You know that feeling when a drawing is basically done — but something still feels off? The face looks slightly uneven. The pose lacks weight. The hair needs more life. You've already put in hours, and the last thing you want is to redraw everything…

That's exactly where Liquify and Puppet Warp become your best friends. This guide will show you how to use both tools to push your art from "almost there" to finished. It’s about fixing that last 5% of an illustration =D

Hey! I'm ScriblingArt 👋

In this tip I will show you how I use Liquify and Puppet Warp after the real drawing work is done to polish and finalize a painting

✨Psst! Skip directly to the workflow section (One Piece Both Tools) if you have an idea on how the tools work =D

Video Tip

🧩 My setup

For clarity I included my setup here, if you can’t find a tool for some reason let me know in the comments below and I’ll try to help =D

🟨 My Setup

Device: iPad 8th gen

Pen: Generic Pencil

Clip Studio Paint: Ver 5.0

🟨 Tool Locations

✨ Studio Mode

In Studio Mode, the Puppet Warp tool lives under Edit → Transform,

while the Liquify Tool can be found on the Tool menu (left-hand side menu)

✨ Simple Mode

In Simple Mode Liquify can be found on the right-hand side menu

while Puppet Warp is inside the Transform tool (right-hand side menu)

🧩 Which tool when?

Quick cheat sheet before we dive deep:

✨ Liquify → small, local pushes in one area (face details, one fold, a hair clump).

✨ Puppet Warp → a whole mass moves together with pins (torso angle, ponytail arc, skirt drape).

💡 Personally, I like to use the Liquify tool for adjustments during sketching phase while Puppet Warp is more useful when my art just needs finishing touches.

⚙️ Some guidelines

Before diving into the tools themselves, here are a few signals that tell you which situation you're in — and whether these tools are even the right call.

💡Have you been editing the same spot with lasso transform more than 3 times and it's still not working?

That's your cue to stop fighting the selection and switch to Puppet Warp instead

💡 "Something's off" on the face but you can't name it? Adjust the features using liquify with low strength.

Good liquify edits disappear into the drawing.

💡 Before making any adjustments always save your art, either by duplicating the layers or saving it under a new file, that's your safety net.

Duplicating the layers helps to toggle the original on / off for comparison.

If the edit is obvious, it’s probably too strong. With liquify specifically, it’s really useful for little retouches here and there to bring out features.

🧩 Liquify — complete guide

The Liquify tool is like a digital “push and pull” brush for your artwork.

Instead of erasing and redrawing, you can:

📌 move lines,

📌 reshape faces,

📌 adjust proportions,

📌 enlarge or shrink areas,

📌 twist or bend parts of an image

all of this just by brushing over them with your pen.

🟨 Key Liquify Modes

Below the Liquify window (in the tool settings window) you'll see different brush settings and modes.

Names can vary slightly by version but if you hover each icon, you can check the names.

Here’s a quick overview of what each mode does and where best to use it.

📌 Push

This mode drags pixels in the direction you stroke.

Push is my default for faces and cloth.

📌 Expand

Bulges outward from the center of the pen stroke.

Careful on faces; can be handy for puffing a sleeve, adding soft volume, or enlarging facial features with small brush size and low strength.

📌 Pinch

Shrinks areas inward.

Useful for slimming shapes, tightening facial features, or reducing oversized parts. For this, I noticed the face was drawn too large, so I used Pinch to reduce its size

📌 Push Left / Push Right

Shifts pixels sideways relative to the stroke direction.

To the Left

To the Right

For this drawing, the face felt too narrow and compressed, so I used low-strength Left Push to give the face more volume

📌 Twirl Clockwise / Anti-Clockwise

Rotates pixels in a spiral motion around your brush center.

Clockwise

Anti-Clockwise

Fun to experiment on stylized effects, curls, dynamic distortions, patterns, and creative transformations.

🟨 Liquify Brush Settings

Brush settings that matter:

• Size: how big the influence area is. Use small size for details and larger size for overall silhouette editing.

• Strength / Pressure: how hard each stroke pushes (start low!).

💡Low strength, many small strokes beat one violent drag every time.

• Density / hardness: softer edges blend more naturally on painted skin.

🟨 Before you liquify — prep

1️⃣ Duplicate the layer (right or long click layer → Duplicate Layer).

2️⃣ If line art and color are separate, either merge a copy (Long click the layer and select Merge Selceted) for Liquify or group the lineart and color layers then apply liquify.

💡 Note that if you have any vector layer within the group, you won’t be able to use liquify properly, it will only apply to the raster layer.

💡 Vector and Text layers need to be rasterized before transform tools work on them — rasterize a duplicate, not your only copy.

3️⃣ Save the .clip file. Seriously =D you’ll regret not having an intact copy if you don’t =S

🟨 Liquify on the head

The goal from using liquify is harmony, not a new person. Eye spacing, brows, mouth width, jaw in 3/4, all of these can be enhanced by using liquify.

1️⃣ Zoom to 100–200% on the area you're fixing. Zoom out every few strokes to judge.

2️⃣ Alternate between Liquify modes depending on what you want to achieve. Generally, Push mode works for most things. Set the strength to around 10–25% (adjust to taste).

3️⃣ Structure pass: jaw line, cheek fullness, eye height relative to each other, head tilt and shape.

4️⃣ Detail pass: mouth corner, nostril wing, eyelid height, brow peak.

5️⃣ Flip the canvas horizontally (View — Rotate/Flip — Flip Horizontal ) and fix anything that looks wrong only on one side.

6️⃣ Compare with original layer toggled off and on (remember to always duplicate your art before liquifying it!)

💡 Earrings, glasses, beauty marks — draw them on separate layers so it’s easier to make adjustements.

🟨 Liquify on clothes

You can also liquify cloth folds and adjust their overall shapes to fit your character better.

1️⃣ Find the stress point — armpit, waist, hip, knee, cuff, belt. That's where the fold "starts."

2️⃣ Push mode, follow the direction fabric would hang if gravity pulled it from that point.

3️⃣ Broad strokes first (whole fold shape), then smaller strokes for secondary creases.

4️⃣ Pinch to tighten a fold that's too puffy; Expand slightly if a area looks too flat (use gently).

💡 Creative Liquify ideas

• Nudge hair clumps before you commit to redrawing strands.

• Fix a crooked collar or scarf end without redoing line art.

• Soften a harsh shadow edge that reads like a mistake.

• Slightly open a closed eye or relax a tense mouth on an almost-finished portrait.

• Push left/right on a 3/4 nose bridge when perspective feels one pixel off.

🧩 Puppet Warp — complete guide

Puppet Warp lets you place movable pins directly onto your artwork. These pins act like joints and anchors, allowing you to bend, tilt, stretch, or reposition parts of the drawing without fully redrawing them.

Think of it like attaching invisible strings to your art, some pins hold areas in place while others pull and reshape nearby pixels.

A single pin behaves almost like the Move tool: dragging it shifts the whole image.

Moving around the bigger circle creates a rotation around that pin

💡 Before you start placing pins: how you've organized your layers will make or break your results. We'll cover the ideal layer setup in the "Layer Separation" section — if you're starting a new piece, it's worth reading that first.

🟨 Settings Overview

• Mesh / Density

Controls how detailed the warp mesh becomes.

Lower density = smoother, broader movement

Higher density = finer control, sharper bends

💡 High density helps with detailed hair or cloth movement, but can also create awkward distortions if overused.

You can find this setting in the Tool Settings panel, if not, search for it in the Advanced Tool Settings menu

💡 Keep in mind that you’ll only see the tool settings panel after you use the Puppet Warp transform

If you want, you can choose to show or hide the mesh by checking the Show mesh mark

• Pins

Pins determine what moves and what stays fixed, they act like joints or anchors. You can add one simply by clicking into the mesh

Anchor pins = stable areas, use these to keep sections from moving accidentally.

These should be placed on the parts that you do not want to be moved, for example, the leg on the right side for my character, as well as the hips and shoulders

Motion pins = create the actual bend or pull, use these on the part you want to move. For example, the leg and hand on the left side for my character

💡 Think of anchor pins as “holding the skeleton in place.” You can see that my character did not move when I moved the motion pins, that’s because the anchor pins are holding it in place.

Not placing anchor points properly can mess up your drawing and move parts that were not supposed to move …

💡 So, always think of what is fixed and what will be moving, generally, for a human, you’d want to fix the torso, shoulders, head, hips, and feet if they’re on the ground and you want them fixed.

You can always delete pins if you wrongly placed them, and you can also apply small movements to fixed parts if needed

 

💡You can use keyboard shortcuts such as Alt click to remove them if you want.

• Pin Selection

Selection allows you to select multiple pins at once and move them together

💡 A pin is selected when its orange, and it is unselected when its grey

When you set the selection to Toggle selection,

Clicking unselected pins will add them to your current selection

Clicking an already selected pin will remove it from your selection

This can be especially useful for moving several strands of hair at once or rotating an arm while preserving elbow spacing

💡 This helps create smoother, more natural movement compared to dragging pins individually.

• Order

Order controls which parts appear in front or behind during deformation.

This becomes extremely important when parts overlap.

Without proper order settings, warped parts can visually collapse into each other, like the strand of hair on my character below

💡 If your warp suddenly looks tangled or melted, overlap order is often the reason.

🟨 How to Use Puppet Warp Effectively

Instead of using it on the entire artwork, try separating your artwork into parts like Hair, body, and outfit. You can then warp the different parts separately without affecting the entire artwork

1️⃣ Select the layer to warp, for this example I’ll adjust the hair to make it more dynamic

2️⃣ With the hair layer selected, go to: Edit → Transform → Puppet Warp to apply the transformation

This will add the mesh to the hair

3️⃣ Click to place pins on important areas, add anchor pins first (to the hair surrounding the scalp to hold it in place),

then, add motion pins to the parts you want to move (strands and braid in my case)

4️⃣ Drag the motion pins to bend or reposition the hair to make it more dynamic

5️⃣ When you’re satisfied with the transformation, press OK to apply it

💡 Puppet warp works best on finished art. Duplicate the layer first before experimenting.

🟨 Hidden Issue and How to Fix it

Warping often reveals areas that were previously hidden. Sometimes, those areas are not painted

To avoid any issues with hidden areas, try to always underpaint the hidden parts, for example the back of the hair, or the part of the dress and skin hidden below the hair, like in my character below

💡 You can always paint them as you go, or simply use blend and liquify to bring the painted areas around to that part

🟨 Layer separation: the secret to clean warps

Puppet Warp becomes dramatically stronger when elements are separated beforehand.

Best candidates for separate layers:

• Hair

• Sleeves

• Cloak

• Skirt

• Tail

• Scarves

• Ribbons

Why?

Because Puppet Warp affects everything connected inside the layer.

If all elements are merged together → moving one element may accidentally distort the other elements, and you won’t be able to edit separate parts easily

💡 Separating layers gives more control over the motion

🟨 Creative ways to use Puppet Warp

1️⃣ Add flow to hair without repainting everything

2️⃣ Shift body weight for better balance

3️⃣ Tilt shoulders for a stronger silhouette

💡 Tiny pose changes can completely change the energy of an artwork.

4️⃣ Create dynamic text effect

💡 While text layer itself cannot be transformed, we can transform a rasterized version of it!

When using puppet warp on a text or a thin line, draw a thick line behind the text layer, then, group this line with the text layer and apply transformation to the group

💡 When done, just erase the thick line layer.

If you dont do this step, puppet warp will try to read every letter separately (sometimes it misses or connect multiple letters)

🟨 Common problems & fixes

❌ Overlapping parts break visually or are in wrong order

Cause:

• Incorrect pin order

Fix:

• Adjust front/back order settings

• Separate overlapping elements into layers

❌ Empty gaps appear

Cause:

• Hidden areas weren’t painted

Fix:

• Paint underneath overlapping parts before warping

❌ Some parts get deleted

Cause:

• Lines too thin the tool doesnt detect them

Fix:

• Draw temporary thick lines where needed then delete them when done using puppet warp

💡 Puppet Warp works best as a polishing tool, not a full redraw replacement. It shines when adjusting motion, flow, gesture, and balance on artwork that is already mostly finished.

🧩 One piece, both tools

Here I worked on a mermaid illustration for the mermay challenge, I tried different color themes and then settled on this purplish palette

Then, I lightly rendered the artwork using the lasso tool and layer modes as well as the blend or painterly blend tool to mix colors nicely

As I recommended earlier, I separated each element into a separate layer, this way when I want to adjust anything I can easily do so without messing with other things

When I started to feel like my illustration is coming together nicely, I wanted to add some texture to the tail, so I took a large textured brush (I went with a floral brush, cuz why not?) and brushed it over instead of scales.

Then I used the Liquify tool with Push mode mainly, to adjust the placement of the texture without redrawing or erasing anything

I tried some layer modes and settled on the Brightness mode and lowered the opacity of the layer to ~30% so that the texture isnt too obvious

Since I’m done with rendering, I duplicated the character layer (to save a copy of the groups) and merged each group into its own raster layer (Long click the group for the selection menu to appear, then click Merge selected layers)

Then, to adjust the overall pose I grouped the hair, accessories and body layers into one group and left the tail separate

I then used puppet warp on the new group to adjust the pose

I felt the eyes were too small and burried by the hair and other elements, so I selected the expand mode on liquify and gave the eyes more volume (I used this on the body layer instead of the grouped layers so as not to affect the hair)

Looking at the drawing, the tail felt like its competing with the character, so i nudged it a bit out of focus using push mode on liquify

💡 You could also use puppet warp to achieve a similar effect

To finish the drawing, I added some fish using a fish brush, then used puppet warp to control their movement

And that’s it for this piece! Remember the point of using adjustement tools is to polish and finish the drawing so you don’t have to redraw everything =`)

💡 Just rememeber this order that saved me the least undo headaches:

1️⃣ Save. Duplicate the whole character group if you use folders.

2️⃣ Puppet Warp on pose and big hair shapes (structure first).

3️⃣ Puppet Warp on separate layers for cape / loose parts if needed.

4️⃣ Liquify for face harmony pass.

5️⃣ Liquify for clothing micro folds.

6️⃣ Liquify for tiny hair fixes only if warp left a clump weird.

7️⃣ Merge or keep passes separate depending on whether you'll animate later.

🧩 Conclusion

You now have two powerful tools for that frustrating "almost done" stage: Liquify for surgical tweaks and Puppet Warp for structural shifts. Used together—on properly separated layers—they can save you from completely redrawing a piece that's 95% there.

Remember the Non-Negotiables

The 30-Second Cheat Sheet

Face feels wrong? → Liquify, Push mode, 10–25% strength, zoom to ~200%

Pose lacks energy? → Puppet Warp on body layer, anchor hips/feet, tilt shoulders

Hair looks static? → Separate hair layer, anchor at scalp, motion pins at tips

Cloth folds read flat? → Find stress points (armpit, waist, knee), Push with gravity

When to Stop

If you've Liquified the same spot a lot, step away. These tools fix execution, not fundamental drawing problems. They're polish, not magic.

But when the foundation is solid and something just itches? That's exactly when a 30-second warp beats a 3-hour redraw.

You might be surprised how much one small adjustment changes the whole feeling of the art.

If you try it, drop a comment! I'd love to see what you fixed and which tool you reached for first. 💙

Thanks for reading! Happy Tweaking.