Hello! In this TIP I will teach you how to draw and animate a cute cat in Clip Studio PAINT. Using a real cat as a guide.

The cat I'll use as an example is one of my sister's 3 cats :D

 

Whether you have the PRO or EX version of Clip Studio PAINT, this tutorial is for you! Since we will only use 24 frames to create this Animation.

What we are going to do:

We are going to use an image of a cat to create our adorable cat, understanding its structure and details.

Cute CAT Design Process

2D Animation

To practice poses and achieve this simple but cool animation:

So I invite you to watch the tutorial called:

ANIMATE an ADORABLE CAT in Clip Studio PAINT (VIDEO TUTORIAL)

What did you think of the video?

Now let's go with the step-by-step process of this nice TIP :)

1. Project Creation

Go to File - New. And create a project with the following characteristics:

2. The Cat

This is the cat I will take as a reference and create an adorable version of it. My sister will be happy that I drew her cat :)

3. Sub View

In the Window - Sub View menu, we will activate this extremely useful tool :)

Once it's visible, go to the bottom and activate: Import from image folders

We choose the image and it imports automatically.

Now it's time to draw the cat's structure. Since I'm going to make it cute, I'm going to exaggerate the sizes of its body parts, as you can see below:

And on this structure, I'm going to draw the details of the cat I'm going to create:

4. Simple Mode

For a couple of years now, I've only used Clip Studio PAINT on my iPad; it's an application I love. For this reason, I frequently use Simple Mode, especially for drawing, as I feel more free with a cleaner interface.

 

To activate it, go to the Clip Studio icon and select Switch to Simple Mode

And the interface looks like this, I love it!

And here we will do the line art and color for the cat.

Once finished, click the 3-dot icon and activate Switch to Studio Mode.

As a last detail, I'm going to lower the opacity of the colors, achieving the following result, I like it much more ;)

5. Sub View - Cat Design

Now we are going to import the cat's design into the sub view tool, to always have it in sight. Go to the Image List icon.

And activate import

We choose the file and activate the open button:

And we have the design of our cute cat in Clip Studio PAINT, ready for the next step, which is to create an Animation ;)

6. Animation Project

We are going to create an Animation project with the following characteristics.

And very importantly, set Frame rate to 8 and Duration to 24.

Once created, don't forget to activate the timeline in: Window - Timeline

And now we are ready to start our Animation.

7. Animation Sketch

In the default frame (Drawing 1), we draw the same pose as the cat's design. This will be our guide for the animation we are making: a cat's jump.

When creating a new frame, we do it with the option: New Animation cel.

Always remember that you can activate the onion skin to see the previous and next drawings.

And in frame 17, we are going to activate the Specify cels option

And we select drawing 1.

Why do I do this? Because this animation will be an animated loop that will repeat constantly over time.

We are going to create drawings in frames 1,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18.

Actually, it's in frames: 8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17.

Achieving the following animation:

8. Animation Line Art

For the Animation line art, we create a new Animation folder in the timeline, named Color.

And in this new folder, we will not create a new animation cel, but rather a new layer folder in the layers panel:

With the following layers:

• Hair

• Line

• Skin

• Color

Honestly, they can be any names you want, this is how I understand them :D

Now we select the animation folder called Sketch and activate Change Layer Color, and lower its opacity to 50%

We select the Line layer in each drawing to create the animation's line art with the Pen tool.

Achieving the following result:

9. Animation Color

Now let's paint! For this, we will select the color layer in each of the drawings and the black fur in the other layer, in my case the Skin layer.

Something very important is to change the background color. To do this, we click on the paper layer and can choose a gray color. We do this to differentiate the cat's soft color from the background.

 

It often happens that we forget to paint our characters white when the background is the same color.

Another very important thing is to activate the option in the sub view panel: Automatically switch to eyedropper.

This will allow us not to have to constantly select the eyedropper tool to choose our character's color when painting.

And to paint, we select the Fill tool, in the Sub Tool: Refer to other layers.

And we paint all the drawings of our animation.

10. Export Animation

To export as a video or as a .gif, we will follow the same step.

But before exporting, we are going to change the background color back from gray to white, as it was originally.

Go to File - Export Animation - Movie

We give our file a name

And we see the size it will be exported at, and the frame rate will be 24. This is great because it will be a 3-second animation :)

And we wait for the Animation to export

Now let's go with exporting as .gif

File - Export Animation - Animated gif

We give it a name

We can change the size and leave the frame rate at 8.

And done! Our animation is also exported as a .gif

11. Final Animation

This is the animation we have managed to create in this tutorial, a cute and adorable jumping cat.

I hope this TIP has been useful to you and that you are also encouraged to create your own animations.

See you in the next TIP!