Setting Up the Animation

Hello everyone!

Today, I’m going to show you a quick and easy tutorial on how to move your characters in Clip Studio Paint Pro. I’ll animate a simple head turn, followed by a blink and a smile.

Before we start animating, we need to set up the animation canvas. You can do this by clicking on File > New > Animation. You’ll see a lot of settings to choose from—I’ll go with the basic HD canvas size and 24 frames per second. I usually use 24 fps because it’s the industry standard, but you can choose a different setting if you prefer. In this case, it won’t make a huge difference.

Since I’m using Clip Studio Paint Pro, I’m limited to animating 24 frames per project, but that’s more than enough for a basic character animation.

 

After setting everything up, I click OK. At this point, you still won’t see the animation timeline, which we’ll definitely need. You can open it by clicking on Window > Timeline. Mine is located at the bottom of my workspace, but you can move it around however you like.

Understanding the Timeline

Let’s see how animation works in Clip Studio Paint. It automatically creates your first animation folder, where you’ll later see your frames.

At the top of the timeline, you’ll find options like New Animation Folder, New Animation Cell, and Onion Skin. These are the tools we’ll use most often.

 

New Animation Folder allows you to add another animation track. For example, you might want to draw the face and eyes on separate layers at the same time. In my case, I’ll use this for coloring.

 

New Animation Cell is how we create new frames—this is how our drawings come to life!

Copy and Paste Frames

If you want to copy and paste an existing frame, keep in mind that simply duplicating it won’t work. If you just duplicate a frame, any changes you make to one will affect all of them. Instead, go to the Layer window, duplicate the frame there, then right-click in the Timeline and add the specific duplicated version. This way, you can edit the copied frame independently.

Drawing and Coloring

I’ll be using an older rough animation, so I’ll focus on clean-up and coloring. But you can start your rough animation on a new animation folder and follow the same steps later.

I re-draw every frame on a vector layer—this makes it easier to correct or move the lines. I copy and clean up each frame by adding new cells and using Onion Skin. Timing isn’t important at this stage; I can adjust it later by dragging the frames left or right on the timeline.

I repeat the same process to add base shadows.

Final Touches

After the lineart is done, I create a new animation folder and place it under the lineart folder. This allows me to add color behind the lines, not on top of them. I fill in the flat colors and make sure to create matching cells for each frame, just like I did for the lineart.

At the end, I add a background I already created. I place it at the bottom by creating a new animation folder—but this time, I only need to create the first cell.

Hope you enjoyed, have a nice day!