Hello! My name is Liz Staley and I’m a long-time user of Clip Studio Paint (I started using the program back when it was known as Manga Studio 4!). I was a beta-tester on the Manga Studio 5 program and for Clip Studio Paint, and I have written three books and several video courses about the program. Many of you probably know my name from those books, in fact. I write weekly posts on Graphixly.com and on CSP Tips, so be sure to come back every week to learn more Clip Studio Tips and Tricks from me!

 

Border effects are great for highlighting elements of your work that you want to draw attention to, though that’s not their only use. This week, we’ll use them to make text pop from an illustration background, but once you know the settings are capabilities of this simple layer option you can use them for all kinds of other things as well!

 

In this article we will cover the following topics:

Using the Edge Border Effect

Using the Watercolor Border Effect

 

Let’s get started!

 

 

Edge Border Effect

This week I’ll be working with this image. As you can tell, the text is very hard to see because of the colors of the design elements and the color of the background. And while a very simple fix would be to change the text to another color, such as white, this may not be possible all the time! For instance, what if this was a commission or freelance design piece and the client specifies that the text needs to be these colors? No worries though, we are going to use border effects to make the text stand out from the background and be easy to read!

First, make sure that the layer you want to apply the border effect to is the current selection in the Layer palette. Then, in the Layer Property palette click on the “Border Effect” icon, shown in the red box below.

In this first section we will be covering the “Edge” border effect, which puts a stroke around the outside of the layer contents.

By using the “Thickness of edges” option we can control the size of the outer stroke.

Click on the rectangle next to the “Edge color” option to bring up the color picker and choose a color for the border effect.

If you’d like to choose a color from your illustration as the edge color, click on the eyedropper icon (shown in the red box below), then click on the screen color that you want to use for the stroke. This is a good way to stay harmonious with the color palette of your image while also making the text stand out against the colors behind it.

The Anti-aliasing checkbox controls whether the outside of the border effect will be smooth (anti-aliasing on) like below.

Turning anti-aliasing off makes the outside of the stroke jagged, as shown below.

Want a more subtle and painterly effect for your border? Keep reading to see the Watercolor border effect in action!

Watercolor Border Effect

If the outer stroke look isn’t what you’re wanting, click on the “Watercolor” border effect icon after turning on Border Effect in the Layer Property palette.

The watercolor edge effect puts a much softer and more subtle border around the inside of the layer contents. Let’s go over the options for this effect and see how they change the look!

The Area slider controls how thick the border effect is. In the screenshot above the area is 0.42, but in the image below it is 0.89 and is making the text strokes look much thinner!

We can’t adjust the color of the watercolor edge, however we can adjust the darkness. The screenshot below shows a Darkness level of 20.

For a darker border just increase the Darkness level to get more contrast.

To create a sharper edge between the border effect and the layer contents, adjust the Blurring Width. You can see that with a smaller Blurring Width this looks a lot like the Edge border effect we went over earlier!

Using the Edge border effect on the bottom text and the Watercolor on the top text, now the words are legible without having to change the text color or the background!

Conclusion

Though it’s such a simple thing, knowing that this option exists can help you create so many things, like better layouts with legible elements and also special effects in your illustrations and comics.

 

For more information on CLIP Studio Paint, please visit https://www.clipstudio.net/en or https://graphixly.com