Hello! In this TIP, I'll show you how to Animate a very expressive girl in Clip Studio PAINT. We'll create some very expressive dynamic poses and also animate a blink.

Whether you have Clip Studio PAINT PRO or EX, this tutorial is for you :)

Since we'll only be animating 24 frames.

 

Although I created this tutorial on my iPad Pro, you can follow the step-by-step process with any device you have or from your computer ;)

What we are going to do:

Girl's Design

We will create a simple design of a girl, starting with a neutral pose. You can see the design process below:

Girl's Animation

And this is the animation we will create: expressive poses and a blink.

It seems complicated but believe me, it's easier than it looks, and if you follow the step-by-step instructions I'll show you, you'll be able to achieve it too :)

TUTORIAL: ANIMATE an expressive GIRL

Remember to activate subtitles in your language, you'll surely find it :)

Additionally, this video is dubbed in English, so you can listen to it in both Spanish and English. I hope to enable dubbing for other languages soon :)

What did you think of the video?

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

1. Project Creation

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

And don't forget to save the project using the save icon.

2. Simple Mode

To draw in the best way, we will activate the Simple Mode option; this mode is only available in the tablet version of Clip Studio PAINT.

And we draw the girl's sketch

Then the line and the shadow line

To finish with the girl's color

3. Sub View

Go to the Window - Sub View menu.

And we activate the folder icon called Import

We select the girl's design file

And we have the girl's design imported into Clip Studio so it's always in view. Finally, we close the girl's design project.

4. Animation Project

Go to File - New, and create a project with the same characteristics as the girl's design project. The only difference will be that we will activate: Create moving illustrations.

Then we delete the animation folder that is created by default.

And we activate the timeline in the Window - Timeline menu.

Now in the timeline, we will create a new animation folder.

In the Layers panel, inside the animation folder, we will add a New layer folder.

And inside this new layer folder, we will add the following layers:

• LINE (Vector layer)

• LINE SHADING (Vector layer)

• SHADING (Raster layer)

• COLOR (Raster layer)

• SKETCH (Raster layer)

5. Animation Sketch

We select the Sketch layer to make the first drawing of the animation, which will be the same as the girl's design we created earlier.

Then we go to frame 12 and activate: New animation cel.

We change its name in the Layers panel to 12K, because it is one of the main drawings. And we can also Enable onion skinning on the timeline, to see the previous and next drawings.

Achieving the following drawing, a very expressive girl's pose.

The next key drawing will be at frame 16. Called 16K. This will be the last drawing of the animation, and I love the pose.

Now we are going to do the Breakdown. For this, we create a new animation cel at frame 10. The name of this drawing will be 10B.

Then we will create the inbetweens. The first one will be at frame 11.

The next one at frame 14.

And the last drawing will be at frame 15.

Achieving the following animation:

Animation Sketch

6. Animation Line Art

We select the Sketch layer and activate Change layer color. We will do this for all the animation drawings.

For the line art, we will select the previously created LINE vector layer, and the tool we will use is the Pen tool.

You can edit the stabilization and size.

And we have the first drawing of the animation completely clean, with the exception of the eyes, which we will create in another animation folder.

7. Eye Animation

We are going to create a new animation folder on the timeline.

And we create a layer folder inside this new animation folder, plus we create the same layers that we created for the girl's animation.

And we draw the line art for the eyes of the first blinking drawing.

Now we shorten the duration of the eye animation up to frame 9.

Now, at frame 4, we create a new animation cel. Just as in the main animation, creating a new animation cel will automatically create all layers and even respect the names of each layer.

And we draw the closed eyes.

Finally, we create a new animation cel at frame 6.

Then, at frame 7, we activate: Specify cels or Assign Cel to Frame. We select Drawing 1 and activate OK.

And we draw the semi-open eyes.

Finally, for each of the animation drawings, we will deactivate the Sketch layer to leave only the clean line art of the animation visible.

Animation Line Art

8. Animation Color

Now we select the Fill tool, and in Sub tool, we choose Refer to other layers, and for Area scaling, set it to 10.

In the Sub View panel, we activate Automatically toggle to eyedropper, so with the Fill tool selected, we can pick the colors from the girl's design.

We select the Color layer of each animation drawing to paint the base color. Then we select the Shading layer and add the animation's shadow.

9. Animation Export

Go to File - Export animation - Movie.

We give a name to the video we are exporting.

We leave the dimensions as they are, and you will see that the Frame Rate will be 24, so our video animation will last 3 seconds ;)

And we wait for the animation to export.

10. Final Animation

This is the animation we've managed to create in this tutorial. I hope you can also create your own animations by following the step-by-step process :)

 

See you in the next TIP.