. When you go outside, you can notice how the closer the objects are to your eyes, the warmer there color is. But the farther they are, the cooler their color is. And naturally due to the effect of atmosphere, objects tend to go towards the bluish color the farther they are. So in this quick example I did here, take a look at the color wheel as I pick the colors. The color of VC closest leaves are a warm yellow, green. But the grass over here is cooler green and the color is become cooler the farther they are until they become Lewis. And this introduces a sense of depth. I really like to use this technique whenever I have a background or the sky showing e.g. this scene in my panel here, while it looks good enough as it is here, if I airbrushed with a bluish color, then I can immediately feel the sense of atmosphere. And the same thing for the buildings over here at the back. I made them bluish to give the feeling of the atmosphere. This technique is also useful when you have scenarios, especially e.g. when you have mountains that are really far from your scene, e.g. the mountains here at the back. While mountains are natural and not blue, they have a warm brown color or maybe a green color. Since they are so far away, making them Lew gives this sense of depth and we can understand that they're so far away from our eyes. So keep those techniques in your mind as you make backgrounds for your scenes. They can totally make your patterns look more interesting. As you can see, they don't need much effort, but they can really transform your scene and make it look more interesting in an instant. The next lesson, we'll talk about painting backgrounds from grayscale to focus on their values and how to transform them from black and white to a colorful version. 18. 4-3 Painting from Greyscale: Before we get started into using assets and 3D models to create our backgrounds, I'd like to introduce you to a basic yet important technique to practice first, which is painting in gray scale by focusing on values only. I would say that this technique serves two important outcomes. The first is that it helps you understand values and contrast better. Since you're only focusing on black and white and don't have to do any coloring at first, practicing this technique helps you master your understanding of how to do backgrounds better. As you can easily make interesting looking backgrounds with great lighting and contrast, which leads me to talk about the second outcome. As you'll see in the next few lessons, we'll be using images, brushes, and 3D models to create our backgrounds. But sometimes you might not be able to find just the right assets that you need for your specific scene. Especially when it's an establishing shot where you want to bring the focus of your readers to the environment itself. Practicing this painting method would help you when you're in a pinch like that. Then this lesson, I have a scene that has me in a pinch to, I'll show you how I'll get my way around it. The scene that I want to draw as an underground cave with a link at the bottom and sunlight coming through the top. I had sketched it roughly in my storyboard phase. So I have an idea about the composition I want to follow on this shot, but I also looked up some reference pictures on unsplash.com. I searched for underground cave. And after looking through the following pictures, I picked up the following four pictures. I'll be arranged the images so that I can see all four of them. As I work. I'll zoom out a bit on each one so that I can see the full view. I decided to take these two to this side so that I have my work in Canvas and the center. Now what I'll do is for each one of these images, alternate into grayscale mode. To do that, go to the image itself and under Layer Properties, under expression color, click this drop-down menu and choose gray. Now the image has turned into grayscale mode. I'll do the same thing for the other three images. Okay, so now I have everything in gray scale and I have my rough sketch. I'm going to adjust it just a little bit. Bring this down. Since I want the reader to scroll through it as they read and not see the full picture at once. Now that I'm satisfied with this composition, I'll go to my panel. Now I'll start painting my scene in gray scale. Basically looking at the color wheel, I'll just pick colors from this side over here, exclusively black and white, no colors whatsoever. Or you can also go to the sliders and control the colors from to pick your grace easier, whichever works for you. I'll pick a dark gray color. I'll select and fill my background. From Edit, Fill. I'll just reduce the opacity a little bit so that I can see the sketch in here using a very light gray color. I'll mark the place of the lake. I'll also mark the place for whatever these things are, blocks off rocks. And using another lighter gray, I'll focus here on the opening at the surface. Now, I'll bring back the opacity to 100 per cent again. And from this point onward, I'll take a look at the images that I have. So I can see from this image here that the contrast is very high and the color over here is our gray. So I'll pick dark gray and go back to my scene and change the background to the same dark color from edit, convert to draw and color. And I can also see that the top is painted with white. So I'll go back to this and paint it with white instead of keeping the lighter gray color. But I'll keep a little bit of it just so that I don't have a crisp edge. I'll merge the two layers and work on one layer from now on. The most important thing to do in this step is to just look in the main colors and then we can start to go in and add more details. I realized that since I have a lake in my image, I'm missing a reference picture with the lake. So I looked up another reference picture with a lake. I'll also set it to grayscale. And I'll have it over here instead of that picture, since it looked very similar to this one, I'm going to refer to this picture for the value of the lake. And I'll paint it over here. For this scene. I'm not going to follow any perspective rulers or anything from the leg. I'll just paint stuff and make them look convincing. So it's a trial and error thing. I'll keep adjusting until I reach a result I'm satisfied with. Continue grabbing colors. We're looking at references and putting my scene together. To control colors better, you can also add them on a new layer and then reduce the opacity. E.g. I. Wanted a lighter gray, but I didn't know exactly how to get it from here. So also playing around with layers helps a lot to get a gradient effects. Click the transfer to lower layer button and do the same thing again for this color. I'll make the top look more rocky. Let's add some lighting now on a new layer, I'll click the soft air brush with a very large size, a lightly airbrush over here. Since that's where the light is coming from. I can reduce the opacity a little bit. But now we're starting to have some form of a gradient. And the same thing I'll do for the lake, but I'll first airbrush with a multiply layer data gradient to the lake. And then I'll go back and add white again. Since the lake is lit by sunlight that's coming from the top. I'll hide those layers a bit and continue painting. Now I'll start trying to define the scene better. As you can see, the scene is starting to look more interesting even though it's just basically scribbles. But you can sort of tell what's going on. I'm trying to define the rocks now. Again, nothing has to be perfect as long as we try, that's all that matters. And if we are interested in any specific technique, then we can of course, study it with more details and get to learn that more with time. I'll just put a placeholder for my characters here for the size comparison. Because this place is very big and they're super small. So I want to remember that I'm doing all of this so far just with the basic round brush. Of course, you can use any kind of brushes you like. I'm just trying to look out the main shapes to give it the look. I'm desiring. To be honest, I haven't done painting studies before. I'm just painting from observation and what I've seen through time. But of course you can dedicate a good amount of time to studying this technique if you want to learn how to paint proper backgrounds. But of course, as wept on artists, I mean, we have a lot to draw anyway in every chapter. So it's almost impossible to paint out your backgrounds in every single chapter if you want to keep an upload schedule. That's why as I mentioned before, practicing this technique is good for your general understanding. And it is helpful for when you don't know what to do with your scene. And of course, after I introduce how to use the assets and the next few lessons, then you can combine both techniques together. So we can paint with a grayscale and then put images on top of it, and then, you know, mix-and-match until the background looks good enough. I'll enable my ingredients again and see how it's looking so far. Since the light is coming from the top, I will need to add more highlights here at the top. So I'll disable the gradients again and work on building highlights around this area. The highlights should be at the top and the shading should be in the bottom. And I think I want this to look like it's a deeper cave going inside. So I added this giant blob and run and give it more darkness to indicate depth. Going back to the top highlights. I keep going back and forth. But I hope you can see how it's coming together. Now on a new layer with a reduced opacity, I'll use the same color I used for the highlights, but to introduce lighter color here. And I'll pick this color now from the lake and on a new layer, reduce the opacity and just paint a little bit. Notice how all of this was done just with default round brush. I'm going to switch now to the brush tool and water tool and start doing some blending just to make things look better. I'll pick colors as I go and paint to blend everything together more. You can, of course leave it at this stage, but you can further refine it. It's totally personal preference. I'm going to refine it a little bit more before jumping to the coloring phase. I can show you how to take this painting from grayscale two colors in the easiest and quickest possible way. Hi enabled the multiply layer of the lake and I'm gonna erase with a soft eraser those parts here that are outside the lake itself. And I'll merge it down. So now I can define the edge of these rocks. I define those edges with a darker value and I'll define these with a little bit lighter value. That's for the lighting there. I didn't white. I'm going to try playing with the blending modes. E.g. I'll try to add the glow blending mode and look how I could get more lighting this way or more contrast. This makes the lake better. Also the top of the cave. So I'm just going to soft erase this part. And also I'll add a new layer with add the glow and add some water lines to the lake itself to make it look like a water surface. I also have this water surface brush. I'm going to use it over here, but as you can see, the size is large. So I'm gonna go over here and reduce the particle size and paint again. I'll do this on a new layer so that I can control its opacity. Again, this new layer is set in the glow mode. We can blend it a little bit with the water tool. To make it less vivid. I'll add some more glow on a new layer. I'll add a little bit more glue on the center to give it to null or more of a sunlit field. I'll also go back at the top here. And I'll use this brush from a collection I'll talk about in the next lesson when we're talking about how to do nature scenarios and using the appropriate brushes. I'll use them to add some plants to the sonata, since that is something I have seen naturally occurring with synthase and I found them. Give me a really nice touch. So I'll lock the layer and I'll average those white ones with some gray and I'll bear brush the gray ones with some white and so on. On a new layer, I'll add dark ones. To give some more depth to the scene as you can see. We could maybe blur them a little bit too. Just a little bit. I could do further refining for this scene, but now let's talk about how to carry this forward from grayscale to coloring. They really easiest and quickest method to do is by adding a gradient map. He can do that by adding a correction there from their new connection there, gradient map. I click on a random one of these. But basically if you're not familiar with the gradient maps, what it does is it projects whatever colors you have here on the gradient. It projects them based on the values that you have set in your scene. I'm gonna look for one that looks good for my scene. I was thinking of giving the scene a bluish atmosphere. You can make your own gradient maps or you can also download them from Clip Studio assets. Personally, I find downloading and using ready-made ones much easier than creating your own. Let's say I'll go for this one. I can still do further adjustments by adjusting each color. So e.g. I. Want the darkest color to look even darker. I'm going to make it darker and look. This is too dark. Just to play a little bit with it. Yeah, I think this is looking better. I'll play around a little bit with the colors and see. Yes, this is matching the image I have in mind. Butter. I want the highlights to look yellowish. The top. I'm going to set the lightest color to white for that extra contrast. And I'll add another color here and set it to very light, yellow. Maybe this is too light. Something like this. Okay? Okay, so now since we have the gradient map, this was a very quick way to color, but we can also do further things, e.g. since the gradient map was added as a correction layer. So if I disable it, I can still see my black and white version. So I can disable and re-enable it as much as I want. I'm going to try playing around with different blending modes to see what works better. You can do that by clicking and dragging each and every blending mode on its own. Or you can just put your mouse on top of it and just hover with your mouse wheel. And quickly check how it looks like without having to open it up again and again. So these are some very different looks. I think I like this one the best. When you set the gradient map layer to color mode, it will preserve your values and it will just add the color on them. So that's one method. We can still play around a little bit more with our scene. E.g. I'll add a new layer and pick a light yellow color with an air brush. Slightly airbrush on the top to give it to sunlight feeling. And I can change the blending mode. Another trick is, as you can see, the full image is now in a bluish tone. But what if you want to have a certain part colored with a different set of colors, e.g. I want to change the legs colors a bit. So I can go to the Gradient Map layer and click on the mask. And with an area is there, I can erase the effect of the gradient map for this, I'm using a soft eraser so that the edges are not easily visible. What I want to do for this part is I want to introduce another gradient map, e.g. let's say I want this specific gradient map. I'll choose it and click Okay. And on the mask of this new gradient map layer, I'll click on it and click the Delete button or edit delete. And now with an air brush, I'll just paint over here. And as you can see, enabling the gradient map on just the lake itself. And now I can go back to this gradient map in particular and try out other gradient maps until I'm satisfied with the results. If the gradient map doesn't look right, you can flip it from the bottom over here. I think I like this one better. And that's not all you can do. You can still add new layers and play around with the blending mode. We'll talk more about color adjustments in Chapter six. So we'll talk about all these color adjustments in more depth. I can say that my panel is almost done. It just needs a little bit of cleanup and then I can consider it done. I would highly suggest for you to try this method, grab any natural scene that you're interested in and convert it to grayscale. And at first try to recreate it in the same way that it actually looks like just to practice values and get the hang of this method. And then afterwards, you can proceed to try to create your own background out of different reference images like I did here. In the next lesson we'll talk about natural scenes in particular, and how to use brushes and images to create a convincing looking natural scene. And the least possible amount of efforts. 19. 4-4 Natural Sceneries: Alright, now has come the exciting part, which is making professional looking high-quality backgrounds out of combining images and brushes, which we'll call as assets to make those great looking backgrounds with the least possible time and effort. When I say combine assets is because every part of these backgrounds is basically something I added myself and combined to make the full sincerity. So when it comes to assets, there are brushes and images and there are free and they're paid assets. I'll start by showing you first recommended free assets that you can immediately get From Clip Studio Paint assets. The first are these trees or bushes, brushes. There are great for easily adding foliage to your scene. The second is this ready-made colored pushes a brush. You can use this to easily add foliage quickly to your scene without worrying about colors as they are ready to use. The third is this true shadows, a brush which you can add on a new layer with a multiply mode and immediately get the shading effect. Or you can also use it with a transparent color and erase with it some parts so that you can get this look of light coming from between the tree leaves. The fourth is this grass brush. It's very convenient for quickly adding grass while changing the color yourself. And the fifth are these tree stamp brushes, which you can easily use to create a tree stem without worrying about adding the texture yourself. Lastly, these ready-made cloud brushes, they're very handy to quickly add clouds to your scene without having to draw them on your own. Of course, there are much more assets, but these ones that I've showed you, our greatest starter pack to be able to make a complete scenario of foliage. So far, these are just from the Clip Studio Asset Store. You can also download stuff from third-party sources. E.g. I. Really love this foliage and aggressive brushes set that is made by the artists Devin L. Kurtz. You can download these brushes for free by entering zero here and then clicking I want this. Or if you also want to support the artists, then you can name a price here. So these aggressions are amazing. I constantly use them specially for grass. You can easily paint two graphs and foliage that looks amazing and instantly fills your scene and makes it look better without spending much effort. The brushes I used in the previous lesson are from the same pack. By the way, you can find them under evergreen brushes. It also comes with flower stock and stuff like that. I highly recommend these oppressions. They're really amazing. Now that was about the free assets. But for me sometimes I don't really always find what I exactly need in pre assets. I look at other sources and sometimes by my assets, one of the assets I bought and I really like is this small tree brush. You can easily use this brush to create a quick forest. Now normally I don't use it as it is. I still make my edits. I also really love disciplines of brush set. It comes with multiple plant brushes, whether they are four threes, some ground details with some grass and stuff like that. This is one of my favorite packs that I use a lot whenever I want to add more plants to my scene. And I also love those two packs of image assets that I also purchased. The first one is for trees and trees with rocks, basically an ordinary looking trees. And the second one has rocks and rocks with the grass. These two sets really helped me make those professional looking backgrounds while keeping the process as a very quick one. So this is just mashing images together. Lastly, I also bought a collection of sky images, come in four types. One for sunny day, one for our night sky, one-four sunset skies, and the last one for cloudy skies. Now if you are unable to purchase assets at the start, then don't worry, Clip Studio Paint comes with some free image assets that you can get by going to the materials window. Under Image material, go to illustration and then you'll see that there are some building assets, some tools, some flower and plants, and the moon, whether it's full or crescent moon and even a rainbow. And also some effects. And you can find additional ones under color pattern and then go to background. Then nature. You can find different disguise here. Whether it's a rainy sky, sunset, cloudy sky, or a day and night skies. And there's also artificial. There are ready-made background here that you can immediately use as they are. And of course, there are many, many more assets that you can download from a Clip Studio assets. So again, definitely do check it out and browse through it and you'll hopefully find a lot of free things that you can make do with S4, the websites to buy assets from. I have dedicated a full lesson in this chapter to talk about all the different places that I get my assets from. So you'll be able to find your answer in that lesson. Alright, I want to show you how to create a scene out of assets. I want to create a forest scene here. And I did a quick sketch of the forest just to have an idea of the perspective and the composition that I'm looking for, even though it's very poor, but it's a reminder for the image that wasn't my head. So in this composition, I'm looking to have some sort of perspective just a little bit. So I want to have some guides, but I don't want my guide to be a perspective ruler because this is an organic thing and a prospective ruler helps you draw straight lines. So what I can do is I'll use this tool that I downloaded from the Clip Studio assets called vanishing point. By clicking anywhere, I can immediately generate a vanishing point that comes immediately with the guidelines. This is helpful for when you want a quick guidelines so you don't have to draw the lines yourself. I'm going to move this upwards until I feel it's matching my lines here in the scene. The line now collides with this red line. And that means I'm good to go with this placement. What our center it a little bit and adjust this position with the move tool while controlling it from the arrow keys on my keyboard. It's looking good. Now, I'll erase those red lines. And now we can start setting up the scene or create a new layer. And I want to use the tree in this brush that I have, but I don't want to use it and it's a brush form. I'll use its image form instead. And I'll copy paste those trees onto my scene so that I have better control over their placement. I'll select both and resize them a little bit. With the scale rotate transformation. I'll put one on this side and another one on this side. But I'll drag it down so that they're both on the same ground. And now I'll transform again. But I'll change the mode from Free Transform to perspective. And I'll make it sort of follow the perspective guides that I have. Same thing for this tree on the left side. It was cut somehow solve, paste it again and resize it. And I'll do the perspective transformation again. I'm trying to make the trunk of the tree follow the perspective lines, but they don't have to be perfect because nature is random and you can get away so much with randomness and irregularities. To be honest, most of the scenes I create are usually without the vanishing point, but I wanted to introduce it in this lesson. So that's, it's a good thing to know and keep in mind in case you want to follow perspective better. I'll hide my sketch now. Since I have the guides and the tree is matching now, I'll adjust their positions a little bit. Now on a new layer, I'll use the brush format to quickly add some brushes to the scene behind them. And I'll also adjust with the perspective transformation tool. I can also use this term brushes that I introduced to you earlier to add more trees while following those perspective lines. Now, before proceeding, I want to establish the ground from the sky. So I'll first of all create a new layer, and I'll pick a color from this graph over here. And I'll just paint over to determine my ground area. I'll grab a sky image and paste it behind everything. Place it at the top. Says the sky image is not long enough. I want to color the background, so I'll double-click on the paper over here. And I'll pick the lightest color from this guy. And click Okay, now if I remove the trees, you can see that there is a sky and then there's an adverb change in colors, but this change is not going to be visible since my trees are covering it. In case I want it to elongate this neck and just airbrush by picking colors from the scene itself. And then continue those missing class with the brushes I told you about earlier. At this stage, I'll do a quick color adjustments to see the look that I want to go for eventually. So the first thing I'll do is this guy looks too dark for me. I want it to be lighter, so I'll go to edit, tonal correction and then Hue Saturation, Luminosity. And then I'll lighten this down and increase the saturation a little bit. And maybe converted more towards the cyan side. This is looking better. This change of colors was permanent. It completely changes my image. But if I don't want that, if I'm not sure I want a permanent color change, then I can do that by using a correction there, which we used in the last lesson. Go to layer new correction there, and then you will find all the color adjustments options over here. I'll pick a Hue Saturation Luminosity again. And I'll do the same color adjustment that I just did. And click Okay, now all the adjustments are on the new layer. I don't need to worry about permanently changing the colors of my picture. I'll come to the grass now. I'll pick colors from this grass that comes with the trees themselves. Using those aggressive brushes that I told you about, I'm going to block in some grass and I want the grass to look darker at the back than it is at the front. I'll use this dark color for the back and use a transition in color that I can pick from in-between here, thanks to the tools transparency, and then paint a little bit more. But one important thing when painting grass is to give a sense of depth. Always have the farther grass with less details. And the closer it gets to the camera, the more details you add. E.g. I. Have this solid aggressive brush, which would look nice too close to the screen. But if I use it here in the back, that is giving me too much information. And as we talked about in the first lecture about depth, the further things are, the less information they have and the less details they have. So that's why I always keep the detailed brushes to the close parts and the less detailed ones for the farther ones. As for our colors, I'm making them go cooler towards the background and warmer towards the foreground. If I want this area to be brighter, e.g. I. Can paint with this lighter yellow or green. But that's not the look I'm going for in this scene. I still want to mix and match and track colors and see how they look like. If you want to pick a color but you're confused, then always make a new layer and add this color and then reduce the opacity of it and see how it looks. And you can also change the layer mode and see if you find something that you like. E.g. I. Liked this warmer and darker green, so I'm going to use it in the scene here. I'm going to create a new layer above everything and add this aggress that's closer to the screen so that it covers everything that is in the back. I'll reduce the size a little bit of the brush as I paint the rest of the grass to transition towards the distance. I can also drag this upwards because I think with our perspective, this would look better, but I'll need to brush it again since it's cropped now. So I'll delete this. Brush it again. But on the top. I can vary also the brush shape to make it look more interesting. I'll change the color a little bit. It's too saturated. I feel. Now I'll go back to those two trees I initially added. This tree is supposed to be in front of this tree, but as you can see, we can't really tell the difference between them. So what I'm gonna do is I'll create a new layer above the tree on the right and clip it to it. And then I'll use an air brush and pick a cool color somewhere here, like a grayish blue color. And I'll set the layer mode to multiply. And airbrush slightly. Can you see the difference now? But the color is too light, so I think I'll add the darker color. Just a little bit. I'll erase the top part with a soft eraser. But I also want to separate the trees at the back. So I'm going to create a new layer again. And so the layer mode to multiply and then air brush with this darker color. Now the thing I have in mind is I want the forest to go darker towards the depth. But if you are looking for red light for a scene, then you can create a new layer above those trees. And said the layer mode to maybe, let's try add the glow and choose maybe a lighter green color. And airbrush. Airbrush, everything. As you can see, this is giving us that forest scene. If we hide this guy and make this background back into white, that is gonna look even more interesting, like if we zoom in, then this is already looking like a nice scene. And we can also play around with the colors and make the colors go cooler as they go towards the end. But this is not the look I'm going for right now. I'm going for a forest that goes darker towards the depth. So I'm going to add a new layer and pick a color from one of those dark tree brushes. Just to brush with a hard brush and erase those parts. And now I'll add a new layer above the tree trunks. And I'll use the foliage of brushes that I showed you earlier. This Leaf pack. I'll pick colors from these trees at the back, and I'll fill in those missing areas. I'll pick a darker color and add some shades. I'll pick more dark colors from the background itself, but I'll shift it towards the cool colors and darken it a little bit. We can go to as dark as a color that's very close to black. If we want to introduce heavy depths. I'm putting those layers behind everything. I noticed that this black color at the end was a little bit warm, so I'm gonna change that to something that looks cooler. Something like this. Now I'll also add foliage, but on the ground for that I'm going to use the distance to a shadow brush and now reduce the particle size and brush. I'll put it behind everything for now. Then I'll make the color a little bit warmer and brush the closer foliage. This tool has the randomized color setting tick. If you click the wrench icon under color jitter, you can see that randomized brush stroke is activated. So this is why we're getting different colors based on artwork. If you want to turn this off, then just untick this. And now we'll color with the same color that you have picked. I sometimes use both. It really depends on the effect I'm going for. Feel free to experiment, but I'm doing the colors manually now, so I'm testing them as I go. So the colors have turned a greener and now they're going to turn warmer. At the foreground. Use a lighter color. For the closer foliage. I'll go back to the leaf detail brush and I'll go for a Walmart color, something like this. Because I want to add some highlights to the foliage here. But this color is too strong. So I'll create a new layer and reduce the opacity and see what color I can come up with. I'm going to play around with the color and make it warmer, more yellowish. And the same thing I want to do for the shading. I'll transfer what I have in this foliage layer down and paint again with a darker color to see how it's looking like. Then merge everything. Now, if I want to further refine this, then I can pick colors from the highlight itself and brush out a little bit more over these parts to give the feeling that the highlighted leaves are on top of the shaded ones. I can add some more darkness in some parts for more variation. And the colors. It's so much fun to play around with foliage. I can also add some further details to those in the back by just creating a new layer and setting it to multiply mode. And I'll pick some very light grayish green and brush over those brushes. You can already see the difference. We're almost done except that I'm not satisfied with those trees at the front. I want to make them more distinct, especially this front one. I'll try adding a new correction there. Probably I'll go for color balance this time. I'll go to layer, new correction layer, and then Color Balance. I'll click Okay, and then, and then click the color balance layer to this tree. And then I'll open it again. From the color balance menu, I can play around with the colors of the half-tones, the shadows, and the highlights. So e.g. I want to play around with the highlights now. I want to make them more yellowish. So I'll drag this arrow towards the yellow side. As you can see, the tree is popping a little bit now. I'll try also the red side. Just to see how it is. Same thing for halftone. I'll try going for magenta little bit, but it's not looking good. Maybe some red. And the shadows. I'll drag towards green. So this tree is popping now better than it was before. I can copy this color balance layer by right-clicking and then duplicate and drag it towards this other tree. And I can play around with the opacity, e.g. reduce it a little bit. I can also play around with their positioning. One last thing I want to do is create a new layer on top of everything. And I'll choose this sky color. And I'll use an airbrush and increase the size of this airbrush to something like this. And likely airbrush the edges of the trees. And also maybe the areas in-between them. And then change the layer mode to screen. Or sometimes I use Hard Light, whichever suits your needs better. I think screen looks good enough for the sin. So this has given an atmospheric effect. You can also airbrush behind those to front trees, e.g. let's go for a gray, blue and maybe slightly airbrush here to give us sort of a haze Look. We can also use lighter gray color and see how it looks like. This gives us a haze to everything that is behind those front trees. So we can say that this scenario in this panel can be considered done. Of course, you can add more assets, refine it better, but I hope this was a good overview of how you can create a quick background with these amazing tools that we have while applying the concepts we have learned to make a convincing looking background. The next lesson, we will make use of assets and 3D models to make artificial scenes of man-made structures. 20. 4-5 Artificial Backgrounds: Let's now talk about artificial backgrounds. There are three things I do when I have an artificial background to create. I either use a 3D models and the software SketchUp and do my edits and Clip Studio Paint. Or use a 3D model directly in Clip Studio Paint. And also do my edits. Or use a combination of both. Get an image from a SketchUp 3D model and add 3D models and Clip Studio Paint itself to complete what's missing in the background. This lesson, I want to explain to you how I do those methods and gives you important pointers on how you can edit your backgrounds to make them look as 2D as possible. So let's first talk about SketchUp. Sketch off as a 3D modeling software. And it's really popular among grep two and creators because you can create and use 3D models that look like 2D artworks, which makes them well fitting for the drone art styles. The software I'm using here is SketchUp Pro, which is the desktop version, but it also comes with a web version that you can try using as well. Though I'm not sure if it can handle heavy files. The way to navigate through your 3D model and SketchUp is the following. Use the mouse wheel to zoom in to your scene and zoom out as well. And hold and click the mouse wheel to rotate your scene. While holding shift on your keyboard and holding the mouse wheel. You can pan through your scene. You can also find those viewing and navigation tools up here in the toolbar. But I find using keyboard shortcuts are much faster alternative. So when you decide on the shot that you like for your scene, to export the image with high-quality, go to File. Export 2D graphic. Then choose your destination folder and name your file, and choose the image format that you want. I generally go for PNG because it's the highest quality image format. To play around with the resolution of your exported image. Go to options and pick the width and height that you want from here. I usually go for a big size to guarantee good quality. The bigger the image, the better the quality you will have. Because my drawing canvas is big enough already, if you remember, it's 2,400 pixels in width. So I usually go for around double that amount just in case to guarantee a higher-quality. But of course, the higher the image size, the longer it will take to export. So make sure you go for our size that your computer can handle and make sure that you have this transparent background tip for when you're exporting a 3D model on its own without a background so that you can easily inputted in Clip Studio Paint. E.g. if I have a standalone 3D model like this, and I want to export the house only on its own without any background of any sort. First of all, I need to make sure that everything is transparent behind it. So I'll go to Edit and then untick sky and onto the ground as well if it was available. This way, when I export my image after choosing my destination renaming, I make sure that I have a transparent background on and click Okay and then export. And now when I opened my image and Clip Studio Paint, then it's perfectly transparent and I can easily make use of it and included in my scenes. Now if you have a panel with characters and background, which should do start first with the characters or the background. Personally, most of the time I would prefer exporting the background shot first and then sketching the characters so that their sizes and angles match the scene. Let's say you want to do the opposite. You sketched your characters first, and now you want to take a background shot. You can certainly manually try to adjust the angle and look back and forth and see if the angle is looking correct for your scene. But it might get quite troublesome to keep going back and forth. And it could get frustrating because you need to do multiple shots in order to get it right. Luckily, for Windows users, there is a very nice little software that you can install cold feet, right? Once you have it installed, you can use it to make the windows of your software is transparent. So let me show you how I'll make use of it. I'll go to Clip Studio Paint, zoom into my panel, and try to center it. And then I'll open the SketchUp window on top of it. And since I have retries software installed, I'll hold Control and Shift and click on any number 1-9 to adjust the transparency of the SketchUp window. So when I have it on nine is the least transparent. And when I have it on one is the most transparent. I usually go for five, since it's 50 per cent transparency. And this way I can see both the 3D model and the sketch clearly. So now with the SketchUp window being transparent, I can easily adjust the 3D model to match the scene that I have and the sketches that I did. Once I'm done, I'll bring it back to a higher opacity. I don't know why, but I can't bring the opacity of the window back to 100 per cent. So I usually go back to 90 per cent and I guess still pretty much work with the software easily because everything is visible. But if you want to restore 100% opacity, then you can save your file at this shot and close SketchUp, and then open it again so that you store the 100% opacity. But anyway, I'll keep it at 90%. And since we talked about exporting images, I want to talk about something else. Now, let's say I want to explore the line art of this shot instead of the fully colored version, I can simply do that by going to View faces style and then choose hidden line. Now I can see the lines only of the house. So I can export this line art version on its own. And if I want to explore the colors version without the lines, then I can do the following. Go to view faces Style, Shaded with textures. And then again go back to View edges style and remove edges. And also go back to View edgy style removed profiles to make it a quicker to get those settings. You can save this style by going to the style window over here. I'll call it colors, and I'll write a short description of it. And then I click on this button to create a new style and save it. The same thing for the lines of view, which I'll go back to. I'll name it as lines and give it a description and then save it. Now, I can easily switch between the two without having to do those steps every time. If you want to adjust the thickness of your lines, then go to Edit. And under this edge settings, you can play around with those numbers, profiles, e.g. making them three, or make them one. Play around with those numbers until you get the thickness that you want. I copy pasted those shots into the scene here as colors and as line art. But my line art is looking too thin in this shot, so I can just duplicate it by right-clicking and duplicating the layer and then merge it down to this button. And if it's not thick enough that I can use this button over here, the border effect button, this button add a border to anything in your layer. I'll reduce this down to one, and I'll choose my line art color and color it. So this way I quickly adjusted the weight of the lines that I normally don't prefer this method because the lines seem too thick now I'll remove it. I don't always export the lines separately from the colors. I only do it when I need to, when the lines of the 3D model are to black and I feel that they are ruining the soft look that I'm going for. So again, it's an optional step. Finally, the last thing I want to talk about in SketchUp is adjusting the camera angle. While we can certainly do it manually with our hands. If you want e.g. to get a front shot might not be that easy to get it right manually. So far that you have some default angles that are saved in SketchUp. He can adjust them by going to camera. Then standard views. There's the top, there's the front and the back left, right, and ISO and so on. Let's say you want to take a shot that is two-point perspective. Remember that in two-point perspective, the vertical lines are straight. But for this shot, I can see that the vertical lines are slanted. So to adjust this scene to a two-point perspective, go to camera and then two-point perspective. And now you get the two-point perspective view. I want to show you how to make edits for this house. Make an interesting looking background out of it. So I'm going to choose a certain angle, e.g. this angle, but I'll set it as two point perspective. I can also enable the sunlight shadows by going to View shadows. And under Shadows window, I can adjust the time of the day. And with that also, the shadows will be adjusted according to the solar angle. I can also change the day of the year, since the angle of the sun is different across the days of the year. I can also adjust the intensity of how dark the shadows are and how low the sunlight is. Finally, before exporting my shot, I just want to change the transparency of these windows. They are transparent and I can see the insights of the house. But that's not going to make it easy for me to edit them. So I'll go to Styles and then go to Edit and then go to face settings. And under face settings on tick material transparency. And now the wind doesn't have become opaque. So finally my shot is ready. I'll export it into an image, and I'll import it into Clip Studio Paint and copy paste it to my Canvas and place it where I like. Now I want to complete this scene. I'm going to use this just to show you how to use the 3D models and how to do this for the overall scene. I'll first start by importing a sky image behind the house. I can also make use of the one that comes with Clip Studio Paint itself and resize it. So go for whichever one you want. But I feel like using this one. Next, I want to add the tree. So I'm going to drag this Clip Studio Paint defaulted tree, and place it over here. This is the tree covers this side of the house. Now I want to add walls that surround the house. So I have a 3D model that I downloaded from the Clip Studio assets. I'm going to drag it to my scene. Now I can adjust the angle of the wall manually and place it with the house. There is a more accurate way to do this, which is why play around with the Perspective ruler. To do that, right-click on the ruler that is next to the 3D layer and click Show Rulers. And now you can see that we have the Perspective ruler of this object showing up. I'll rotate it a little bit so we can see the lines better. Now I want to adjust the perspective ruler, but there's also a grid and I want to hide it so I can see my lines appropriately. So I'll click on the ruler icon here. And under the object tool, remove the x z plane here, and also untick the fixed eye level so it can change the position of our vanishing points. Now you can see that as we play around with those lines, the objects angle is changing as well. Now I'll adjust my vanishing points through the guidelines method that I showed you in the perspective lesson. And I'll use the house as a reference for my angle. I'll lower the opacity of the wall and remove the tree so that I can see better. This process can be frustrating sometimes I don't always do it to be honest, but I'm doing it to show you this method so that you can get to apply it when you have scenes that need perfect perspective. To check if your perspective is coming together, right? Move around those guidelines and they should align with all the lines in the same angle. And so far I think it's looking good. I'm going to check the lies on this side as well. This side needs some adjustment. This is looking good enough. Now I will start the opacity of the wall and I'll double-click on it and I'll enable the tree back again. And I'll move though inside the scene. As you can see when I move it, now there is a shadow beneath it that indicates that it's floating. So I'll just click on this button over here to ground it. And instead of moving into this icon, I can just change his position using those arrows. This way. I can easily adjust it while keeping it to ground it. Now because of this, I'll adjust the trees location a little bit because I want to decrease the distance between the wall and the House. Since I adjusted the perspective ruler, I can simply easily drag another wall and play around with this location and continue the wool to sit around the house. I also put a wall over here. Something feels off with the wall. It doesn't really match my perspective ruler. And this is a problem I haven't figured out yet, but I'm going to adjust the angle manually to make it more fitting to the scene. I can play around with the rotation of the wall from the settings under allocate. I'm going to play around with the wide angle. This is a problem I haven't figured. Dissolution, foreign Clip Studio Paint. Sometimes the snap between the 3D model and perspective ruler gets a broken. So now even if I adjust the perspective ruler, the 3D model is not changing. To solve this issue, I can just add a vanishing point using the vanishing point tool that I showed you in the previous lesson. So I'm going to put one and drag it to be here. And duplicate it, and drag it to be on the top of this other vanishing point. And now I almost have the same perspective grid lines. Now I'll add the last wall behind the house and I'll drag it up and rotate it. For this one, I'm going to do it manually. Since you saw it can be time-consuming. So I'm going to disable the ruler on the previous walls and Zoom and in the settings under allocate again, I'll play around with this rotation a little bit so that it matches my perspective guidelines. So this is looking good enough. I want to add a gate to this house. I'll drag the gate 3D model, which I also downloaded from Clip Studio assets and its camera angle a little bit to make it match that of the wall. I'll enable the perspective ruler and I'll remove the fixed eye level and we move the x, z plane grid. Just the perspective ruler to match that of the wall through the allocate other Justice position to push it to be in front of the house. And I'll also rotate it a little bit manually to make it match my perspective grid. Again, you don't have to go this detailed. We're just doing this for the sake of making a perfect looking background. But most of the time I just did skip those steps and do the scene by eyes. We're done with the 3D part, aldehyde, the vanishing points. I'll duplicate this layer here and I'll hide the original copy. And I'll right-click and rasterize this walls there to make it into an image. Because I want to delete this extra part using this color from this wall over here. I'll create a new layer behind the house and manually fill this space behind the house. Now I'll add some grass to the scene by creating a new layer that is beneath all the walls and beneath the house as well. I noticed that the wall over here has a shadow that is cast on the top because it's below the ground level. If I place it on the ground level, the ground levels here, but I just want to do things quickly now through the object tool under apply light source just to remove the cast shadows from ground, to remove that shadow at the top. Now I'll create a new layer below my sky using the gradient tool over here. I'll pick the foreground to background gradient. And I'll choose my color from the foreground to be this one. And I'll choose my color and the background to be a very light or baby blue. And now I'll draw a gradient to complete the empty spaces. And I'll create a new layer above the skies. And using the Cloud or brushes, I'll pick colors from those clouds. And just to quickly add some more clouds. I can now create a new layer above the house and the trees and using the color of the sky. I'll do the same thing that I did in the last lesson. I'll airbrush on top of both and said this mode to screen or hard light. Hard light looks better. In this case, I want to adjust the colors of the house since they are grayish and I want them to look more bluish. So I'll go to layer new correction there and then color balance. With the color balance. I'll adjust the shadows and make them into LU, just the halftone and make it into maybe cyan or maybe a little bit of magenta and a little bit of the blue. And the highlights. Maybe I can set them a little bit yellowish. But I want to apply this only to the house, so I'll clip this layer. So now only the house has changed. I'll do the same thing for the walls. I'll do a new correction there. Colored balance. I'll click Okay and clip it and then adjust the colors. Yellow highlights, shadow, bluish, halftone, also bluish. Then I'll duplicate this and place it above this other walls layer as well. Now I'll add texture to the grass through the aggressive brushes I showed you in the last lesson. I'll take the change brush tip color to have a variety in the colors as I paint. Now I want to replace the windows a little bit to make them more interesting. I'll go to the house layer and go to Select, then select color gamut, and then click on this button and click on the blue color of the windows. So that with this tool you select everything that is colored with this blue. And I also want to add the other blue. So I'll use this icon over here to add to the selection and also like this color again. Now, most of my windows are selected. And if I want to be very specific, then I can really zoom in and select this last color. So now the majority of my windows are selected and click. Okay. Now I can see that some of the top parts of the house is selected two, but we're mostly not going to brush over them. So they're not gonna show. I'll create a new layer now above the house. And using an airbrush, I'll pick a color that is sort of greenish, light blue. And I'll set this new layer is mode to multiply. And using the airbrush as likely airbrush. Some parts of the windows. I'm brushing the top part because it is the shaded part. If I de-select, you can see the before and after the windows look more interesting now, but I'll go back to the selection and I'll create a new layer and use a very light blue color. Or maybe I can pick the color of the sky from here. I can airbrush more parts of the windows to make them look more interesting. So see the before and after this, a gradient really makes the windows of your buildings more interesting. I'm just going to adjust the colors, e.g. for this multiply layer, I want to make it less vivid, reduce the saturation and increases the brightness. And maybe I can drag it to be on top of the color balance layer. And the same thing for the highlight layer. I can drag it over here. And maybe I can also change this layer mode to add the glow or soft light. Hard light. You can experiment and see which one works better. I think overlay looks nice. It looks kind of pales in comparison to the house. So I'm going to create a new layer above the tree and clip it and change its mode to multiply. And then I'll pick also a less saturated, lighter blue. And I'll airbrush some parts of the tree. I'll choose also a darker color and airbrush more. And the buttons side. And with a soft eraser, I'll erase any parts that I feel I shaded too much. So this is the before and after. Now this guy is looking quite empty behind my house. So I can easily grab the skyline from the default eclipse studio materials and put it behind my house and rules and everything but in front of this guy. And I'll zoom out a little bit and resize it and move it with the move tool and resize it again. And I'll bring it in front of the clouds. Of course, these buildings would look much better if I had a frontal view of the house. Since they were drawn for our different frontal view camera angle that I'll just put them here to fill the background. And if I also want to fill the background more than I can use a 3D model from the collection that comes with the Clip Studio Paint as well, by going to 3D, then background, then housing. And I can drag this residential area. And the same thing as well. Also adjust this angle and make it match the overall angle of the shot. But I'm going to again do it too quickly just to fill the background. And I can duplicate this layer and move it over here to fill this space over here. I can either leave those 3D models as they are or do some edits to them. E.g. I. Can remove the light source to make them look less detailed. I find that to be moving the light source sometimes make 3D models look less 3D. By the way, the houses and the buildings are looking bluish now and are fading with the atmosphere because we already applied and airbrushed layer with a hard light mode. But if I remove this airbrushed layer, then you can see that their colors are vivid. So enabling this has really helped feed them into the atmosphere and that can airbrush them more by creating clipped layer on top of both of them and setting it to maybe hard light or screen. Again, whichever it looks better, and fade them even more to bring the focus on the house I have over here. Of course you can do other edits, e.g. we can add a new layer on top of everything and with a yellow color and maybe you can air brush a little bit of sunlight. And we can try different layer modes, e.g. let's try hard light, or maybe soft light or overlay screen or add to glow. The glow is too powerful, but that's when you want a very sunny day. I think I'll go for overlay. I like it best. And I can continue airbrushing more to give this sunlit feeling. And I can reduce the opacity as well if it's too vivid. This scene is almost done. If we look at it from over here, we still can add other things like a pavement or street lights or things like that. But I'm going to keep it at this stage because really talking in depth about backgrounds and editing them would need a course on its own since there's so much to talk about. But one last feature I want to tell you about is a feature that's available only in the x version of Clip Studio Paint, which is extracting lines from 3D models. E.g. let's say I wanted to extract the lines of the walls over here. Then I'll go to this walls layer and under the layer property window, click on this button over here, which is extract line. As you click on it, you'll see that you'll get a preview of the lines of your layer. There are so many settings for this tool, but I set mine to the following. If you're satisfied with how everything looks like, click on Convert layer two, lines and tones, and then input those numbers if you want to get results similar to wine. And then click Okay. Once you click Okay, a new group will be formed. One has the outline or the lines of your image. The second has the screen tons of your layer. And the third has a fill of the whole thing. So when it extracts lines, it immediately highest the 3D model or the image that you previously had. So I'll enable it again and go back to the layer and remove the extract line option to get my image back again. And I'll enable this a new folder. But I'll delete the tone layer because I don't need it. And I'll delete the fill layer as well because I don't need it in this case, do this. I got outlines for my image so quickly and easily. If I want to change the colors of this outline, then I can change the expression color of the layer under layer property from gray to colour. And I can choose the color I want, e.g. I'll choose the color of my line art and then I'll go to Edit, Convert to draw and color. And now my wall has been colored with the color I chose to make lines of land war with your background, you can reduce the opacity and maybe change the layer mode to multiply. And maybe also adjust the layers colors and see how it looks like. You can extract lies not only from images but from 3D models as well. So if we go to those houses at the back, we can also extract their lines in a similar way. So I'll click Convert and click Okay, and hide the outline too, and hide the fill. And now I only have the outlines of the houses. This is a very useful feature that I use a lot, especially for backgrounds of interior environments. E.g. this bed was a 3D model that I converted into lines to make it look to the pillow was 3D as well. And those drawers where 3D as well. And the store was a 3D model as well. But by extracting the lines, I could easily convert them into a 2D image. And I did edits, and that's how I constructed this whole scene. Lastly, and before ending this lesson, I just wanted to talk about the tip that can be helpful when you want to add characters to your background regarding how to place them correctly. Now of course, you can use the Clip Studio Paint 3D figures, and adjust their angles accordingly so that they match the scene. But if you want to scratch it on free hand, then I found following these steps very helpful, especially for seated characters. Basically, draw where the bottom of your character would be. And then draw their feet on the floor and then connect them. And that's how you can easily place your character and have them nicely seated on the chair. The same tip was very useful for drunk character sitting on a bicycle as well. I did that again by drawing the bottom of the character first and then the feet. And then connect the two. I'm just going to make the background more transparency. You can see clearer what's going on. Yeah. I placed the bottom and the feet. And I also place the hands on the bicycle. And now just connect things together. Of course, using references will really help you as well getting the postgraduate and sometimes it is necessary. But this is again, a good tool for quickly and easily placing your characters on objects. I hope you've found all those tips useful. And really now is just the time for you to explore all those tools that we've discussed and start to creating your amazing looking backgrounds. In the next lesson, I'll tell you about useful websites that you can download many useful assets from where they're 3D models or brushes or image materials. 21. 4-6 Sources to Get Assets: Alright, now I want to talk to you about where I get the S is for my background, whether it's images or 3D models or brushes. When I'm looking for a particular asset, I have several websites and platforms that I check and search into them until I find the most suitable assets for my needs. So in this lesson, I want to introduce you to these resources. The number one sources, the one that I've mentioned multiple times throughout this class, which is Clip Studio assets. As I told you, Clip Studio assets comes with both free and paid assets. So you can always check the free assets first of all, and if you don't find what you're looking for, you can check the paid assets. Of course, the assets that are here are not just for backgrounds, but for the truly everything, whether it's character design, our FX, our gradient maps, you can find so many amazing things. I've made it a habit for me to check it every now and then and download or bookmark the things that interests me. The next destination that I really love and has saved me a lot specifically with the backgrounds of my web tune is a con 3D. Acorn 3D is an asset website made specifically for web two and creators. They offer a 3D SketchUp models that were made mainly for web to news. You can find so many interesting things with different themes. They not only have a SketchUp models, but they also have 3D models and other formats. And they also sell brushes and image packs and sound effects and so many things that come in handy. This website will most likely have that particular thing that you're looking for. And by the way, echo 3D is collaborating with me and as giving out a little gift to this class. As participants, you can apply a coupon code under my name, cluvious, and get a two dollar discount on your order to apply your coupon, you need to have an account on the website. Once you register and sign in, go to my page, then user Home, then click on apply coupon over here. When you're here type of cluvious, then you click apply coupon. And once you do that, you'll be ready to apply it when you check out. The next really useful work to an asset is store, is this website called BG outlet, but the website's address is called Ginny x.com. This website is in Japanese, but you can always translate it to English using Google translator so you can find your way around it. This website also has a lot of 3D models, whether in SketchUp or other formats. And it also comes with amazing image assets from this website. Specifically, I bought the trees and rocks and grass image assets that I showed you in the natural Scenarios lesson. They also sell some of their products on this booth website, which is also on Japanese, but you can always translate it to English and find your way around. There are two other websites that sell Web two in assets. To be honest, I personally haven't tried them, but I still want to mention them for you because you might find them useful. The first one is pixel dot sc. They also seem to have a clip Studio assets and SketchUp and brushes and image assets. So you can take a look at what they have. And the second one is called the 3D Web two in webshop, which is in Korean, but also you can translate it to English and find your way around the website. They seem like they mainly sell 3D models specifically for SketchUp use. Another website I want to introduce his gum road gun roared is like a digital marketplace for creators to post their digital products and assets. So you can find a lot of interesting and brushes and assets if you search for drawing and painting and then Clip Studio Paint, I haven't tried to purchasing any of these so far, but the foliage of brushes pack I showed you in the natural Scenarios lesson while I'm on this website. And you can definitely find so many things, not just for Clip Studio Paint, but for other apps as well. Now let's say you are looking for a particular 3D model, but couldn't find anything useful on the previous websites, then there are other websites that I'd recommend you search in. The first one is called turbo squid, you can search for what you want. E.g. I'll search for animus cool. Then you can choose the format of your 3D model, e.g. I'll check on SketchUp models. And you can see that they have more 3D models for sale, which also look really nice. There is also a Sketchfab. You can also find 3D models here and purchase them and use them. But I guess these more sophisticated 3D models need to be opened in a 3D modeling software. For that, I wouldn't recommend a software more than Blender. Blender is a free and open source 3D modeling software. And you can open so many formats of 3D models. Honestly, blender is a whole world on its own. And I personally want to delve into it because there's so many interesting things to explore and do that. But let's say even after this, you still couldn't find the environment that you want, then I can recommend one last option, which is my last resort, when I really don't find what I'm looking for anywhere else, that we'll be using game engines like Unreal Engine and unity. Both game engines have their own assets, stars, and both have really amazing and interesting 3D models. Many of them are made specifically for games, so they're realistic 3D models. But you can also find some cool looking backgrounds and environments like this one, e.g. on the Unity Asset Store. And this one e.g. that I found on the Unreal Engine acids store. Now using game engines is a whole another story. It's really outside the scope of this course, but it's a path or a route that I wanted to introduce to you so that you have this option in mind. So that you always keep an open mind to explore new things and learn the world of web twins is really amazing. And you'll notice that as you work on your comic, you'll be broadening your horizons as you go on. So it's really, really cool to see how much you learn along the way because you are drawing, I wept doing. I hope you'll find these resources useful. Now that we're done talking about backgrounds, in the next chapter, we will do the interesting part of setting the mood in our panels. So in the next lesson, we'll talk about color adjustments. 22. 5-1 Color Adjustments: Alright, we'll finally start talking about color adjustments, adjusting the colors after you're done drawing and coloring can really enhance your scene even more and make it look more interesting. In this lesson, I want to talk more about the color adjustment layers that we have slightly went over in the previous lessons. So basically if you remember, there are adjustments layer that we can add from layer and then a new connection there. And then we can see all those options for color adjustments. Or we can add the color adjustments immediately on the layer itself by going to Edit Tonal Correction. And then we'll have the same settings, but this will be applied on the layer itself. That's why I generally use the correction layer because it is something that I can remove and adjust and play around with anytime I want. So let's explore the correction there options that we have. First of all, we have the brightness contrast. By using this one, you can reduce or increase the brightness of your scene. And you can also play with the contrast of your scene. Personally, I almost never use this in my work tone panels. The next one is hue saturation luminosity, which we already talked about. You can play around with the hue and saturation and luminosity of the colors in your image. I rarely use it to, unless it was for editing. This guy's like I showed you in the previous lessons. Then we have pasteurization, which kind of narrows down the colors and makes the gradient look more like chunks of colors. Instead. I don't use this one either, to be honest. Then there's reverse the gradient, which inverts the colors. This is a really cool effect and can be used for dramatic purposes, e.g. increasing essence of shock into your scene. I think it's really interesting. You can of course play with the opacity of the correction layer and also play around with the layer mode. To show you what I mean by it looks good for our shock teen. If we apply the reverse gradient here, you can immediately feel the shock has become more intense. Next, we have level correction. So over here we have three arrows. By dragging the arrow that's on the right side to the left is going to make the light parts of my image lighter. By dragging the left, I go towards this side, it makes the dark parts of my image darker. And by dragging the one in-between, e.g. let's say towards the left, it makes the dark parts lighter. And dragging it to the right makes the light parts darker. Over here we have these two arrows. By dragging this arrow is going to take the light colors of my image towards the gray side. Similarly, if I drag the black one towards the gray, It's also going to take the dark parts toward the gray and makes them lighter. If I bring those two arrows close to each other, than my image is going to transfer it into a grayish version. If I click on this over here, I'll see that I was controlling the RGB. Red, green, blue, which means all of the colors in my image. But I can also control colors separately, since colors on the screen consists of red, green, and blue components. So I can edit each one individually. E.g. if I play with the red channel, I can introduce more redness and subtract redness. And I can come up with some interesting results. If I play around with it. Really when adjusting colors, just play around with the sliders until things start looking right. But I want to talk more about channels under the tone curve. The tone curve is very similar to levels, except that you can control colors with more accuracy or more details. So if we take a look here, we have a graph that I side of this graph represents the light colors and the left side represents the dark colors. And in the middle we have the mid tones. By dragging stuff upwards, I'm going to add lightness to them. By dragging them downwards. I'm going to add darkness to them or subtract lightness by clicking Reset over here, I can go back to my starting point. So that means that since I have the light parts here and the dark parts here, I can play around nicely with the images colors, e.g. if I drag the curve towards the bottom over here, I made the dark colors darker because this is the dark side and dragging downwards mixed colors darker. If I bring this upwards, then I made the light colors lighter. And the opposite can also work. Doing this makes the light color is darker and the dark colors lighter. So they're kind of shifting towards the gray. But we can use it in simple terms just to introduce some interesting effects. Really just need to play around with it and see what results you like. Personally, I really find the tone curve useful to make my character blend with the background. E.g. my characters colors here are looking bluish, but the background is green and yellowish. And I want to adjust his colors so that he blends better with the background. So I'm going to click Okay, and I have the tone curve layer over here. I'm going to clip it to the folder of my characters layers. And now I'll go back to it again by double-clicking. And I want to play around with the channels instead of all the colors at once. So we also have channels here. We have red, green, blue, or we can control all the colors from the RGB side. But I'll go e.g. towards red. It's a similar thing. If I drag upwards, then I'm going to add that to my image. If I drag downwards, then I'm going to subtract yet and subtracting red gives me blue. I'll reset this and show you how it is for the other colors. For green, if I drag upwards and then I add the green, if I drag downwards, then I subtracted green, which gives me reddish colors, but I would say more of a magenta color. And lastly, for a blue, dragging upwards, takes the colors towards the blue, and dragging them downwards, Takes them towards a green. I'll reset. And I want my colors look greenish. So I'm going to subtract the blue from them. So I'll adjust my colors. Taking the curve down little by little and seeing how it's looking like. As you can see so quickly, I adjusted the colors and there are now more interesting and much more background butter. But I think I'll add some red as well to the highlights, mainly subtracted from the shadows. And maybe add more blue to the shadows. I think the character is looking now much better than it was before. He's a blending better with the background. But if I want to do further adjustments and refine those colors more than I use one more interesting color adjustment layer, which is color balance. We use this a little bit before, but I'll go over it in more depth now. Still click Okay and clip it to my character because I want to focus on adjusting the colors of my character first before the overall colors. So I'll double-click to go back to the menu. Now for the color balance menu, the colors are divided into three options. I can edit the shadows, and I can edit the half-tones, and I can edit the highlights. It's always by default on the half-tones menu, the half-tones are like the middle tones or the overall general tones of the picture. I don't like to start with this first. I'd like to start first with shadows. And usually I like to take my shadows towards the blue just a little bit and see how they look, and sometimes towards magenta. But for this scene is not looking that good. I think I need to take them towards the green and maybe add some blue. So taking the colors towards any side of these colors, we'll add more of the color. So if I drag this, then read will be added to my shadows. If I drag it over you, then cyan is going to be added to my shadows and so on. It's a very simple concept. I think he's looking good now, but I'll go to the highlights and add more yellow. I tried to make this contrast between the shadows and the highlights. I usually like keeping the highlights with warm colors, the shadows at cool colors. So I take the highlights towards the yellow slash red, sometimes green, and then the shadows. I take them toward the blue to have this balance between cool and warm colors. And then finally, I can adjust the mid tones and see how they look like. Then click Okay. And I can see the before and after. I think it's looking better now, but I can just reduce the opacity of the color balance layer. And I can also add a color balance layer for all of the image above everything in my panel. On this step, I also drag the shadows towards the blue. Sometimes maybe magenta or cyan, towards the cool colors, basically the highlights towards yellow and maybe read. But again, this is becoming too vivid. Just showing for the sake of explaining. It's can you see the before and after? And you can always play around with the opacity and reduce it as much as you want. As for the binarization color adjustment. I don't really use it for getting a black and white effect of your image. And I don't particularly use that in my comic. And finally, the gradient map color adjustment layer, which we talked about already in the lesson where we convert it to grayscale backgrounds to their colored version. I still like sometimes to play around with the gradient maps and reduce the opacity and play with there blending modes to see what effects I can get. So that was about color adjustment layers, but we can also make use of gradients to introduce a nice effect to our panel. And I'm going to select my panel with the marquee tool so that I make the gradient within this area only. I'll go to the gradient tool. And I can use any of those default gradients that I have. And I'll hold Shift and create a gradient. I can play around with the layer properties. As you can see, I can come up with very interesting results even though I'm just laying around with it. I especially like using hard light or soft light or overlay. It can immediately make your panel look more interesting. Now maybe it's not so obvious for this panel because it's irrelevant. But if I show you this panel over here, the character looks good with the background. But after applying a gradient overlay, the whole panel started looking more interesting. I applied a gradient overlay here, ranging from purple towards orange, yellow. And I made two copies of it. One of them I set it to color burn, and one of them I set it to linear burn. And of course I came up with this after playing around with the settings and seeing what looks most interesting. Here's another example of another panel that I made more intense by adding soft light gradient that ranges from darker blue towards red to give this intense feeling and make the panel look more effective. So try playing around with all those options I talked about, and you'll immediately see a nice effect on your artworks. In the next lesson, we'll talk about adding lighting and shading to your panels. 23. 5-2 Lighting & Shading: In this lesson, I want to show you how you can add lighting and shading effects so quickly to immediately make your panel look more interesting, I'll use this panel as an example. I want to introduce the effect that this guy is coming from the shadows towards a sunlit place. To add that effect, I created a new clip layer. And I'm going to choose a color that is kind of pale purplish. And using a normal brush, I'm going to brush over e.g. let's say the top part of his head. And then I'll change this layer mode to multiply. So before and after, I can immediately feel that this is a shaded part and this is a sunlit part. I can also use the blur tool by going over here and choosing blur. Then with this tool, I can blur the edges of my shade because it's a shade coming from a fireplace. So smoothing it out indicates that it is a far light source. I can also lock this layer and airbrush. Well, choosing a very warm color from over here, e.g. light reddish color. And I can just airbrush the edge of the shade to have a transition between the shading color and the sunlight color. I can also introduce a cooler color and the shadows, e.g. I. Can use this pale, darker blue and airbrush over here. So my shading layer is looking like this now, instead of being just pale purple, I introduced a hint of a warm color on the edge here, and a darker color overview. And I can add even more and then bring it back to multiply. So that was the first thing. We can also make the lighting effect more dramatic by introducing a new layer on top of everything without the clipping it to the character and choosing a yellowish color, yellow slash orange, something like this. With an air brush. I can airbrush over here. And for highlights, I try out the following their modes, e.g. color, dodge, glow, dodge, the glow, hard light, sometimes overlay. But for this particular scene, I think I'm going to use a more yellowish color that's not so light and air brush and set its more to add the glow, e.g. you can immediately see this dramatic effect happening, or hard light. These are my favorite layer modes. If I want to go for hard light, I'll use a slightly lighter color. Then I can also create a new layer and use a combination of both. So a little bit of hard light and a little bit of the glow. So that gave me intense lighting. The lighting generally in daylight settings, I use warm colors for the lights, e.g. ranging from yellow to red. And for the shadows, I use cool colors ranging from violet to blue. So I'll choose a bluish color, a pale, darker bluish color like this. And I'll create a new layer and set the mode to multiply. And airbrush over here on the dark side to make it darker. So now with those simple three layers, I immediately introduced this interesting lighting. Or instead of multiply, I can also use hard light and use a darker color because Hard Light layer mode kind of projects the color that you have onto your colors. So choosing a dark color, saturated color can allow me to introduce this effect. If I compare this with using multiply, multiply feels less vivid, but Hard Light has that vividness. I can also use Linear Burn, our color burn. You can experiment around a lot with layer modes and see what interesting thing you can come up with. And also always play around with opacities and see what effects you get. Of course, you can adjust the overall balance of your panel with color balance tool, dragging highlights, tours, yellow shadows maybe towards the blue, magenta, and see how it's looking more interesting. Now, another cool effect I really like to make use of is making intense lighting, which is very simple to add. So I'll create a new clip layer on my character and set this to multiply. Then I'll choose the color that I'm going for, e.g. I want to go for maybe a purplish look with a brush. I can just brush over my scene and then erase the edges of the character to indicate that this is backlighting and have this intense lighting effect. After you subtract those highlighted parts, you can adjust again with your pen like we did earlier in the shading part. If you don't want to subtract directly from your shadow layer, then you can create a layer mask by clicking on your shading there and then clicking on this button over here, Create Layer Mask and then erasing stuff. Our painting. To bring it back, regardless of any color you have chosen, it will still paint over. And you can use a soft eraser as well to make the surroundings less intense. The nice thing with layer masks is that you can right-click the mask and untick enable mask. So that means that all the racing was done on the mask itself. So you can easily edit it anytime, even if e.g. you make edits to the base shading layer, e.g. we can introduce more red and some blue. So that means my shading there. And right now it looks like this. But by playing around with the shades on the mask itself, I can edit those so easily. And to make the lighting even more dramatic, you can create another layer and set its mode to multiply and maybe airbrush also on the middle part of the character. And to make it even more intense, you can create a new clip layer and change. It's more to add the glow and then pick a color for our highlights, e.g. this orangeish color. And then you can add highlights. This gives a feeling that there is backlighting of yellow color. And of course, you can make your shades darker to increase that contrast. So that makes your highlights look more effective. And play around with the opacity of the highlights part and so on. It's really, really fun to play with the colors and the lighting. This is really my favorite part by using their most, that's how I was able to create this kind of lighting. I use similar methods, shading the characters first and then adding highlights on their edges will then add the glow layer or hard light layer. In this example, the highlights are blue. So I added a cyan color with a hard light on the edge of the character. And then added a glow dodge layer, again with the same color. And then added a multiply layer over here with a pale blue color. And that's also how I made those powers with Louis by introducing a glow dodge layer on top of the power. And also I made this character globe by adding a glow dodge layer on top of him only to introduce this effect. Using multiply layers is also the way to change the lighting of your scene based on the time of the day. So let's say I wanted to change the lighting here to match that of sunset timing. Then I'll enable my multiply shading layer, which I had already done previously. And now click Control U to bring up hue saturation luminosity. And I'll just make this multiply layer into orange or red color. And as you can see, I immediately got the sunset effect. And if it was nighttime, then I can change this to something like this, that pale bluish color. But I can also introduce another layer. I'll select and fill this whole area and choose a very light pale blue color, and then edit, fill, and set the layer mode to multiply. And I can play around with the lighting of this layer just a little bit. Even without the shading there, by just applying one multiply layer, I already changed the look to a night look. And by enabling these shades, I get a backlight flighting. It's really not that necessary. But anyway, with one layer only we can immediately change the lighting of the scene. And finally, if it was a cloudy sky, then I can enable a multiply layer with a grayish color. Reduce its opacity a little bit, and also introduce a new correction there. And reduce the saturation of my character just a little bit. And then because this scene looks a little bit too pale, then I'll introduce a new correction there and use color balance and maybe make the shadows a little bit more bluish just to get rid of that pure gray look, personally, I like to use a gray colors that have a bit of a tint into them. So you can see the before and after. Using those same tips, I converted this background that we made earlier of this forest from a Daylight Time, 02:00, you're looking scene just by changing this Keita cloudy one and doing the color adjustments like I showed you. I highly urge you to experiment with all the tips that we've introduced so far. You will definitely make your panels look more interesting by adding lighting and shading and adjusting the colors. The next lesson, we'll talk about delivering emotions by playing around with the looks of the text. 24. 5-3 Delivering Emotions Through Text: Now I want to talk about how you can deliver the emotions of your characters better by playing around with the text of their speeches. Their written language is very powerful and expressive and playing around with the shape of the text, the size and the weight can really invoke different feelings towards the readers. So I'll go over some useful tips while showing you examples in order to deliver the idea better. First of all, playing with the shape of the font, the size and the thickness can help invoke a louder voice, e.g. over here, the character is saying, Well, I wonder how. But because I made this word wander and a larger font size, and I made a thick as well. Now when you read it, it feels like he's saying it in the following, don't. Well, I wonder how. So playing around with the size and weight of this word helps give that feeling. The same thing over here. She's saying, yeah, yeah, right. But I made the word write it static so that it feels like she's saying yeah, yeah, right over here. She's saying, if only talk to me like normal people, you're getting this normal kind of tone instead of normal because the word normal is in metallic here. Then she says, instead of shouting at me, which is in the bigger font size as well, and I also made it bold to indicate that she's raising her tone of voice as she's fighting with him. Also play around with the font properties a little bit can make shouting look more intense. E.g. here she's saying no, well, this absolutely works out. If I make the snow into italic, then I can feel as being more effective. And I can make everything look even more effective by selecting my texts and going to the sub tool properties. And then under font, I can play around with a vertical ratio by increasing this. Also increasing the size of the text box. I can make the no more exaggerated, even more if I increase the vertical ratio war. And of course I can still play around with the SKU. So you see this little manipulation made the text more impactful. Also, we can play around with the font type to give different feelings based on the mood and the type of the character as well. E.g. for cutesy character, we can use a cutesy font and also maybe with a fluffy looking speech bubbles. This differentiates this cute characters pH from the normal speech. The immediately invokes this feeling of different character. We can also change the font to give a creepy feeling. E.g. I. Chose this font over here, which I really like called feral, to invoke a feeling of creepiness. Like my character here was talking normally with my usual dialogue font. But then suddenly I switch to this font to indicate a feeling of creepiness. Like he's carrying this girl with his speech. He's being creepy. So this change of font has introduced this change in the mood. Also, I really like using a strong shouting font for characters that are screaming, especially in an evil way. So e.g. here, I use this font called Sean and punk custom to invoke this feeling of the character screaming in a scary way. And I also increase the vertical ratio to make this creaming look more impactful and more scary. Sometimes you can also handwrite the speech instead of using a font because this could make it look more effective. E.g. here, I wrote the screaming sentence with my handwriting because I felt I couldn't find the appropriate font to express the emotion that I wanted to convey. And also over here in this panel that I haven't finished yet, my character is shouting saccharides name. And I wanted that to be very impactful. So I did that by handwriting the letters myself. And I feel they are much more impactful than if I just used a normal font. I think this can also be very effective to invoke a creepy fluff. If you had e.g. an evil character laughing, then you can just hand write that kind of laugh. Make it look more creepy, eerie. For handwriting and brushes. I highly recommend this brush set that I downloaded from the Clip Studio assets. It comes with a lot of interesting brushes that you can express so many different feelings with. So feel free to give it a try by downloading it. Of course, there are much, much more possibilities. The world of text is really amazing. And I highly urge you to read more comics. Because the more you read, the more interesting things you'll find, the more interesting things you'll start to explore with yourself. The next lesson, we'll talk about expressing emotions and your panels. 25. 5-4 Expressing Motion: Now in this lesson I want to talk about how to express motions and give that feeling of the characters moving in your panels. There are several things you can do and we'll go over them one by one. The first n quickest way is by using Motion Blur. I'll merge all the layers of my character first by selecting them all. Then right-clicking and selecting merge selected layers. And I'll select all and copy this. Then I'll undo to retain my separated layers. And then I'll paste what I copied on top of the character. And now I'll select the character with the marquee tool and then go to Filter blur, motion blur. And this way, as you can see, I have a motion blur being applied, but this is just a preview. So I can play around with the settings. You can play with the angle of the motion blur. I want it to be towards this way, since the character is running from the backside towards the screen. I think this kind of angle is good. I can also play around with the direction of the blur, e.g. now it's set to backward, but I can also set it to forward. That can also set it to be in both directions. I find using backward to be the most effective in this kind of scene to indicate that the back of the character is a blurry since he's coming forward. The forward is going to be clearer than the backward. You can also play around with the mood of the blur. There is box, which is the one we have now, and there is a smooth. I also prefer box over smooth. Once I'm satisfied, I'll click Okay. And then I want to erase some parts of this blurred layer so that I can show more of my character beneath it. So what I'll do is I'll deselect and then I'll create a layer mask. And with a soft eraser, I'll erase this side of my character that I indicate that the blur is happening only on the backside and give that motion feeling. Can you see the before and after? It has really given that feeling of motion. And I can also reduce the opacity a little bit if it felt too much. Another way is we can use the blur tool, e.g. I. Have those two blurred tools that I downloaded from Clip Studio Paint assets, and I'll show you how they look like. So there is this speed of blur, and if I use it over my character on the side that I want, then I can get the motion effect and have it only on the places that I want myself. It's a very interesting blur tool. And similarly, the shock of blur gives a different kind of blur. It works for both shock and motion, I would say. So by using this tool, I can invoke a feeling of motion a little bit. Then also I can erase some parts that I don't want. Of course, you can use the shock of blur as well to invoke a feeling of shock and make the scene look more shocking and intense. But let's go back to this panel over here. I can do a further step. And on a new layer with a brush, I can draw stream lines to indicate that the character is running. And again, I'll put those lines on this side. But as you can see during those slides, they're free hand way doesn't look so neat. So what we can do instead, we can go to the ruler tool and choose a special ruler, and then choose parallel line, and then the ruler and the line direction that we want. And now go back to the pen and easily draw those streamlines in a neat way. As we're applying those steps. I came up with this result, which is what I showed you at the beginning of the lesson. You can also go one step further and apply effects to the sound effect of your panel, e.g. here I did the dash sound effect, but I copied this sound effect on a different layer. I also did a motion blur for it. And with this, when I look at the complete scene, I can immediately feel this motion that the character is running. You can also use stream lines to indicate motion. And to get that, go to the figure tool over here. And you'll see that there are multiple options. So by choosing this tool, e.g. I'm going to draw streamlines. And then I can play around with them, rotate their angle with the object tool. And I can also play around with their settings from here, e.g. their length, angle and how group they are, the gaps between them. And if I play with the control points that I can introduce even more lines. And I can add a layer mask to this newly added scattered stream lines layer. And with a soft eraser, I can erase the parts that I don't want to show my character more. You can also find some ready-made streamlines in the manga materials under effects line. Then choosing speed line. You'll see that you have some interesting things to add. Once you ask such an image, you can play around with its color. Make it white, and also do the same thing, erase what you don't want and so on. There are also other options other than the speed lines. There is the saturated lines which go towards the center of the image. There is the sea urchin flash lines. And there's the butterfly rash, which can be used as a background for your characters. E.g. I. Use the saturated lines here since my character is running in the center. So to bring all the focus towards him and to give the feeling that he's running towards the direction of the forest. For the background. The background was originally like this, but I copied all the items of my background together like I did with my character earlier, and then made a selection with the marquee tool and then went to filter blur, radial blur. And by playing around with this x, I can change the center of the blur. Making a selection of your panel beforehand is really important in the case of radial blur, so that you can see this x and focus on your blurb point to be towards where you want it exactly. Because as you can see, this kind of a blur is a little bit heavy on the computer and it takes time to render. So the more you narrow down the area of your selection, the better and the quicker you can get this effect done. I can also play around with my son effect layer and also apply radial blur to it to make it look more effective and to make it match the motion of the character. One last thing for this saturated line, you can get it not just from those images over here, but there's a tool for it, like the streamline tools that I showed you earlier. There is the saturated line tool over here, e.g. I'll use one of them and draw a circle on where I want my effect to be concentrated towards. And then I have the saturated lines immediately drawn. And you can also play around with their settings, who the object tool, increasing their amount or decreasing, and so on. Feel free to explore the other tools as well. The next lesson, we'll talk about playing with backgrounds to invoke different kinds of moods based on the emotional state of the scene. 26. 5-5 Mood Expressing Backgrounds: Well generally the panels of web tunes are drawn on a white canvas or a white background. This does not always have to be necessarily the case. We can always play around with the background color according to our liking. Personally, I haven't experimented much with other colors. What I mainly focused on switching between black and white. So my comic panels are generally in white when it's a normal mood and nothing serious is going on. But I switched to a black background. What I want to indicate a sense of mysteriousness, e.g. over here during the nighttime, or essence of mysteriousness, even if you're a daytime. By making the background black, is kind of changing the whole atmosphere and the whole vibe of those panels. And I also use a black background when I want to introduce a sad backstory or a sad flashback. And also when the fight is about to happen, especially when the characters are expressing deep and intense emotions. These panels wouldn't be as effective if they were left with a white background. Also, I use it when there is a whole fight scene or everything feels wrong. E.g. in this chapter of mine, the antagonist is introduced and a fight happens between him and the main characters. So that's why I kept the whole chapter and a black background to give that feeling that something is wrong is different and something scary is about to happen or is happening. But the thing is, I don't abruptly change the background from black to white, but rather I easily through it by using a gradient. So e.g. here, I switched from the white background by introducing a light background that goes towards the gray and then goes towards the black. So as the reader is crawling, the background changes for them. It doesn't feel abrupt. And instead of using a gradient, you can also use some sort of grunge brushes to introduce that change. E.g. here I use the grunge brush, is the character is about to release his anger. So that means that it's not a very smooth transition. Also, playing around with the backgrounds of the panels themselves can help invoke different feelings based on the mood of the scene. One of those ways is by adding streamlines. E.g. this panel over here wouldn't be as effective if I remove those streamlines and kept it as a gradient. Those streamlines added the feeling of shock or the camera going up towards the character's face or something like that. Similarly, using a Beta flash for the background indicates some kind of surprise or astonishment. E.g. over here, I used one of those images that come by default with the Clip Studio Paint and played around with the colors a little bit. You can play around with the colors, if anything, by playing with the layer color under Layer Properties, I changed it from black to this color to better match the tone of my panel. And then I applied a multiply layer with an airbrush and that's how I got it to look this way. You can also add noise in the background or goals or grunge, e.g. over here in this panel, I use this brush that you can find under the Declaration tools under hatching. You can find this goes to cloud and by using it, you can create this effect. There is also the goals of brush. There's also the friction brush. All of those brushes really helped bring the tension feeling in the scene or portray this tress that the character is feeling. To show you how I constructed this background, I first added a gradient with these colors. And then I imported this image from the Clip Studio assets, which by the way, you can find under monochromatic patterns. And then you can find all different sorts. There's basics which are just green tones. There is a gradient, There's crosshatching. There's patterns which are generally used for clothing and stuff like that. But there's this that I really like the effect and feeling. You have bright feelings and you have dark feelings. And there's also a texture which I really like. From the texture I got this double the Cloud and lowered its opacity. Then I added this grungy brush with a dark color and a multiply layer mode. Then I added more grungy brush with a purple color from the background. Then I added an overlay layer with a yellow color on top of the panel using the same brush. Finally, I use the same brush, again with a white color to finalize the look of the panel. Making use of those textures can really bring us some interesting effects, e.g. in this panel over here, I used this forest texture first and change these colors by playing around with those colors over here from the Layer Properties. And then I applied those noise lines while reducing their opacity a little bit to introduce some sort of tension in the scene. And then I also applied some rough lines on top of the character itself to give this feeling of worry and overthinking and kind of feeling lost. And if you notice over here, I didn't shade the character to give the feeling that the character lost his sense of his surroundings and is really simplified to those basic looks without any complicated shading that could make this feeling gold lost. And I also added a white outline surrounding the character to separate him from the background a little bit. And if I want to make this even more effective than I can remove the colors altogether and simplify the scene to a monochromatic look to indicate a deeper sense of shock. Speaking of ready-made backgrounds, you can also find some colored ones by looking in the materials under color pattern, you can find effect and feeling, which also has a bright stuff and dark loud stuff, which I used in this scene, e.g. I. Use this shock one to indicate the feeling that they are fighting and things are blowing up between them. Finally, my favorite kinds of backgrounds, which is the no background background. Basically by keeping the background white and adding backlighting to the character, I can give this feeling of the character being immersed in their own thoughts and forgetting all about their surrounding. And is also useful when the character is having deep monologue with themselves. And it's questioning what's happening and things like that. But I also like using it to indicate some sort of shock. E.g. my character, he was attacked. So to indicate that she was attacked and to make it look more impactful, I added no background to this panel and just added multiply. There's over here and some noise texture to give the feeling that everything went silent when she was attacked. The following panel as well. The character is looking at this well-being extremely shocked and is having an unbelieving look on his eyes and his being speechless. If we scroll through those panels again, we can have a feeling like time has stopped or slowed down when this action happened. So having no background in those panels, in my opinion, intensifies the emotions that I want to be delivered through them. So yeah, that's why it's my most favorite kinds of backgrounds. And it's also of course the easiest to apply. You can finish those panels so quickly. Just do quick shading for the character and then put a multiply layer and add some backlighting and that's it, you're done. So by reaching this point, if you followed along, you hopefully have reached a stage where you have almost completed your chapter. And all that's left is to export your images and finally publish them online. So on the next lesson, we'll talk about how you can export your comic to make it suitable for the electron format so that you can upload it with ease. 27. 6-1 Exporting Webtoons: Congratulations on finishing your chapter. At this stage, you're finally ready to export it and publish it. So in this lesson, we'll go over how you can export your images in a way that is suitable for the web tune format, mainly for the electron Canvas platform. If you are an X user, you can export all of your chapter into images at once by going to File export with dune. And then over here, make sure to have all pages used or you can specify the range of the pages that you want. I usually go for all pages and you specify the width from here. I specify the width to be 800. Because if you remember from Chapter one, we talked about how the electron canvas size guidelines are 800 by 1,280 pixels in height. So we're here only specifying the width. But as for the height, we can set it from these settings under File Export Settings, choose this last option, divide vertically and change this number to 1,280 pixels. So this will show you the number of files you will get. Finally, from here, you can choose your destination where you want your files to be saved, and then set the name to be the number of your chapter or episode. And finally, I want to talk about the file format. So since we're saving our files as images, we have two formats, PNG and JPEG. Jpeg is a format that compresses images. So by setting the quality, you can set how compress your images. If you want to save your images and the highest quality possible, then set it to 100%. Or you can lower this quality to reduce the file size. But personally, I don't really like saving in JPEG because I've noticed that when uploading on Web two in Canvas, even if you had your JPEG image is saved in the high-quality, since they are of JPEG format, web tone tends to compress them further. So you tend to see some noise on your images. And I really don't like seeing that because I work extra hard on the quality of my comic and I want my readers to enjoy that high-quality as well. So instead of JPEG, I go for PNG format. Png format preserves the quality of your images, so it gives you the highest quality export possible. I'll go for a PNG and you click Okay to export my web tune. It might take some time if you export all pages at once because it's processing a big number of files. So give it some time. The speed will be different based on the specs of your computer. Once exporting is done, you will see all your exported images in the folder destination that you specified and their slides and ready for you to upload. Each image here has the dimensions of 800 by 1,280 pixels, and they're all saved in the PNG file format. Now if you're using the Pro version of Clip Studio Paint, then you can export your work too in Chapter in exactly the same way, except that you will have to do each page separately. So e.g. let's say this is the first page of your comic. Then you go to File export web tune, and save it from here, but name it Chapter 9.1, e.g. so that's your files don't get messed up. So this is 9.1 and then you save it. And then you go to page two, and then you export it as 9.2 and so on. It's exactly the same way. Now going back to our exported images, we have indeed saved our comic and the highest quality possible. However, there is one thing. If you're uploading your comic to F2 on Canvas, you have an image size limit of 20 mb per chapter. That means all of the images you upload to your chapter should have a total maximum of 20 mb only. There are some cases where your files total might be more than that. E.g. my chapter here has a total of 20.8 mb. That means I won't be able to upload all the images as they are. Now, of course, if you save all your chapter in JPEG format while lowering down the quality, then you're most likely going to be able to fit all of the images under the 20-megabyte limit. But in my case, as I told you, I value quality over everything. That's why I still want to upload the PNG format, but I want to optimize my father little bit. The way I found around this is quite simple actually. I'll take a look at all of the sizes of my images individually. So I'll right-click here and set my view to be details. Then under the size of u, I'll click on this so that I arrange my images in a descending folder based on their size. So I can see that all of my images are fine except those top four images. This one is almost 2 mb. And by the way, speaking of Web two in Canvas, each image also cannot exceed 2 mb. So even if your total was less than 20 mb, but you had one image that is more than 2 mb, then you still have to reduce its size. So anyway, we're doing that now. Either way, I'll check those four images. I'll double-click and check. This is one image that has a big size, e.g. and I know why it has a big size because there are so many different pixels and so many colors in this image. That's why it has a bigger size. And the same thing for those images as well. So let's solve this problem with these few files. First of all, if you are an X user, close the page management file and then drag this one page that you want to optimize towards Clip Studio Paint to open it, and then go to File Export single layer, and then choose JPEG only for this image will save it as JPEG. And then choose the same destination that you saved your previous files at. Then click Save over here, just change the quality to 90 instead of 100. And then click Okay. This is a preview of the image export. I'll just click Okay. And now when I check my files, I have a new image saved as a JPEG with 500 kb of size only compared to 1.8 mb before compressing. So if I select my image is now without the troublesome image, then I have lowered down the total of my files to 19.5 mb. And that means that I can go ahead and upload those images to E2 and canvas without any problem. If you want to check the quality of the two images, then we can put them side-by-side for comparison. And really by looking at them as they are now, It's very hard to tell which one is the jpeg and which one is the PNG, unless I look at the title of the file over here. So this one apparently is the jpeg file. Since we saved it at 90 per cent of quality, we really can't notice the difference easily between them. Even when I uploaded it on web tune is not very noticeable to see the quality drop because this image is full of noise and pixels. So even though epsilon Canvas has slightly lowered the quality of the image, it's not that visible. So that means that this way I could preserve the quality of my chapter by uploading everything in PNG and only compressing those images that needed reduction. Now that all of our chapter images are ready, in the next lesson, we'll talk about wept on publishing platforms and how to publish your series. 28. 6-2 Publishing Webtoons: We're finally here. We're finally ready to click that button and publish our comic. So let's talk about the main two web tune publishing platforms. The first one is wept on Canvas with doing section for self-publishing creators. And the second one is status, which also allows the space for creators to publish their comics. So let's start with wept on Canvas. Of course, before everything, you need to be registered on the website so that you can publish. And once you're done signing up and you're logged in, you will see the Publish button over here. So click on it over here because I'm unpublished, created already. It's showing me my series. But if you're just starting out, then click on Create series. And over you can set the details for your story. I'll show you an example of my story so you have a better idea for your canvas is story. You can start to thumbnails, one in a square format and one in a vertical format. This square format must be 1080 by 1080 pixels and no bigger than 500 kb in size, and it can only be JPEG or PNG format. Similarly, for the vertical thumbnail, it has to be 1080 pixels by 1,920 pixels and no larger than 700 kb. Now for the story thumbnail, based on my experience so far, I highly urge you not to do like what I've done here, where the thumbnail has a lot of characters, but rather focus on drawing one or two characters only in the thumbnail and a maximum of three, I would say, and have some sort of story or emotion in your cover because that droves reader's attention better. I didn't know that when I created my story cover, I just went for the animus style because I really wanted to create a poster like anyone wants for my story. But anyway, I'll redo my thumbnail soon and do a close-up of two characters instead of this. And play around with the lighting and the shading, because that's what really catches the eyes of the readers. So after setting your thumbnails, the genres for your story. For me, I chose my main genre to be fantasy, but it also helps to set the second genre, especially that the fantasy enrollments and comedy are generally oversaturated with stories on web don't Canvas. So that means their competition is very high. So by choosing a less saturated genre for my story, I'm giving it a chance to pop up more at the top on the second gendre because there's less competition over there, but makes sure that the secondary genre is still applies to your story. And then over here enter the title of the story and the summary. Try to keep your story summary chart and engaging so that the reader would feel entry to read your story and find out more. And once you're done and save those details, then you can go to your dashboard. And under dashboard, you can click on Add episode. Enter your chapter title over here. Personally, I don't need my chapters. I just numbered them. And for the thumbnail, the size of the thumbnail has to be 160 by 151 and no more than 500 kb and only JPEG or PNG for the chapter thumbnail. Always make sure to choose one interesting shot from your panel that has some sort of emotion or something going on that your readers would be intrigued to click on that episode and see what's going on. Personally, I like to go for a close-up shots of the faces of my characters, especially those invoking some sort of emotion. So once you add your chapter thumbnail, all that's left is to upload your chapter images. And that can be done very easily. Just select everything from over here and drag and drop. Or you can of course also select the files from this button over here to upload them. But I find this way much quicker. Once you're done uploading, you can rearrange your images by dragging and dropping. Of course, most of the time they're gonna be uploaded in order, but sometimes they are uploaded out of order. So I can just refer to the image numbers and reorder them so that everything is looking okay. Finally, by scrolling down, you can add a creator note over here, a short memo off your chapter. You can preview your chapter over here to revise it before uploading. So I can try the mobile preview. I scroll over here and check how the pacing of your chapter is looking. If you feel something is off, then you can always go back to your work files and adjust the spacing between your panels and so on. You can spot mistakes. Sometimes overhear that you can't spot in the drawing software. So it's a good idea to check your files here before publishing. You can also click on Preview PC to preview how it looks like on computers. If you don't want to publish your chapter immediately, then you can click on Save Draft. Or if you want to publish your episode, then you can click on this button immediately to immediately publish the episode. Or you can schedule it by clicking on scheduled for later and setting the date on time. And I click Publish episode. Once you're ready to check your episodes on the dashboard, go to Edit episode. And you can see all your chapters over here. And if you have a draft that you have not yet published, then it will show up over here as well with a status written as draft. And you can always go back to edit it by clicking the Edit button. One last note regarding Web two in Canvas, they say it's highly recommended that you upload the first three chapters of your comic altogether at once when you publish your comic. Because this gives readers the chance to know more about your story. And once they are on the third chapter of your story, then the app will prompt them to subscribe to your comic if they haven't done that yet. So that means that you can get more readers that way. I personally didn't know that until later in time. What I highly advise that you follow that advice when you're first launching because it can help you to gain more readers at this earlier stage. Now that was for wet on Canvas. As for tapas, you also need to be logged in. And once you do that, go to dashboard and then click on new series. Type US has both comic and novel, but we want to choose the comic option. And then the same thing over here. You need to fill out the details of your series. Again, I'll show you the details of my series as an example, you can set the title of your comic. And the nice thing is that you can set a unique URL for your story so that you can easily type this URL and redirect people do it and then upload the thumbnail for your series. Their requirements are 300 by 300 pixels for the square thumbnail. And then put your story description over here. And then you can upload the vertical thumbnail, which they call book cover over here, and the size should be 961,440 pixels. Tap us also gives you the option to add a series banner that shows up as a header on your comic page. The banner dimensions have to be 1280 by 460 pixels. And you can also set the banner link so you can redirect people to another website, your personal website, e.g. I. Set mine to link to my YouTube channel. And the nice thing is that you can also have a custom ad banner. So e.g. I. Put a banner for my Patreon over here and put the link of the banner to go to my Patreon page. And finally, select the genre. You can select up to three genres, but set one as the main genre. So again, I set mine as fantasy. And you can also add tags that indicate more details about the elements of your story. So e.g. I. Added a thriller sorts modern fantasy, elemental powers, and so on. Once you're done creating your series on your dashboard, click on this plus button over here to add a new episode for your series. And the same thing, again, add the title of your chapter. And you can also drag and drop your images so they get uploaded. And you can also rearrange them and check their order. Then you can upload the thumbnail for your chapter from here. But the dimensions for the thumbnail here is 300 by 300 pixels. Instead. There's also the sheriff thumbnail that you can adjust, which takes the first image of your chapter and you can edit it as you want. For me over here I have the logo so there's no need to edit. And finally, you have the description and other settings. And when your files are done uploading, you can also preview it by going to preview and also a mobile or desktop. So if we click on mobile, we can see the mobile preview. If we click on desktop, then we can see the PC preview. By the way forward tap us the following limits are different and bigger than WEP do in Canvas. Your image can have a maximum of 10 mb and there's no height limitation on the image. You don't really have to slice your images. But since we've done that already, then we can just upload the files as they are. One thing to note though, diapers has a limit on the number of files you upload. So you can upload more than 60 files. So if your chapter was very long, you could end up with a number of files of more than 60. So maybe that's when you would need to not really slice your images and have a higher height for each. So that was all regarding publishing your series. The next lesson, we'll talk about how you can save a row or a blank version of your comic chapter. 29. 6-3 Saving Raws & Blanks: In this lesson, I want to show you how you can save a blank version of your comic like this without the speech bubbles on sound effects to keep with your files in case you want to export your images without text for your personal and recurse as an artist. And I also want to show you how to save our own version of your comic with just a blank speech bubbles. So in case you want to publish your comic in a different language, when you want to send it over to translators, you need to provide them with this copy. I'm going to show you how to do both in very easy and quick steps. Let's first save our own version of our chapter with a blank speech bubbles because it's very easy and quick to do that. But before proceeding, I just want to note that you will need to disable any texts or sound effects that you've done by hand, e.g. on this page over here, I have this handwritten sound effect, so I'll just hide it. And also over here I have this little comment written by hand. I'll also hide it. And without saving anything, just keep the file open. Go to your binder or management file for X users and go to File, export multiple pages, and then click on batch export. Choose your file destination by clicking on this button and choose your file format. I usually go for a PNG format again to preserve quality and then name your chapter. I'm going to keep it as Chapter 13. And for the page range, I'll click on All. Then I'll click OK under these settings. Make sure to unclick text so that all texts layers will not be saved into your final image. That's literally it. The main important step that you need to take. And then I keep everything else as is except the output size. I change the width to 800 because I don't want it to be a very big size. Since for other languages, I mainly just aim for publishing online and don't really think of printing in book format later unless I really know that I might have printed later and that specific language that I keep it in the original size. Other than that, I set it to 800 pixels and then click Okay, it's going to take some time as well. Over here, there are big files and they will need time to render an export. So it's very easy to export for X users. But again, for our Pro users, you can follow the exact same steps, but you won't have the batch export option available. So just follow the same steps, but do it individually, manually saving every page on its own until you have the full thing saved. So now when I check my files, I'll find that I have the blank version of my comics saved in an image format ready for translators to just come in and plug this beach. And one doing this step, I check one last time that there is no hundreds and texts leftover and everything is a blank and ready to be translated. If I want to save a blank format with no speech bubbles or texts whatsoever, then I'll open each page of my chapter on its own. And what I'll do on each page. I'll just hide the text folder and the sound effects folder. If I had one, I'll hide that for each page so that I'm left with just the images. I'm not going to save those files. I'll keep them as they are, but I'll go again to my page management file. And I can see the preview over here. There are no speech bubbles, are balloons whatsoever, no sound effects either. From here, I'll go to File, export multiple pages, batch export, and I'll choose the destination from here. But for the file format, when I say my rows, I want them saved in the highest quality possible. So I can choose image formats like PNG. I'd rather not do that because sometimes I have long pages that have a height of more than 30,000 pixels. And all the image file format don't support images that long. And even the Photoshop file format, PSD doesn't support that. I found that choosing PSB format works the best is called Photoshop big document. I choose this and what this format, I can save images that are larger than 30,000 pixels. So I go for PSP and click on combined and export image. Again, I specify the page range to be all. And then click okay, over here, you guys still also make sure that nothing is ticked. And as far as the output size, I want to save it in 100 per cent. So I'll choose the scale ratio from original data and set it to 100%. And then click Okay. Again, this batch export will always take time, and especially now that I'm rendering with the full-size. So I just go do something else when I'm doing this step in order not to feel like it's taking so long. And again, for a pro users, you can still follow the same steps, but do it individually for each page on its own. Once I'm done exporting, close those files and not saved them because I want my comic pages to stay as they are, nothing hidden. So I mixture not to save anything. And as you can see, I can see the speech bubbles back here again, since I didn't overwrite my files. And now my exported images will look like the following. There and PSP format. And by opening and checking each page individually, I have saved my comic with images only, no text, no speech bubbles, just the way it is so that I can preserve my artworks for my personal record, for sharing on social media as well. I copy paste these and save them whenever I want to share those images. This concludes this chapter. By now, I'm hopeful that you're well equipped with the knowledge needed to find your way around this and also explore your own ways along this journey. The next bonus chapter, I want to talk about things and tasks not related to drawing, but are really important for your overall work in the web tune field. So in the next lesson, I'll talk about backing up your work and data. 30. 7-1 Backing up your work: Alright, let's talk about backing up your files. Since you worked very hard on your comic, you would want to make sure that you store its files and preserve them in a safe place while you can make copies of your files and save them on portable storage disks, like flash disks, e.g. or external hard disks. I learned a very important lesson, the hard way. Never ever dressed physical devices. Yes, you can create copies on them, but don't just count on them. From my experience, I lost a huge amount of my files two times within five years because I interested them to physical storage disks that failed on me out of the blue, just like that, they stopped working without me doing anything. That's why after the second time, I made the decision to start using Cloud services instead, they are the solution and are the safest option nowadays to keep your files are preserved. Of course, you can still store copies of your files on physical storage disks, but I really highly recommend you back up your files to the Cloud. You can use any service of your liking. Personally, my favorite is Google Drive. I said my files to be automatically backed up so they sink immediately after I save them. Doing this also gives me the benefit to allow me to work on different computers anytime I want, since my files are with me anywhere. So it's easy to switch between devices. And another benefit that comes with backing your files to the cloud is that it allows you to restore older versions of your files. So in case you make undesired changes when you're working or something goes wrong by mistake and you lose some data and the process, then you can just go to your Cloud Service and download an earlier version of your file before things went wrong. And this has happened with me multiple times and saved me from unpleasant moments. Let's say. I highly recommend you back up your files to the Cloud. And as your comic grows and your files will grow, it doesn't hurt to invest into extra storage because as they say, better safe than sorry. So that's what backing up your files. In the next lesson, we'll talk about documenting your work progress. 31. 7-2 Progress Documenting: Now I want to talk to you about how I track my progress for every chapter so that I know how much work did I do per day and how long did the chapter take for me to finish? So I do that with the spreadsheet that I created for myself. This spreadsheet device work over time. So the top row already has the date and each row represents one panel. This is why I told you I number my panels when I create their friends in my work file so that I can easily keep track of them. So e.g. here in Chapter 11 of my web tune, I have 38 panels, so I May 38 rows, each row for each panel. And this way I can track my progress on the panel with each passing day. I do that by clicking on this arrow over here and choosing the state that my panel is n right now. So these are the phases that I would document. So I document lettering, sketch, line art, base colors, shading, background, and finalizing. So as we saw in the progress of this class, I do the lettering first of everything. So that's why the first column is full of lettering and e.g. when I sketch on the panel, then I click over here and choose a sketch to know that I sketched in this day. If I do my sketch on Tuesdays, e.g. then I would keep it as a sketch on those two days and then only change this when I progress to the next phase. Doing this helps me see my overall progress on the chapter e.g. I. Finished working on Chapter 11.14 days only, which is really the ideal case. And I didn't work every day. I even documented my weekend over here. I can see that this chapter was done in a timely manner. But of course sometimes life happens and one chapter can take much longer than that. So it really is just a way for you to see how long you took to finish your chapter. I have saved a blank template that I'll share with you in the class notes so that you can try using it for yourself. What you'd need to do is decide on your timeframe. E.g. you can add more days by copying columns with Control C and then pasting them with Control V. And then over here said that they, that you're starting in. And then just to drag this so that you have dates over all of your columns and adjust the number of your panels from here, e.g. if you had 40 panels, then just to click on the last cell and drag it down for 2Ls and then copy the URL and paste it on those two new roles. And then you can start documenting your progress. When I mark-up panel as finalized, I'd like to copy one blank cell and then paste it over the rest of the cells. This is an extra step that I do for myself so that I can easily see what I have finished and what is left. I also color the background of the cells of the panels that I finished in a way that shows me the canvas that I'm working on, e.g. the first canvas or page of my chapter had six panels. So by coloring all those finished six panels with the same color. I know that I finished the first page of my chapter and I do the same thing for the second page, third page, fourth, fifth, and so on. Again, this is also an extra step that I like to do for myself, but I wanted to show you my way on how I keep track of my progress. I hope you'll find this spreadsheet useful if you want to track your own progress as well. The next lesson, I'll talk about how you can promote your work tune. 32. 7-3 Promoting Webtoons: Let's now talk about promoting your work done. Now publishing on Web two in Canvas may bring you some readers, but don't count on it to be your main source because competition is very high. So it's not easy to be noticed unless you're comma gets featured by the Web two and staff and show up and they recommend this sections, then you most likely won't be getting any significant number of readers. Don't just rely on it and wait to be discovered. Make use of social media. Create yourself profiles on your preferred social media, and share your work. Give you a comic, a chance to reach more people. I highly recommend creating yourself a little website where you can put all your links together so that people can easily see all of your business into one page. I recommend you use card. It's a free website and you can create an interesting looking simple website with images and links and nice-looking buttons so that you can share everything that you do in one place. Or you can also make use of link tree, which you can create a simpler looking page with. Now when it comes to social media, I have several points that I want to share with you. First of all, create a hashtag for your comic and type it in your profile because it's clickable and both Instagram, it Twitter so that people can instantly click on it and see your relevant posts about it. I highly advise as well to make use of the lepton Canvas hashtag and left tune so that you can discover other creators and have other creators discover you. I do that for both my Instagram posts and Twitter. So with every new post iMac about my story, I make sure to use my hashtag and the electron Canvas hashtag also worked on Canvas stuff are really active on social media. They create a lot of activities that you can participate with, and they share creators works and help promote them. So it's really a good idea to follow them on their social media so that you become a part of the community and be up-to-date with their latest in use. They also created an official discourse server for Canvas creators. He can join this discourse server once you have published at least three chapters of your comic, joining the server is a great way to meet fellow creators and we'll connections. You can make a mutuals and the server. And also it gets readers from within creators to check out your comic too. And you can also discover so many amazing creators and comics. So it's a win-win situation. You can also get useful tips from the community and you can also get a chance to participate in their workshops. They're very active. So if you'd like such kinds of communities, then I highly recommend it for you. Lastly, I want to talk about the type of comment to share on social media. While sharing images is great, they don't always get as much attention as short videos, which are trendy nowadays. By short videos, I mean the TikTok style of videos which are made for smartphone usage. So e.g. you can make use of TikTok or rails on Instagram or YouTube shorts. In fact, once you create one short video, then you won't lose anything by sharing it on all of your social media, including Twitter and Facebook as well. Some videos may do better on certain social media more than others. So you're not really losing anything by posting it on multiple places. As far short video content ideas that I can recommend, there are multiple trendy things. The easiest is by recording your screen and then cropping it, then speeding it up and uploading it as a time-lapse. But you can also do this before and after kind of video. Put in your sketch on top of the final image and erasing it to reveal the final image. You can also fill mere steps in real time as you're drawing. So it's kind of a tutorial, but not really. It shows people your steps and the way you do things. And you can also have record the time loves and Clip Studio Paint. E.g. I. Recorded one as I was drawing the cover of my story and then extracted and published it. You can do that in Clip Studio Paint easily by going to File time-lapse and then click on Record time-lapse. It will record every step you do as you draw on your Canvas. Once you're done, you can go again to file time-lapse and then click on Export time-lapse so that you can export a video of your time-lapse. And you can play around with the settings from over here and then click OK to save it. Of course, social media is tricky and it keeps changing with time. But I hope these tips can help you at least within the current time. And I highly advise you to always be on the look and keep in touch with the latest trends so that you can understand what would work better for you. In the next and last lesson, we'll talk about how to monetize your web tune so that you can make some income out of your work. 33. 7-4 Monetizing Webtoons: Let's now talk about how you can monetize your web tune and make some income through it. Well, monetizing web two moons, is it still arrow key and challenging way? It's not impossible. However, as with all social media work, it needs time and patience to build. That's why it's really essential not to start working on your comic just for the purpose of making money. Because such kind of goal is not enough of a drive to keep you on track and this long journey, it's important to work on your web tune first and foremost because of your passion for it and because you love it. Trust me, that's what will keep you going despite all the challenges you face. But of course, it helps a lot to get some payback, at least for all the effort that we put into our work. No matter how small. This lesson, I want to share with you some tips and ideas currently available to make money through your web don't work. The first option is by monetizing the web tune on the platforms themselves, both WEB du and then tap us have an ad revenue program that creators can often, once they meet the criteria. When you're accepted into those programs and ad will show up at the end of your episodes and you'll make money just by having readers read your comic. The amount is totally dependent on the views that you get. So it wouldn't be a significant amount unless you have hundreds of thousands of views. But as we said, our motto is anything better than nothing. To get into the address on your program on electron Canvas, you need 1,000 subscribers on your comic and 40,000 monthly page views on your series, which can be quite challenging to be honest. It needs your patients with it. I would say leave it for a time while trying to promote your comic and let it grow as much as you can. But once you meet those requirements, then you can apply. But your comic will undergo a review process that this stuff makes sure that it meets what dunes guidelines. As four tap as you can also make money through the ad revenue, they requirement for this is only to have 100 subscribers on one of your series. So it's much easier to get into it on tap us. But that was also has another nice monetization system. If you had 250 subscribers on one of your comics and then you can activate reader support. The Support button will show on your comic. Readers can click on this button and support you with ink, which is the coin currency on tap us. When you receive ink, it will be converted to its equivalent amount in dollars. So that means it's converted to money that you can withdraw. This system is great for getting support directly from the kind and supportive fans. The second monetization ways that you can create a patriarch page for your work and offer rewards that people can get once they subscribed to your Patreon, e.g. you can share exclusive content and early access to your chapters and maybe other kinds of rewards. It's a good thing to take a look at what other creators are doing to get ideas and inspiration from them. The nice thing is that you can connect patriotic electron Canvas button would show up on your comic page where people can click it and immediately get directed to your Patreon page. The third method is by selling merch. You can create March of your Comics characters and brand and design products that you can sell to people who are interested in purchasing from you. I like using red bubble the most since they have a great variety in their products. So you can design many interesting products with great varieties of your comic characters. And of course you can try different services like printf full or print if I e.g. just search for print-on-demand services and you'll see many options will show up. Finally, you can redesign and redo the layout of your comic to be in a book format and publish it on services like Amazon, k d p, which is also a print on demand service, so that you don't have to worry about printing copies and inventory and things like that. Of course, these are not the only ways. There can be many more ways to make money from generally creating content on the Internet. I wanted to keep it specific in this lesson with waste directly related to your comic itself. However, never limit yourself and always be on the look on what's the latest that artists can do to make an income. Especially if you want to make this into a work that you do on a full-time basis. Most importantly of all, though, don't forget to have fun and remember to enjoy this thrilling ride of bringing your story to life. 34. Outro: Congratulations, you have finally made it to the end of this class. And by now, I'm really hopeful that you have taken that first step towards making your dream a reality. In fact, since you started working on it, then it's no longer a dream. You're living the dream now, and this is only the start of it. This will be an amazing journey that's both challenging and rewarding. At the same time, you will find that drawing your web tune will take you out of your comfort zone and make you try and learn new things that you never thought you would do before. And therefore, you'll see that you'll grow a lot as an artist. In my personal experience, it's only been one year since I started drawing my web tune. The improvement mice kills have undergone really exceeded my expectations. Not only did I get better at drawing in general, but my drawing speed has also increased a lot. I used to draw digital illustrations for years and H would take me an average of 5 h or more. Now I can draw similar illustrations with better finishing into our 3 h only I wouldn't be getting if I told you that the improvement my skills have seen throughout this year is worth more than what I learned in the past five years altogether. Because of my web tune drawn came back to be a habit for me after I used to practice it only a few times per month, It made me challenge myself so much. Andrew poses and make backgrounds. I never thought I would ever be able to do what is the power of passion? And because we as web to an artists are challenged every chapter with panels that are not so comfortable for us to draw, but we have to draw them anyway, so that the story gets told in the way that we imagined it in our heads. And that's how throughout this process, our limits are pushed with every new chapter and every new panel. And without realizing, we get to improve our schools so much, I would be more than happy if you'd like to join me on my improvement journey and follow my story intertwined as it gets unfolded with time, you're more than welcome as well. To follow my work on my social media and YouTube channel, I would be very happy to have you there and I hope that you will find what I share. They're useful as well for you. I'm very looking forward to improve more and grow more as an artist as I go on this journey. And I'm truly helpful that you are excited as well to go on your own personal journeys. Thank you so much for taking this class and for letting me be a part of your creative path.