Ruler Tutorials

Ruler & Painting Tutorial - Part 1

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Introduction

Welcome to my new series of tutorials, where I will be talking about rulers of all kinds.

Clip Studio Paint comes with a broad variety of rulers, and hopefully I will be able to help you get to know them, and figure out how to work with them. What I’m going to do is draw a series of paintings, and try to work in all the rulers as I go. This first part here uses the 1 point perspective ruler, the curve ruler, the linear ruler and the symmetry ruler. I’ll take a look at the 2- and 3 point perspective rulers later on. I also explain the entire painting process of making the image, with a ton of screen captures and images.

Alright, let’s get to it!

Initial Settings

The first thing I do, is create a new file and create a new layer for the initial sketch. Note that this sketch is only the beginning, there will be another more refined sketch layer, before I get to the actual inking stage.

As for measurements and DPI, you can pretty much do whatever you want, but I do recommend a setting of at least 300 DPI. This painting has the odd measurements of 36x46 centimeters, because it needs to fit into an old gold frame I found at a thrift store.

Initial Sketch

I always use the Lighter Pencil for sketching, and for the initial sketch, I use a light blue color. I have no specific reason to do so, other than it fits my workflow. I do recommend not using black or too dark of a color for sketching, as it’ll interfere with the inking further down the line, but you can go for whatever color you see fit.

Above is a picture of the initial sketch, and as you can see, it doesn’t look like much of anything. That’s okay, it’s not supposed to, we’ll get to that in the refined sketch stage. At this point it’s mostly about getting the general idea down. What I want this picture to include, in regards to character pose and background elements.

Refined Character Sketch

Now I lower the opacity of the initial sketch layer, create a new layer on top, and pick a red color. Still using the Lighter Pencil tool, I go over the sketch, clean it up, add details, and all that kind of stuff. I start off with the character, as seen above.

The Linear Ruler

Now that I have my character, it’s time for the umbrella and background, which means what we’re all here for: Playing with rulers! Start by clicking on the triangular icon, to get to the ruler menu. Then pick the Linear Ruler, and we’re ready to go.

Now the Linear Ruler is very straight forward, although it does come with some options. You can use it as a regular straight ruler, or you can turn it into curves (like an old fashioned french curve ruler, for instance), by using the Quadratic Bezier or Cubic Bezier settings. Above I’ve done some random ruler lines, so you can see what it looks like. These lines have not been painted or drawn, this is just how the ruler on its own look. Keep in mind that the Bezier curves can be pulled in all kind of directions and curves, these are just examples.

Since the rulers are purple and my lines are red, I tend to lower the opacity on my refined sketch layer slightly, just to make them stand out more. I start by drawing two straight lines down, from the top of the umbrella, to the bottom where the handle is, with the Straight Line option. Once the ruler is in place, whatever painting/drawing tool I use, will snap to it.

Here I’ve used the G-pen to draw on top of the rulers, and as you can see, perfectly straight lines, where the thickness varies with pen pressure, brush size and whatever other settings there may be linked to your selected brush. It’s really that simple.

The Curve Ruler

There’s four options of curved rulers, Straight Line, Spline, Quadratic Bezier and Cubic Bezier. The straight line is really just connecting straight lines via points, so that’s pretty straight forward. You can end the line by either double clicking, or going “full circle”, where you stop at the point where you started.

Next comes the Spline option. You click on the canvas to make your starting point. Then you click somewhere else, and a line emerges between the two points. You can now – without clicking – drag a curve between the two points. You can add more points as you see fit, and just like with the straight line, you either double click or go full circle.

As for the Quadratic Bezier and Cubic Bezier, these also works with curves between points. The easiest way to show the differences, is by showing how they are build, which you can see in the screenshot above. To me, they do the exact same thing and serve the exact same purpose, it’s more a matter of taste and what fits your workflow best.

Now for some context!

I need to make the shape of the umbrella handle, and for that I’m going to use the Cubic Bezier curved ruler. I use that, mainly because I worked a lot with vector graphics in Adobe Illustrator a while back, and they work like that. You could make the exact same curves using any of the other curved rulers, this is just what comes easiest to me.

Above you can see the “first draft” of the ruler. Looks somewhat horrible and deformed, but lucky for me, there’s a solution for that.

Click on the Operation Tool, then choose Object in the menu. Now click on the ruler, and all these little handles will appear. These can thankfully be dragged and adjusted to clean up the ruler. The white dots are the actual points where you clicked to begin with. Dragging these changes the basic position of the point. The little red dots jotting out of it can also be dragged and adjusted, and these change the curve between the two points.

After some corrections, my ruler now look like this. You might notice that there’s a part of the curved ruler jotting away from the linear ruler. That’s okay, the two merges together a little further down the line, and when painted it will look just the way it’s supposed to.

Now I’m not quite done with the umbrella yet, it still needs the top part. I do that the exact same way as the handle, just use the Cubic Ruler, click and drag then, correct the lines with the Object tool.

One thing that proved very useful in doing the top-part of the umbrella, is that if you hover over the previous point you made, a little V will appear. This means: Break the curve. Click this, and the point will go straight, as if it were your first point, and you can now continue with a new curve, without breaking the ruler. The picture above shows the finished umbrella ruler in all its glory.

And there is the finished refined sketch of the guy with the umbrella.

1-point Perspective Ruler

First thing I need to do is create a perspective ruler. I do so by finding Layer in the top bar menu, then Ruler/Frame, then Create Perspective Ruler.

I get this little pop up window, and for this tutorial, I tick 1-point perspective. A set of (maybe) confusing looking lines now appear.

Now let’s take it from the top:

• Blue horizontal line: The horizon, as in, where the ocean meets the sky in real life. Now if you’re not in the middle of drawing an “ocean meets the sky” type of picture, don’t worry. It can be placed wherever you want it, it just has to make sense in regards to what you’re trying to portray. I usually move this line around A LOT to figure out the perfect placement. Sometimes I go for eye level of a character, sometimes I go far up high or way down below, to me, it’s just an issue of what looks and feels right.

• The diagonal purple lines: Those two meet at a point in the middle, called the vanishing point. You can use these to place your perspective in the picture, just find a couple of lines in your sketch and try to match it up. Doing this also helps placing the horizon line, and even more important: The vanishing point.

• The vanishing point is whereto everything vanishes. Think of a set of railroad tracks, somewhere, way out in the distance, they turn into a single point on the horizon. That’s the vanishing point.

• The vertical purple line: Simply shows what is vertical in contrast to the horizon. This line cannot be moved around, but it can be rotated (we’ll get to that in a bit).

Now let’s take a look at all the tiny handles and buttons on the ruler.

1\. Moves the entire ruler, without altering any of the lines.

2\. Moves number 1 around, in case it’s conflicting with whatever you’re drawing. It holds no effect on the ruler itself, it simply moves handles and buttons on number 1.

3\. Locks the entire ruler. It can still be moved by dragging around number 1, but you can’t adjust any of the lines or vanishing point.

4\. A and B, these little handles can be dragged and will rotate the ruler’s horizon as well as the vertical guideline.

5\. Drag this around to move the ruler and alter its guides and placement of horizon line at the same time.

6\. Locks the vertical guide, which means your lines won’t snap to it when drawing. Instead they’ll only snap to the vanishing point (and horizontal if that’s unlocked, see point 7 below). If this isn’t locked, you can draw perfectly vertical lines, as well as diagonal perspective and perfect horizontal lines.

7\. Locks the horizontal guide, which means your lines won’t snap to it when drawing. Just like with the vertical guide, your lines will now only snap to the vanishing point (and vertical if that’s unlocked).

Now lastly, we’ll look at the diagonal guidelines and their adjustments.

1\. The dragging point of the guide. You use this to adjust the placement of the guide, without affecting anything else on the ruler.

2\. Locks the guides, so the lines you draw won’t snap towards the vanishing point. Instead they’ll only go vertically and horizontally (or just one, if any of the other guides are locked).

3\. A and B moves the vanishing point as well as the horizon line, along with the guide. This makes it easier to adjust the vanishing points, especially if they are far off from the canvas.

And that’s it, those are all the many many things you can adjust and play around with in regards to the 1 point perspective ruler. Now onward to drawing and painting!

Drawing the Background (Basics)

I start out by positioning the perspective ruler, and this is really done by trial and error/whatever looks right to me. Simply put, I put it down somewhere, draw a few key lines to see how it looks, then reposition and repeat if it doesn’t fit.

Seen above is the position I ended up with, notice how far off the vanishing point is from the actual drawing.

Then I draw in the foreground using the perspective ruler. I want him standing on a couple of boards jotting off from the side of a building. A lot more detail will go into this, but I prefer to get all the basic background elements down first, so I draw in some simple blocks for background buildings.

Now there’s one thing I want to add, and that’s another board lying on top of the two others, only at another angle. This means I’ll need another vanishing point on the same horizon line, which can easily be done. Just select the ruler, then right-click it, and a menu will pop up. Click Add Vanishing point, and you’ll get a brand new set of lines for this new vanishing point.

I place the new vanishing point in a position that makes sense to where the board is supposed to be, add a new layer, then draw in the additions. I lock the guides on the first vanishing point, making it easier to snap the lines in the right place.

Using the Grid

Now I want a lot more details on this piece, for instance I want windows on the buildings. These can be added quite easily, by using the grid. Go to View in the top menu, and there will be an option called Grid. Click that, and the grid will appear.

If the grid doesn’t match up with your drawing in a way that makes sense, you can move it around by selecting the Move Layer tool, then click Move Grid. Now it will move the grid around and leave the layer and your drawing alone.

Remember to have the Snap to Grid option turned on at the top of your screen, then start drawing in some basic window shapes. Using the grid as measurements makes it easy to get them uniform and evenly spaced. You can use the grid for all that kind of stuff, here I use it for drawing bricks as well. Once I'm satisfied with the level of detail, the refined sketch is officially done, and I am now free to move on.

The Tattoo – The Symmetrical Ruler

Now before going on to inking this piece, I want to take a look at another ruler: The symmetry ruler.

For this I create an entirely new document, measuring 15x15 cm.. I pick the Symmetrical Ruler from the Ruler toolbox, and in the number of lines box I type in 16. That’s the maximum of lines you can work with, and it works well for the design I have in mind.

Click and drag the ruler onto the canvas, and remember if you hold down shift it’ll be perfectly aligned either horizontally, vertically or at a 45 degree angle. I end up with a result looking like the one above.

Now I want to draw this mandala design, but I don’t want to spend a lot of time planning it out. Therefore I work in ink from the beginning, and start drawing different patterns.

A note on ink: I don’t use black, I use this very dark purple. As you can see on the picture way back at the beginning of this tutorial, this painting has somewhat purple shading, and therefore I use really dark purple ink, to blend it in more smoothly.

Now the genius of the symmetry ruler is that if you draw a line inside one space or along one of the lines, it will be repeated exactly in all other spaces of the ruler. Having sixteen number of lines means that every line I draw will be repeated sixteen times.

Above you see the result of what is actually just random doodling put together with the symmetrical ruler into something quite nice.

Now I copy the tattoo and paste it to my painting.

I start by resizing it to fit where I want it to be (in this case the inside of his elbow).

Then go to Edit → Transform → Mesh Transformation. This gives me a little box with some points I can pull and stretch around the tattoo. I’m doing this so the tattoo will wrap around his arm a little more smoothly than if I just stuck it on there the way it is right now.

And there we go, after some pulling and pinching, I got a result that looks a little more like a tattoo on top of flesh and muscle, than a copy/paste sticker. I will erase the few parts going past the lines of his arm once I’m done inking, set the blending mode to Hard Light, and that’s it for the tattoo.

Inking

Now let’s get to inking. This is really very straight forward, because I already did all the hard work with ruler and grids. I have all I need, to pretty simply follow the lines.

I keep the background and character on separate layers though, in case I need to erase some background stuff from my character, and sometimes I’ll add more layers and merge as I go along.

Keeping the background and character on separate layers also comes in handy later on in this tutorial, so doing that is a really good idea.

Above is a picture of the finished character inking, tattoo included.

And another one of the entire finished inking.

Gray Values

Now create a new layer underneath the inking. I also created a folder for all of my sketches and rulers, just to keep them out of the way.

Picking a light gray color, I start adding shadows to my character and background. There will be three layers of shading, a base color and two sets of highlights in total, so I have to keep that in mind when adding gray values. I use the G-pen for adding values, and remember to keep any non-shaded pixels transparent.

The picture above shows the first layer of shading.

Selecting a mid-gray tone, I repeat the whole process over again.

Finally, I select a dark gray and add the last layer of shading, wherever needed.

And that’s it for the gray values.

Tinting the Inking

Now the thing is, I decided (on a whim) that I wanted the shading of the background to have a greenish tint, instead of purple (something I’ll actually change my mind about again, later in this tutorial, but you’ll get this step anyway).

As you might recall, my lines are dark purple instead of black. Purple lines will clash immensely with green shading, once we get to the blending stage, so instead I’ll try to tint my background line art with a dark green. Hum hallelujah that I kept the background and character inking on two separate layers, right?

To do this, start by selecting the entire content of the background, by right-clicking the layer, go to Selection from Layer, then click Create Selection.

Now you have every tiny detail of the background inking selected. Now to color it differently, I pick the same color as background and foreground color, then do a Foreground to Background gradient. That’s all, it will fill every pixel and you’ll be done with tinting your background inking. There’s actually another (maybe easier) way of coloring all of the lines, which I will do the next time I change my mind.

Be sure to keep the character inking layer above the background inking in the layer palette, since the character is in front of all of the background elements.

Overlay

I now create a new layer on top of the grays, but below the inking layers. This will be my overlay layer, where I will give all of the shading its tint. Flood fill it with whatever tint you want to give the background (in this case green). There’s a lot more background than character, so it makes sense to get that down first.

Now on the same layer, I pick a purple color, and paint in where the character is.

I change the blending mode of the layer to Overlay, and I’m done with this stage of the drawing.

Base Colors and Highlights

I start by creating a new layer on top of the overlay, below the inking, setting this layer’s blending mode to multiply. I then put down a gradient on the entire layer, partially to color the sky, but also to have some sort of starting point.

Next I pick up the Airbrush tool, select the Spray option, and spray on a lot of stars. Don’t worry that they are all over the rest of the painting, all of the colors will be on this layer, which means I’ll be painting over anything that’s not supposed to be there anyways.

Finding the right colors for the different elements of my painting can be somewhat based on trial and error, but I try to keep the mood of the painting in mind, and what general color scheme I want going on. Also, sometimes I have to lower the opacity, at least when I’m working on as dark as base as I am here, where it can be difficult to see where the lines are.

Once I have a base color down, I add some highlights where I see fit. I usually go for two sets of highlights if it’s either organic or shiny, one if it’s neither. I keep the highlights on the same layer as the base colors, but if you want, you can make a new layer on top and just have it on normal blending mode. The result will be the same, to me it’s just easier to try to limit the amount of layers.

Now I pretty much do that, until I’ve got all of my base colors and highlights down and ready for blending.

Here’s a closeup of the character’s face. As you can see, this is truly an ugly phase, but trust me, it’ll get better.

Blending

To blend I have a custom brush, but it’s really just a slightly modified version of the Wet Bleed Blender, where I’ve added a little more stabilization and a few other minor details. It’s more or less the same brush, so you can easily use that for the blending.

Now it’s really simply, I just start blending all the gray values on the grayscale layer, and the base colors and highlights on the multiply layer. Get a nice smooth transition between the two, and you’re pretty set. In the screenshot above I’ve blended the first piece of the background.

Here the entire background has been blended, and only the character is left.

Blending the character is the same technique, only much more delicate. Here’s a shot of half the face blended, just to show off some of the detail work that goes into it.

For the hair, I’ve downloaded a special blur brush, made by Tofu-Tofu. You can find it for free in the Clip Studio Assets store.

Besides blending the overall hair, I’ve created a layer on top of everything else, and added some white highlights to the eyes, and some stray strands of hair here and there. Also I blended in the eyebrows slightly, using the blending brush mentioned above.

Here the entire painting has been blended. So far so good, but there’s still a lot of work left.

Re-toning the background shading

I want to take a brief look at the shadings tone before moving on. I like the purple on the character, but the green shading of the background could be better. Luckily the grays hasn’t been merged with anything else, which means I can just go change the overlay color.

I start off by duplicating the layer, just in case I decide the first option really was the right one. Better safe than sorry, especially because whatever I end up with affects the inking color. Then I hide the Multiply layer and turn the Overlay layer back to Normal mode, to easily select the green of the background.

Switch the layer mode back to Overlay and put the Multiply back into view. Now I can flood fill whatever color I feel like, only affecting the background, and be able to see the finished effect while doing so (really just trial and error here).

In the end I settle on something really close to the character shading color, only a little bit darker and more muted.

Now all there’s left to do is re-color the inking of the background as well, to make it match the rest too. Simply lock the transparency on the inking layer, then press the flood fill button at the top of the screen, with the right color selected.

This is what I meant earlier on, when I said re-coloring of the lines could probably be done in an easier way than using the gradient tool.

Adjusting the lines

There’s a few places where I want to blend the lines with the colors, especially with the character. I use the Wet Bleed Blender just as with everything else, and blend in the lines where needed.

Here I've done a little on the nose.

Detailing

Using the top layer I add a little extra light on the piercing, a few extra strands of hair, and a little light to the umbrella’s top.

Then I create a new layer on top of the Multiply layer, and select the area on the sides of his head using the lasso tool. I want to add a little buzz-cut there.

Using the spray brush with a dark brown color, I spray on some particles.

Now the edges are way too harsh, so I use the soft eraser to soften it up.

I want the umbrella to look sparkly, so I select the umbrella fabric area, using the magic wand tool on the inking layer.

On a new layer on top of the Multiply layer, I use the Tone Scraping brush with a couple of blue colors and set the layer mode to Glow Dodge.

Adding detailing to the wooden planks also seems like a good idea, so I create a new layer and start drawing on some lines. Setting the layer mode to Multiply makes the lines darker and blend in more.

I do the same thing with the umbrella handle.