Today we're going to take a look at some of the ClipStudio Paints functions for creating ink drawings.

I want to create a monochrome composition and limit myself to the darkest black and the brightest white.

 

The monochrome color mode in Clip Studio Paint

When creating a new canvas, you have to set the general expression color to "monochrome". Choose a high resolution and a large format canvas.

In this mode, there is no antialiasing for lines and you can see artifacts on the edges of the lines if the resolution is too low.

Antialiasing is available in the "Color" and "Gray" modes and softens the edges of the lines.

For ink drawings, however, we want exactly this look, since ink is a medium that lives from its expressive black lines and lines.

 

We can establish a scale from light to dark, textures as well as light and shadow by the line thickness, the distance of lines or the superimposition of lines in variable alignment.

Ink tools: The G-Pen

For ink drawings, I prefer the G-Pen, which is already well calibrated.

 

In the tool properties you can adjust the value for stabilization so that you get straight lines. However, the value should not be set too high, otherwise the accuracy of your input will be jeopardized.

In the settings for "brush size pen settings" I would set the minimum value to 0. If you set a value above 40 in the tool properties [G-Pen], you should be able to create nice thin and thick extensions of your strokes depending on the pen pressure. If your pen display or graphics tablet supports a tilt angle, you can also calibrate this.

 

You can use this curve to refine your settings for pen pressure. Try it out a bit, we all have different pen printing requirements! :)

 

When drawing the lines, you should pay attention to a steep angle of inclination of the stylus and grab it further forward. Depending on the range of the stroke, you have to draw from your wrist, forearm or shoulder

Draw the lines towards you or away from you, if you find it difficult to line horizontally.

Also, you shouldn't zoom in too far, as you will get lost in details at lightning speed, use too fine lines and could undermine the visual language of the whole composition. If you can't get used to zooming in and out, just move the mouse away from you.

Das Lasso Fill Tool

You can mark large areas with the Lasso Fill Tool, these will then be filled in automatically.

To achieve credible transitions between the light and dark areas, you can either draw lines from the dark area or set the G-Pen to "transparency" and subtract from the dark area. To select the transparency mode for the G-Pen, you have to pull out the toolbar horizontally.

Monochromatic patterns

Clip Studio Paint also has presets for "monochromatic patterns", that is, patterns of dots and dashes that you can use to fake shades of gray in the brain without actually using gray. You can access this via Window> Material> Material Basic

 

To fill entire areas with these patterns, you first create a new layer.

Hold SHIFT and mark all areas.

 

You can drag and drop the desired pattern into the marked areas.

 

After inserting a monochromatic pattern once, a layer mask is added. Now you can paint directly with this pattern with the selected pen tool.

 

If the frequency of the pattern does not match your rest of the drawing, you can adjust it under "Settings for rasterization". For example, you can change the size and spacing of the grid. Under "Density" you can determine how light or dark your gray tone should be.

Final preparations

If you now want to draw up a sketch for an ink drawing, you can of course import the scan of a drawing or create a digital sketch.

 

In both cases, you should lower the opacity, which you can do in the Layer menu.

 

Now you can create a new layer and create the ink drawing over your sketch.

 

Have fun trying :)