Stop wasting hours redrawing arms and capes—learn to pose finished art in seconds with Puppet Warp!

Why is Puppet Warp a Game-Changer

First added in Ver. 4.0, Puppet Warp lets you drop pins on any raster layer and bend it like a joint—fixing anatomy, flipping capes, or giving hair flow after you’ve finished colouring. No more repainting an entire limb!

Step 1 – Prep your work

Let us lay the grounds for using Puppet Warp!

Raster Vs. Vector Layer

First, you should know that this feature only works on Raster Layers, it does not work on Vector Layers.

Here’s a still image for easier visualisation.

Note:

This feature also does not work on 3D layers; you don’t really need it as limbs are movable on 3D models.

Understanding Puppet Warp

Second, before using any tool, we should first understand how it works.

Simply put, the puppet warp feature allows for pins to be added to the drawing, those pins then become movable parts and act as anchors to other pins.

Placing one pin allows you to move the entire drawing, just like the Move tool.

Adding another pin, you can now temporarily freeze one parts of the drawing while moving the other, this will create a stretch effect. This means, you can move one pin while the other pin holds the surrounding part in place.

Notes: 📌Other parts will inevitably follow the direction of the moved pin if you stretch it too much.

📌You cannot go past one pin with the other pin; this will only create a rotation.

 

 

You can also create a rotation movement based on your chosen center using only 2 pins.

With a third pin, you will have two anchors and one movable part. You can now edit your drawing in more detail like changing the direction.

Imagine you have an arm that you need to point in a different direction, using three pins you can easily achieve this.

Here’s an arm example.

You can see that we can’t get the full potential of this tool using only 3 pins as at some point you can’t move/stretch further without damaging the art.

As with any tool, you have to use it with moderation, so as not to ruin your art.

Preparing your artwork

Let’s draw some basic full female body figure with pigtails. A simple drawing will help you understand the tool better for more complicated ones.

I will use the following art i specifically made for this tip.

You can keep the line art and colors separate however you will need to group the layers so you can apply the puppet warp on both layer at the same time. Remember, if you used vector layer for the line art, you would need to rasterize it.

Step 2 – Apply Puppet Warp

To use the puppet warp:

1. Go to Menu: Edit ▸ Transform ▸ Puppet Warp

2. A triangular mesh appears over the opaque pixels.

🔑 You add a pin simply by clicking anywhere on the artwork.

🔑 You can delete a pin by clicking it while holding the ALT key.

🔑 You can hold click the space bar when in mesh mode and the mesh disappears until you let go.

🔑 You can also rotate a pin not just move it around.

Let’s first change the position of her hair.

You can see how the sharp edge of the hair became even more defined, as well as the hands which became more edgy and triangular in shape, that’s because the puppet warp use triangular mesh to transform the artwork, so it may sometimes try to fit the artwork to the mesh.

To deal with this, before adding any pins increase the expansion level in the Tool Property panel, this works well especially when you have thin shapes, such as hair and fingers.

Around 20 works fine.

You can see the space around the body increasing as i increase the expansion level allowing for more room to the artwork.

Also note how since i did not pin the body, moving the hair moves the body along, here’s a pinned body so you see the difference.

Remember that placing a pin temporarily freezes that location.

Step 3 – Pin Placement 101

Alright, now let’s learn about the most suitable pin placements for a full body figure.

Body

For the body, the essential pins should be placed on:

📌The Shoulders

📌 The Head

📌 The Elbows

📌 The Wrists

📌 The Torso

📌 The Hip

📌 The Knee

📌 The Ankles

 

 

📌 Shoulder & elbow pins lock upper-arm volume; wrist pin handles the pose.

Head & Hair

📌 The Roots

📌 The Mid-strand

📌 The Tips

📌 The Forehead

📌 The Bangs

Cloth & Capes

📌 The Shoulders

📌 The Mid of a cape

📌 The Hem corners

📌 The Waistband

Summary

Basically, place pins when you don’t want the pinned part to move, and, as a rule of thumb, you place them at the edge, middle and tip of limbs, hair, cloth and so on.

Here are some rules to keep in mind:

📌 Anchor everything that must not move – hips, fixed cloth edges, weapon handles.

📌 One control pin per bend segment – shoulder-elbow-wrist, root-mid-tip, etc.

📌 Keep 3–5 triangle spans between control pins – too close = sharp kinks; too far = mushy noodles.

📌 Delete test pins freely (Alt/Option-click) until motion feels natural; Puppet Warp is non-destructive until you confirm.

Step 4 – Pose like Clay

Now let’s play around with the pose.

Following the previous section, i will place pins where needed.

Now, we can change the pose without worrying about moving unnecessary parts. Just move the pins you want to change your pose.

Here’s a before & after comparison.

The change is subtle, but can you see how this has potential for animation?!

Advanced Tricks & Animation Hacks

📌 Use the Lasso tool to select separate body parts and apply the puppet warp to each part separately

📌 Create hair movement animation using the feature. Comment below if you want me to do a guide on animating using the puppet warp feature!

Here’s a rough animation, on each cell i change the hair slightly.

You can see the results here.

📌 Combine the Puppet Warp with the Liquify tool for finishing touch: Big motion with Puppet Warp , micro fixes with Liquify

What do you think of this feature? How will you use it? Let me know in the comments I’d love to see your creativity!

Download: Free Practice Sheet

Here you can find my practice file, as well as a 3D model you can use for practice.

🎨 Found this tip helpful? Please like and share it with your friends so more people see it!

🎨 Save it for later if you want to practice, and let me know if you have any questions, I’d love to help!! 👩🏻🥰