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!

 

Coloring specialty surfaces such as shiny crystals can be a struggle, especially if you’re a beginner artist! But with just a few simple tools and layer settings, making a shiny glittering jewel is a piece of cake!

 

Let’s start coloring!

 

 

Coloring a Shiny Crystal

For this example we’ll, of course, need a drawing of a crystal to start with! You can draw your own, but I’m going to be using this beautiful asset from CSP User Aquarius.k that comes with some really beautiful frames and also crystals!

Once you have the line art for the crystal you want to color, set the line art layer as a Reference Layer by clicking the “Set as Reference Layer” icon in the Layer Palette.

Now create a new layer below the line art layer for the base color. Select the Fill tool, then the “Refer Other Layers” tool from the Tool Group panel. Make sure that the “Refer Other” option in the Tool Properties window is set to “Reference Layer”. Now you can use the Fill tool on the new empty layer below the line art to fill in your chosen color!

Create a new layer named “Gradients” above the base color layer but below the line art. Right-click the base color layer and go to Selection from Layer - Create Selection. This will create a selection of the shape of the contents of the layer (in this case, the shape of the crystal!). Now go back to your Gradients layer.

Now we’re going to add a subtle gradient to the crystal. Thinking about your light source, use a lighter version of your base color to add highlight to one end of the crystal, and use a dark version at the other end. Because you have a selection of the base colors, your gradient color will not go outside of the line art.

Once you have the gradient done, you can clear the selection. Create another new layer above the gradient layer (I named this one, “Inner Sparkle”, you’ll see why shortly!). Set this layer to the Multiply blending mode.

 

Now select the Polyline tool under the Selection Tools category.

 

 

Using the Polyline selection tool, go back and forth clicking and making lines randomly.

Select a darker shade of your base color and fill some of the selections you made at random using the fill tool. If you use the “Refer other layers” Fill tool then your colors will still stay inside of the line art since it’s still set as the Reference Layer!

Deselect the selection once you’re done filling in areas to your personal taste.

 

Create another new layer and use either the polyline selection tool or your favorite drawing tool and bright white to make highlights on the facets facing the light source.

 

 

Use a Soft Eraser with the brush density set to 50% and erase some of the highlights on the parts of the faces of the gems that are furthest from the light source. Then lower the opacity of the layer to around 50%.

Use that same process to create some thinner highlights just on the edges of the faces. This time I lowered the opacity to 75% to make the highlights stand out more.

Now you can play with some blending modes and make copies of different layers and move them around to get more color variation if you’d like! Below is the layer combination that I ended up using for this crystal - you can see that I changed the opacity of the inner sparkles slightly and also created a Gradients layer copy that I set to Overlay.

Here’s the final result from what I created! I did end up adding a very small blur to the “inner sparkles” layer to soften them a bit and I love the outcome!

Conclusion

Hopefully by working through this you’ve seen just how simple it is to create a shiny crystal of your own!

 

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