Hello everyone

It’s BlessedBlight back with another tutorial on Clip Studio tips. Here, I’m going to show you how I draw and color my backgrounds.

Start with a Draft

No matter the drawing, ALWAYS start with a light draft to guide your color. The idea can come from your imagination or from a reference, obviously. However, if you are not that good at drawing and coloring backgrounds, starting off with a reference is always good. For layer work, I had the draft layer be my first.

Flats are a Base

Whatever your reference or imagination holds, the flat colors are a necessary starting point when coloring. I used the dense watercolor brush to get the texture and color, but you can use your most preferred brush to create the best work. I had my flats on their own layer as well.

Embrace the Shadows

Next, color in the shadows. Why not do the lights before the shadows you ask? Transitioning from dark to light is a LOT easier than light to dark almost always objectively.

 

Unless your brush allows for an easy light to dark transition, I heavily advise against doing so. It will make coloring an unnecessarily painful process especially if you are a beginner.

 

So, embrace the shadow colors by hue shifting from the original. In my own drawing, I used a dark blue on the sea and purple for the sky to imagine a transformation of afternoon to night. My shadows had their own layer as well.

Get out of the Shadows and come into the Light

For lights, literally just take the light source from your reference image or imagination and put it on the places it should be. For example, in my drawing, since the sun is behind the mini island, the light shines over the tree and a little bit of it touches the water creating a bright reflection, almost making the image feel physically bright.

 

When putting in your lights, try to have the image give a similar effect of being visibly bright if the reference has that much light. Something to note as well, don’t get caught up in the little details for your coloring stage or even draft stage. It is completely fine if your drawing is a little messy and unorganized. It shows a human’s style of imperfection.

By the way, the lights were on their own layer as well.

Extras

If you so choose or if your reference image has extra parts to it that aren’t necessary but nice to have, then you can focus on this too. My case was that I wanted clouds and stars but didn’t want them to clash with me when it came to coloring the sky, sun, tree, and sea. But, after finishing those you can make a new layer to do the flats, lights, and darks for your extra details.

 

Remember to not overdo it and be fine with it not being exact because it never has to be. Also remember to have the objects facing the light source receive the light, and the darks be on the opposite side.

Cleaning it up

Once you are done with all of the flats, darks, lights, and extras, you can blend them together so that they smoothen out. I first had difficulty blending the different layers so I ended up connecting the layers to each other so that they become one. I would personally advise against blending absolutely everything as that can make it look less appealing generally.

 

But, other than that, the brush I used was the opaque watercolor brush.

Thank you for reading!

If you read all the way through or at least what you felt was important, thank you very much. If you have any questions concerning coloring, I will answer them the best I can and I will check often since I won’t receive notifications.

 

Also, if anybody wants the exact colors I used as well as what I used them on, I can put screenshots at the bottom of the tips, past this closing. The same goes for my brush settings.

 

Anyway, thank you very much for reading and I hope you have a good rest of your day.