Introduction & Goals

Ready to supercharge your workflow? Clip Studio Paint 4 now lets you paint directly on 3D figures and primitives—no more second‑guessing poses or proportions! 🚀 Perfect for manga, webtoons, comics, and animation.

With this feature you can:

✏️ Draw custom guides right on your character—tight outfit, accessories, even anatomy lines—so every panel stays consistent.

🤲 Paint straight on ready‑made models to speed up your scene‑building.

✨ Paint special markings, scars and blemishes for your original characters!

 

 

Why paint over a 3D base?

✏️ It guarantees consistent proportions and perspective.

✏️ It speeds up pose exploration so you can focus on creating beautiful artwork of your OCs.

✏️ It saves up time for future works as you’d have the model ready to use whenever and wherever needed.

Setting Up Your 3D Base & Canvas

🎨 First let’s start by creating a new canvas, set it to your desired size and click “OK”.

🎨 Next, on the right-hand side of the program, you will see two arrows “ <<“ click them and a new menu will appear, from the menu, find the materials folder, click on it and in the All materials folder select 3D.

🎨 In the 3D folder you will find primitive shapes and 2 basic 3D model for male and female.

🎨 Import the basic Male/Female body by dragging it into the canvas and you’re ready to start!

Symmetry & Rulers for Perfect Mirroring

The drawing on 3D objects feature does not support symmetry by default, however we can still use symmetry rulers, we just have to set them on a separate layer than the 3D objects.

🎨 First create a new layer.

🎨 Then go to “Ruler” and select the symmetrical ruler, make sure the number of lines is set to 2.

🎨 Position your cursor at the middle of the model.

🎨 Click and hold.

🎨 While holding, click on the shift button and hold it

🎨 Draw the ruler while moving your cursor up or down.

This will ensure the ruler is vertical and centred all the way.

Additionally, you can edit your ruler to ensure it’s in the center by selecting the operation tool -> Object and then typing half your canvas width in the “Center X” variable (for example if you canvas is 4000 px in width, type in 2000).

Now, you’d notice, every time you click away from the symmetry ruler layer, it no longer exists?

Well, that’s because we have to activate it on all layers for it to be visible on the 3d layer!

Here’s how you do this.

Building a Custom Color Palette

Pre‑load swatches for:

🎨Base skin tones (mid, shadow, highlight)

🎨Scar hues (reddish fresh scars, pale old scars)

🎨Marking colors (tattoos, bioluminescent lines)

🎨Cloth tones (leather, spandex, metallic)

Here’s how you can save them in a new Color Set so you never lose consistency.

Laying Down the Skin Base

Let’s start by coloring our model in the chosen skin tone.

Since you can’t use the bucket tool to fill the entire model, you’ll have to choose a really big brush tip and color in every nook and cranny (yup keep turning the model until its all colored)

Unfortunately, as of today, i could not find a better, faster way than this.

For this step you don’t need the symmetry ruler, so go ahead and deactivate (or hide) the layer, and select the 3D layer.

Choose a large brush tip (use a pen) and paint the skin over your model.

Make use of these buttons to turn your model around while you paint.

Don’t worry about missing spaces, nobody’s perfect!

Painting Scars, Blemishes &Tight Clothes

Lets give our model some pants and a pair of gloves!

You can draw most tight clothes directly on the model, and if there’s any editing to be done later, at least you’d have the base clothes ready.

You can see that i mostly struggled with the gloves, because there is too much space to fill, especially between the fingers.

Now lets add some unique scars and blemishes and scars to our character.

You can look up scar drawings on pinterest if you have no idea how to draw them!

I basically use the lasso tool to create a random sharp shape, fill it in with the darkest color, add some redness on the inside, then some light skin tone on the outside.

You can even add bruising in a light purple.

 

 

Note: Although i drew the eyes here, they’re just place holders, as the model does not have an accurate face, turning it to the side will reveal the ugly truth!

Yup that’s not how the eye should look like on the side, not to mention the nose!

Hopefully in the near future, we will be able to draw on more accurate 3d models.

Designing Special Markings

To make your character even more unique, you can add special marks, tattoos or even veins!

Make sure to turn your character, their arms, legs or head, wherever you’re placing the markings, so you have a consistent marking no matter the pose they’re in.

You can add marks on the back as well!

This very much reminds me of the sims! You can customize your own character :)

Refining & Exporting Your Work as a Material

Once you’re done with designing your character, its time to have fun!!

You can add props, change the pose and finish your drawing!

Even tho he’s bold, he’s still looking fiiine ;)

You can export your model and save it as a new 3d model, you can then use it wherever and whenever you want to draw the same character.

This is quite handy for OCs, you won’t have to think about special markings, tattoos or scars when drawing a different pose, just use the 3d model for different poses and draw on top of it!

We’re not done yet!

The fun has just began, now let’s create a character sheet for our OC!

You can do the same thing for a female character!

Female characters have more elegant poses to try!

Wrap Up

Alright, this is it for the 1st part of this series, you can follow me to be notified of when i post the next part!

Next part will be about drawing muscles on our character and stylizing it with clothes, hair and so on!

The 3rd part is about giving life to our model by using simple animation!

Stay tuned, and most importantly have fun!

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Part 2 tips is up!

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If you’ve found this tip to be helpful, please like and save it so i know I’m doing something right ^-^