Hello! In this guide, I will be going over an easy method to start working with screentones. If you're used to drawing in full colour and you're not sure how to apply your techniques to manga screentones effectively, this is the tutorial are for you!

 

All you need are: Clip Studio Paint (Ex/Pro ok!), and ready-to-use lineart. The cleaner your lines the better, although I'm using pretty crunchy lines myself, it just takes longer to clean up and using the bucket tool is less efficient.

 

There are two ways I go about applying screentones. The first involves working with values & layer properties, while the second takes advantage of CSP materials.

Method I: Screentone Using Values

This is the lineart I will be working with in this tutorial! As you can see, I have the base colour (white) laid down underneath the lines on a separate layer. The bg layer is set to a medium grey for contrast.

 

Make a new layer and clip it to the base.

I. a) Pre-Screentone Prep: Colour in Greyscale

On this layer, you want to start shading the lightest value in the illustration. In this case, it's the shading for the skin and the white shirt. Make sure you're working with the leftmost side of the colour wheel (ranging from pure white to pure black), because we're only working with values here!

 

I used a very light grey. I won't go over how to shade in detail, but I usually shade the skin where things cast a shadow such as under the hair. As for clothes, I roughly follow the clothing folds.

On a new layer, I use the fill tool to apply the darkest colour in the illustration with a dark grey. My settings are show above. "Refer other layers" is extremely handy because you can reference the lineart layer while using the bucket tool on a separate layer!

Now, all the values for the rest of the illustration will be in between the darkest and lightest grey colours. Keeping that in mind, I use the fill tool to colour in the hair, eyes, vest, and bubble tea. Because my lines are very sketchy, I also need to use the brush tool to fill in the gaps.

The result should be nice and clean greyscale flat colours! Now, it's time to add some shading to make everything pop. Make sure to click on the button to "Lock Transparent Pixel" for all the layers.

For shading, I use pure black to shade the darkest grey. Then, the darkest grey to shade the medium dark grey. Just in words that can be a little confusing, so I made a diagram to show all the overlapping colours! Aside from the black shading, all the other greys are reused as the shading colour.

 

All the cell shading is done with a default hard brush.

I use the airbrush here to apply a light gradient to the clothes for some depth.

Here's a quick step-by-step of how I do the hair! I use the same principles as before with a one-shade-darker hard brush to block in cell shading, and then a light airbrush on top to add some gradient.

And then we go one shade lighter for the hair highlights! Again, cell shading first, and then lightly brush with an airbrush.

I. b) One-Click Screentone Application

Once you're happy with everything, merge all your shading layers!

 

When that's done, this is the "now we magically turn it to screentone" step. Above is the right side of my CSP interface, as you can see there's a "Tone" button under layer properties, click on it! Actually, this step is all you need, because it should convert your illustration to screentone immediately.

Ta-da! Screentone.

You can also adjust the screen frequency (the size of the screentone dots) using the "Number of screen frequency" slider as show above. Not only that, you can change the shape of the dots as well using the drop down "Dot settings" menu.

 

When you're happy with how it looks, then you're done!

Method II: Screentone Using Image Materials

Here's a faster method that does not require any shading, and allows you to use a wider variety of tones at your disposal! I used default CSP tones available in the "Material" tab, but you can download an even wider variety from Clip Studio Assets.

 

With this method, you want each layer that will be a different tone pre-filled. It's pretty much exactly the same as the previous part of the tutorial, but this time shading and the colour doesn't matter. Just block everything in!

Open up the "Material" library and scroll through the tags to find the one that says "Tone". If you can't find it, you can use the search bar directly above or click on "Monochromatic" under "All materials", and you should be able to find them. It'll bring up all the materials classified under screentone. There's a nice variety already, from noise-like tones to gradients.

 

Select the first layer you want to add screentone.

I picked the first screentone on the list, the "40/0 100% Linear M". All you have to do is click the button highlighted above to paste the material onto your canvas. Then you get a panel out of a horror manga. This is temporary.

Unclip the hair base layer temporarily so that the screentone layer goes where it belongs!

Because this tone comes with a nice gradient, you can move it around to make it lighter or darker. Once you're happy with it, merge down and clip the hair back on the base.

Repeat the same technique as above! For the clothes layer, I used "30.0 line 50% Linear M" screentone. You can scroll through the materials library to see what you like, or download some from CSP assets. All of the image materials work in the same way - you can paste it directly to your canvas, clip it to the layer you want to tone, adjust, and merge.

I didn't manage to get a screenshot, but I used one of the circular gradients for the layer that has the backpack and bubble tea. This one has a really sharp gradient transition, which contrasts the other tones nicely!

 

This method allows for a wide variety of tones, and you can adjust contrast as you're working on each layer as opposed to having to figure out the values yourself. It's a lot faster once you know how to add image materials to your drawing, and it looks good too!

And there we go! A quick and easy way to turn your lineart into a screentoned illustration/manga panel. You can mix and match the principles from the two techniques to add screentone to easily to your drawing.

 

Thank you very much for reading my tutorial, and I hope you learned something useful!