1- INTRODUCTION

Hi everyone, it´s Konart.

Today, I will show you how to shade your drawings to give them to give them that “anime movie” or “anime show” look. When talking about shading drawings in an anime style, sure, there are a lot of ways, and a lot of styles to do it, however, those are often more aimed towards illustrations that just happen to have an anime style to them.

 

Here however, we’ll see how to make your drawings look more like screenshots from an anime show or an anime movie and try to make them look authentic.

 

Let’s start

 

2- BRUSHES

In this tutorial I will be using some brushes, but the ones that I use for almost everything tend to be just 3 or 4 of them, and here in particular, I will change between them depending on the element of the drawing. For example, to shade characters in anime, you usually only use hard brushes without texture, while for backgrounds you can use a wider range.

3- THE SKETCH

If you want to make it look authentic, I recommend to start by drawing the character with a background. In anime shows or movies, the characters are almost never just standing there with nothing in the background, they’re usually in a room, in the street, or at school, and as we will see soon, the way you shade the background is one of the main elements to consider if you’re going for this look.

 

If you have trouble drawing backgrounds, you can use 3D models or photos as reference to make things easier. If you’re working from photos, it can also help you a bit to understand the lighting on the scene you’ll draw.

 

You can start your sketch with the background or with the character, you just need to keep in mind the perspective. I sometimes start with the character, and other times with the background, maybe even trying to draw both at the same time to see how would the composition work, really you can start anywhere, as long as the pieces fit together.

 

For this drawing, I’ll start with the sketch for the background.

 

And then I’ll sketch in the character in a separate layer. To make sure the character fits well in the background, I lower the opacity of the background layer to be able to see it while I sketch the character.

Then, in a layer below the character sketch, I use a flat color to separate the character from the background.

To do this, you need to set your character layer as the reference, then, in a layer below, use the auto select tool and click outside the character.

Then, invert the selection and shrink the area selected by 2 or 3 pixels, this depends on the size of your drawing, if your lines are very thick, you’ll need to shrink the selection more. After that, you can fill the selection with any color

And with that, we have our sketch finished.

4- LINEART

Now, if you want your drawing to look like something from an anime show or movie, you need to follow the same steps that are used to make anime, and that means, for starters, to have a clean lineart. When you’re working in a more painterly style, you might not need a clean lineart, or even a sketch, but that’s not the case here. Animating characters takes a lot of time, so anime studios use just clean lines and flat colors. Sure, you probably won’t animate your drawing, but if you want it to look like the real thing, you will need to draw as if it will be animated.

 

Note: When I say “Character lineart”, I’m not just talking about the character itself, but also the things they’re grabbing or moving. You can see this for yourself, watch any anime show or movie, and you’ll notice that the objects from the scene that can be moved by the characters have the same lineart and flat colors as the characters. For example, when a character is riding a bike, the bike has the same style as the character, same if the character is sitting on a bed.

 

To make a clean lineart I start by lowering the opacity of the sketch, the same way I did with the background, and then start drawing in a layer above.

 

To make it look clean, I have 2 main tips:

 

A- Use only 1 single brush for all the character’s lilneart

 

B- Avoid using line weight as much as possible, that means, try to have all your lines of roughly the same size. You can adjust it by going to the settings of your brush and then to shape dynamics.

 

Now I’ll draw the clean lineart and add a flat color below it as before.

For now, we’ll move to the background and leave the character for a bit. As I’ve said before, you can go in any order you like, first coloring the character, or leaving it to the end. After the sketch for the background is ready and the character has a clean lineart, I usually like to move on to coloring the background, because that will give me a better idea for the lighting and colors that the character will have.

 

But before that, I will lower the opacity of the character and leave it there. I could just turn off the layers with the character, but by simply lowering the opacity, I can see which parts of the background will be blocked by the character, so I won’t need to color them.

 

If you’re planning to use your drawing for a small animation GIF or something similar, however, I would recommend to turn off the character and draw the background completely, because as the character moves, more parts of the background will be visible.

5- COLORING THE BACKGROUND

For the coloring stage of the background, I don’t clean up the sketch.

 

This may be different in some anime, but usually, backgrounds have no lineart, they tend to be a bit more realistic, so they don’t need it. So instead of cleaning up the sketch, I lower its opacity and start adding flat colors in a layer behind.

 

Try to make it so that every object of the background has its own layer. For example, in a room, I would use one layer for the floor, another for the bed, another for the chair, and so on, this will make things easier when we start rendering and adding details to every object.

Be sure to make the shape for every object be sharp, so use a hard brush without texture to draw the shape or use the selection tool.

Once you have each object in its own layer, you can start adding the shadows to every object.

 

Then we add the lights

After this you can erase the sketch.

 

Now we can start adding details. Usually in anime, the backgrounds have a lot more details than the characters, some of them look almost like photos. Because of this, when coloring the background and adding details, we can use more brushes and different textures to make it look better. The background style can vary a lot between different anime, sometimes it’s very sketchy, sometimes they look like oil paintings, but this time I’m going for a certain look that is cleaner, with not many textures.

 

I recommend starting with details in the objects that are closer to the camera or focal point, since they are more important, and then you can start with elements that are further back. Separate your background into different layers and then decide which objects you'll render more

 

Then I start adding more and more details and a bit of texture.

Usually, the objects that are closer to the camera, have a lot more detail than the objects further back, and that’s because they don’t need to have that much detail, when everything in a drawing has the same level of detail, nothing stands out, so you only need to add more details to the parts that matter the most. Also, since some shows like to add a blur affect to the backgrounds, adding more details would be just a waste of time.

6- COLORING THE CHARACTER

Now we will color the character.

 

First, in another layer, I will draw the lines that indicate where the shadows go. The color for these lines doesn’t matter, however, it’s a good idea to use very vibrant and saturated colors to make them look different from the lineart. Also, to avoid getting confused, you can use different colors depending on the parts of the characters, for example, red for the shadows on the skin, blue for the shadows on the shirt and so on, the color itself doesn’t matter, it just has to be different.

 

Usually, to speed up the production, characters only have 2 values per color, that means, one color for the light side, and one color for the shadow side. You can add more than 2, but keep in mind that the more you add, the longer it will take to color the character, and if you add too much layers of shadow, you run the risk of the character not looking like something from an anime show or movie. The eyes of the characters, however, tend to have more detail and colors depending on how close the camera is.

Of course, you don’t need to use this method to color your character, since you can get the same result with different methods, I personally like to do it this way for 2 main reasons:

 

A- I feel like it’s faster, since from this point on, I will mainly only use the fill tool to add color.

 

B- If you see videos about how anime is made, you are likely to see scenes with drawings that look like this, because they’re not finished yet. So even at this stage you can already make it look like it’s part of an unfinished animation.

 

Now that I have the clean lineart and the indications for where to put the shadows, I will start coloring it using the fill tool. To do that, first we need to set both the lineart layer and the shadow lines layer as reference layers. Use the SHIFT or CTRL keys to select both layers, and then click on the icon to set them as reference layers.

Now, we need to set up the fill tool properly.

A- First, I like to set the “close gap” setting to the maximum

B- I keep the color margin around 10

C- I usually set the area scaling to 1 or 2

D- Then make it so that it references the reference layers

 

With the fill tool set up properly, I start coloring in a layer below the lineart. I start by painting the main colors of each object. As I said before, each object has 2 colors, one for the light side and one for the shadow side, depending on which side is the main one, that’s the one I will color first. In a scene set in daytime, you usually have a light side that’s a lot bigger than the shadow side, while in night scenes it’s the other way around.

To do this, I turn off the layer with the silhouette of the character that I made before. Then, in a new layer above that one and below the lineart, I fill the main color for every object in the character before moving on to the next step

At this point, we can turn off the layer with the lines we used as guides for the shadows since we technically won’t use it anymore.

And then you just need to fill the remaining spots with the corresponding colors

To avoid having and white spots, I tend to turn the silhouette layer on again and fill it with the same color as the lineart by locking the transparent pixels. You could just fix these problems by coloring it better and more carefully, but I feel like doing it that way takes too much time, that’s why I just use the silhouette layer to fix my mistakes. Just keep in mind that this is something I use to save time, and not something you would do if you were to animate it.

It’s possible that even with the black silhouette layer you’ll still need to make some corrections manually, so be careful with that. A tip to avoid that is to set the brush you’re using for the lineart with the anti-aliasing at the minimum, that makes the lines a bit cleaner and it will be easier when you try to color the drawing.

7- POSTPRODUCTION

We’re almost done, now we just need to add the postproduction adjustments. These are adjustments that usually, in animation, would be done with software for video editing, however, Clip Studio Paint has tools that can help you achieve a similar result when working in single images.

First, to be safe, save every layer from your drawing in a single folder and then copy that folder. We’ll be working on the copy so that if there’s some mistake, we can start again without having lost the original.

Now, in animation, the character would be separated from the background, so I start by merging all the character layers into one. Just select the lineart and color layers (if the colors use several layers, select everyone of those layers) and merge them into one.

 

Then do the same for the background. If the background is separated into multiple objects, some closer than others, merge the ones that are at the same distance from the camera into the same layer.

When the layers are set up properly, it’s time to adjust the colors with correction layers. I like to start by using the correction layer “tone curve” to adjust every layer. I start by using one in the background. If your background has several layers, you just need to copy the correction layer and clip it to every layer.

And then one for the character. Remember to first clip the correction layer to the character layer so that it only affects that layer, otherwise it will also affect the background layers, so you need to clip the correction layer to the character layer and, after you’re done adjusting it, merge the correction layer with the character layer. Same with the background layers, so every correction layer clipped to another layer, will need to be merged to said layer.

Now I add a bit of shadow in a new layer. Create a new layer, set the mode to multiply, and then, with the gradient tool or with a very soft brush, create a slight gradient for the darker side of the drawing. If the shadow is too strong, adjust it by lowering the opacity.

Then I do the same to add highlights, but instead of using color black, I use white, and instead of setting the mode to multiply, it’s set to “screen”, “lighten” or “color dodge”, try several blending modes to see which one works the best for you.

Now it’s time to add some blur. To blur things, I like to use the Gaussian blur. Some anime like to add blur to the scenes to better convey depth. So, things that are further away from the focal point tend to be more blurred out. You can just bur the whole background with the same intensity, but I would suggest blurring elements according to their depth in the scene.

The character will also need a bit of blur, but this time, the method will be a bit different.

 

A- Merge all your layers into one

B- Make a copy

C- Apply a slight blur effect (with gaussian blur) to the copy

D- With a soft brush, erase the parts from the copy that you don’t want blurred out.

This way, the sharp parts of the original will show trough, while the blurred parts of the copy cover the rest.

 

When that is done, merge again all of the layers into a single one (please remember to keep the original folder in case you don’t like some of the results and you want to start over)

After that, to make the drawing just a bit softer, I use the “blur (strong)” effect.

 

Then I like to use another correction layer called color balance to adjust a bit more the colors before moving to the final steps

At this point I sometimes add another layer in screen mode to add a bit more highlights where they’re needed.

And now it’s time for a little trick called chromatic aberration. You might have heard of it, since it has kind of a bad reputation, however, when you use it well and carefully, it can add a bit more of that “movie” or “retro” feeling. You can see this effect sometimes in big anime movies, since it’s not something often used in anime shows.

 

To do this, you need to follow some steps, for starters:

 

A- Make 3 copies of your drawing

 

B- The one at the bottom will be the “original”, the one above will be the “copy”, the one above that will be “red” and the one at the top will be “blue”. You can rename the layers or just change their palette color to avoid getting confused.

 

C- Set the “blue” layer in “difference” mode, and then, in the “Edit” window, go to tonal correction and then to level correction, you’ll apply a level correction to the “blue” layer.

 

D- in the level correction window, select the Red channel and erase it by sliding the bar at the bottom.

E- Now you will do the same for the “red” layer, however, you need to keep the layer mode in “normal”, and instead of erasing the Red channel, you will erase the green and blue channels. If you did it correctly, your drawing should look as it did at the start.

Now, in the “blue” layer, use the transform tool to make the layer bigger by grabbing a corner of the drawing and holding down “shift. Then do the same for the “red” layer but using the opposite corner. Be careful, you just need to make them slightly bigger, the bigger you make the layers, the stronger the chromatic aberration will be, and that is an effect that looks better if it’s subtle.

If you did it correctly, your drawing should look like this

Now you can merge the 3 layers into 1, so that you only have 2 layers left, the original, and the one with chromatic aberration. So, all you need to do now is erase the spots where you don’t want that effect from the chromatic aberration layer, like the face, which is the focal point in this case. It’s the same as with the blur effect, you erase parts of the modified layer to let the original layer below it show through

And finally, for the last filter, I like to sometimes use “noise”.

First, same as before, merge your layers into one, so all you have is your drawing with chromatic aberration, and then, make a copy.

 

Now, in the copy, go to Filter – Render – Perlin noise.

Keep the scale very low.

 

Then, change the blending mode to overlay or multiply and adjust the intensity by lowering the opacity.

And that’s all, here’s the final drawing

As you can see, when you compare it to before the postproduction, the adjustments and filters can make quite a bit of difference, and it’s those details that make the drawing feel a bit more authentic.

8- CONCLUSION

If I had to explain it with the least amount of words possible, it would be like this: “if you want your drawing to look like something from an anime show or movie, draw like they do and follow the same process”

 

Obviously, there are differences since this is a single drawing and those are animations, but my point is that you need to imitate the process if you want it to look similar. Separating the characters from the background, cleaning the lineart, using lines to divide the shadows, are all techniques commonly used in animation. The postproduction stage would be something similar to the compositing done in animation. You are basically doing the job of different teams in the animation production by yourself, but for a single drawing, from the storyboard (the sketch) to the compositing (postproduction).

 

Overall, I think this gives you an idea of all the hard work that goes into making animation, and it can help you understand some of the techniques used to give it a distinctive look, and when you understand the techniques, you can start changing them or expanding them to better suit your needs.

 

9- THANK YOU

I’m still kind of new to giving tutorials, so I hope I was able to explain it well enough. Also, English is not my first language, so if there are some grammatical errors feel free to tell me in the comments.

 

Thank you for reading to the very end, I really hope this tutorial was of some help to you, if it did, feel free to give it a heart and leave a comment. Also, you can check out my stuff on my instagram @ricardokonart and my twitter @RicardoKonart

 

See you later