Introduction

Today, I will show you how you can automatically color your sketches and line art using AI technology in Clip Studio Paint, either as a basis for a painting you want to develop further or as a color sketch to explore some color harmonies.

Video for the Article

Requirements

Your Clip Studio Paint version should be at least 1.8.4, and an internet connection must be available, as the data required by the AI is uploaded to a server where it is interpreted.

Preparation

A prerequisite for automatic coloring is to define the contour of your motif.

It can be helpful for the AI to largely close these contours, but smaller gaps will be recognized and closed - You should also not work too sloppily within the contour.

 

Theoretically, you can now have the entire drawing automatically colored.

To do this, we set the Lineart Layer as a reference layer by selecting the layer in the Layer menu and then clicking "Set as Reference Layer" also in the Layer menu

 

Alternatively, you can do this in the main menu under the tab "Layer" -> "Layer Settings" > "Set as Reference Layer".

Auto-Colorize Options

Under "Edit" > "Colorize all", generate some basic colors within the linework that could work well as flesh tones.

However, it is much more interesting if you create a "hint layer". This refers to a layer that should give the AI information on how it can fill the composition.

 

To do this, we first create a raster layer and roughly apply some colors to the intended areas. I try to work with the light to medium tones of the colors here, as I want to add the darker ones in the next step.

 

Now I select "Edit", "Colorize", "Use hint image and colorize" and after a short calculation time, we have a quite passable result.

The colors often bleed through the contour, so color areas at the edges are slightly blurred.

If you are bothered by the blurred edge of a color area extending beyond the contour of the drawing, you can quickly fix this by using the automatic selection tool and then selecting these areas on the hint layer.

Press the Delete key once, and the outer edge is clean!

And if the tool doesn't recognize everything, there's always the manual option using the Select Tool.

 

The degree of the blurred edge can also be influenced by selecting edit > colorize > use more advanced settings, which opens the almost cheeky-looking Colorize box.

With the "Analyze colors and colorize" function selected, you can then make use of the so-called Tone Curve, which allows you to regulate the output of a color.

 

 

Furthermore, the blur strength can be calibrated here, which defines the area of the blurred region. There is also the blur precision parameter, which determines how smooth the transitions are designed.

Possible Uses

How could one now use this function effectively?

 

Firstly, you quickly get a base color for your painting and can build upon it.

As a test, I will further elaborate on the current example, adding form and drop shadows, rendering details, as well as hard and soft edges.

And this is what the result looks like :)

You could easily test smaller color sketches and color harmonies before investing a lot of time in a composition.

This would also be a great tool in the application area of color scripting for animated films or comics.

I hope this was helpful - Have fun trying it out! :)