Hello! In this TIP, I'll teach 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 in 24 frames.

 

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

What we are going to do:

Girl's design

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

Animation of the girl

And this is the animation we will do, expressive poses and a blink.

It seems complicated but believe me it is easier than it seems and if you follow the step by step instructions that I will teach you, you can also achieve it :)

TUTORIAL: ANIMATE an expressive GIRL

Remember to turn on the subtitles in your language; you're sure to find them :)

Also, this video is dubbed into English, so you can listen to it in Spanish and English. I hope to be able to turn on the dubbing for other languages soon :)

What did you think of the video?

Now let's go through the step-by-step process for 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 with the save icon.

2. Simple mode

To draw in the best way, we will activate the Simple Mode option; this mode is only found in the Clip Studio PAINT version for tablets.

And we draw the sketch of the girl

Then the line and the shadow line

To finish with the girl's color

3. Subview

Go to the Window - Subview menu.

And we activate the folder icon called Import

We select the girl's design file

And we've imported the girl's design into Clip Studio so it's always visible. Finally, we close the girl's design project.

4. Animation Project

We 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 within 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 made earlier.

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

We changed the name to 12K in the layers panel, as it's one of the main drawings. We can also enable onion skinning in the timeline to see the drawing before and after.

We achieved the following drawing, a very expressive pose of the girl.

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

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

Next, we'll perform the inbetweens. The first one will be on frame 11.

Next on frame 14.

And the last drawing will be in frame 15.

Achieving the following animation:

Animation Sketch

6. Animation Line

We select the Sketch layer and activate Change Layer Color. We'll do this for all the drawings in the animation.

For the line, we'll select the LINE vector layer created earlier and use the Pen tool.

You can edit the stabilization and size.

And we have the first drawing of the animation completely clean, except for the eyes, which we will do in another animation folder.

7. Eye animation

Let's create a new animation folder in the timeline.

And we create a layers folder inside this new animation folder, and we create the same layers that we created in the girl's animation.

And we make the line of the eyes of the first drawing of the blink.

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

Now in frame 4 we create a new animation cel, just like what happened in the animation, when creating a new animation cel it will automatically create all the layers and will even respect the names of each layer.

And we draw the closed eyes.

Finally we create a new animation cel at frame 6.

Then, in frame 7, we activate Specify Cels or Assign Cel to Frame. We select Drawing 1 and click OK.

And we draw the eyes half open.

Finally, in each of the animation drawings, we will deactivate the Sketch layer, leaving only the clean lines of the animation visible.

Animation Line

8. Animation Color

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

In the Subview panel, we activate Automatically Toggle Eyedropper, so with the Fill tool selected we can select the colors for the girl's design.

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

9. Exporting the Animation

Let's go to File - Export Animation - Movie.

We give a name to the video we are exporting.

We leave the measurements as is and you will be able to see that the Frame Rate will be 24, so our video animation will last 3 seconds ;)

And we wait for the Animation to be exported.

10. Final Animation

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

 

See you in the next TIP.