Hello! In this TIP, I'll show you how to easily draw and animate flowing hair in Clip Studio Paint.

 

Whether you have Clip Studio Paint Pro or EX, this tutorial is for you, as we'll create a 24-frame animation.

The mistake that is often made:

Often, when drawing and animating hair, the priority is to maintain volume, but this is a mistake, as it makes the hair look coarse and unnatural, which we absolutely must avoid.

 

The correct way is to make the hair feel soft.

What we are going to do:

We'll start by tracing the line of action of the hair's movement. This will help us understand the shape and trajectory the hair will take when in motion.

To finish with a full-color animation.

It seems like a difficult animation, but believe me, if you follow the step-by-step instructions in the tutorial, you'll see how simple it can be.

 

That's why I invite you to watch the tutorial:

Draw and Animate Windblown Hair in Clip Studio Paint

My tutorials are now dubbed in English! If you speak another language, you can turn on the subtitles for now. I'm sure you'll find your language ;)

Step by step tutorial

Let's review what we learned

1. Project Creation

Go to File - New and select the first option, which is the illustration option. It has the following features:

And we save the project using the save button above.

2. Simple Mode

If you're using a tablet with Clip Studio PAINT, you can use Simple Mode. In my case, I'm doing this tutorial on my iPad Pro.

 

Go to the Clip Studio PAINT icon at the top and select: Switch to Simple Mode.

And we have the Simple Mode interface, as you can see it's different, it's a cleaner interface so you can draw more comfortably.

And with the brush tool we draw the girl we are going to animate.

After finishing drawing the girl's body, we go to the 3 points at the top and activate "Switch to Studio Mode."

And we return to the Study Mode interface.

3. Timeline

Let's go to the top menu Window - Timeline.

In the timeline we activate the button: New timeline.

In Frame Rate at 24 and Duration at 24.

And we have the timeline to start animating.

4. Line of action

In the timeline we create a New animation folder.

And now we create a new animation cel

And we draw a point from the head above the ear and make the line of action of the hair movement from frame 1.

And we do the same in the following frames:

1-4-7-10-13-16-19-22

Achieving the following animation:

5. Animation Sketch

We create a new animation folder in the timeline.

And this time we won't create a new animation cel, we'll go to the layer panel to create a New Layer Folder.

And we create the following raster and vector layers:

• LINE (Vector Layer)

• LINE SHADOW (Vector Layer)

• LIGHT (Raster Layer)

• SHADING (Raster Layer)

• COLOR (Raster Layer)

• SKETCH (Raster Layer)

We select the SKETCH layer to make the animation sketch and choose the Pencil tool.

And we make the first drawing of the Animation in this way, following as a guide the red line of action of the movement that we created previously.

To make it a perfect loop I recommend going to frame 24 and activating Specify Cels.

And we select drawing 1 and activate accept.

Don't forget to enable the Onion Skin option.

Then, we'll create new animation cels in the frames:

1-4-7-10-13-16-19-22.

 

And as you can see, each new drawing we create will respect both the names and layer types we created previously.

It's one of the Clip Studio options I love!

And we achieved the following animation:

Animation Sketch:

And we disabled the red motion action line animation that served as a guide when animating the hair. We can disable it both in the timeline and in the layers panel.

Animation Sketch without the action line:

6. Animation Line

We will start with the girl's fixed body, select the SKETCH layer and activate Change Layer Color.

To create the animation line, we'll select the Pen tool. I like G-Real as a subtool. In Tool Properties, we'll activate Stabilization.

 

For the line, we'll select the LINE layer, which is a vector layer.

And we do the same with each of the hair animation drawings to achieve the following result.

Animation Line:

7. Animation shadow line

Now we'll select the SHADOW LINE layer for both the girl's still body and her hair, in all the animation drawings.

We'll change it to a magenta color to contrast with the black border line, so it looks like this:

8. Animation Color

For the color, we're going to download a 90s Anime-style color palette from the Clip Studio PAINT Assets, which you can download below:

To install the color palette, go to the Material window and select the downloaded Color Palette.

And at the bottom we activate: Glue the selected material to the canvas (register adjustment material in the palette and preset)

And we activate the accept button.

Select the Fill tool, and in the Subtool section, activate Reference to other layers. In Tool Properties, activate Area Scaling and Multiple Reference.

To achieve this, paint with a single click.

And we paint both the still body and the hair movement animation.

Also, don't forget to turn off the LINE SHADOW layer in each of the animation drawings.

Animation Color:

9. Animation Background

In the Material window, type "Sky" to search for a sky background. Once you find one, drag it into the scene and integrate it into the animation.

In the layers panel we duplicate the background and place it above all the layers, and in the combination modes we activate: Light Soft, achieving a much better integration.

10. Export your Animation

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

We give our video a name.

In export settings we click the Accept button.

11. Final Animation

This is the animation we managed to make in this tutorial.

I hope this tip is helpful and that you're able to create your own animation.

See you in the next tip!

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