Clip Studio Paint Tutorials

How to make PIXEL ART Animation in Clip Studio PAINT

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KevinFarias

Hello! In this article I will teach you how to make a PIXEL ART Animation in Clip Studio Paint, we will create an animation cycle of a LO-FI style scene.

Remember to check out my other Clip Studio Paint Tips where you're sure to learn a lot.

Pixel Art Animation we will make

On this occasion, we will create a Pixel Art style animation that could perfectly be used for LO-FI musical animations. We will simply animate a character lying on the grass at sunset interacting with other elements.

Let's go with the super tutorial and remember that you can activate subtitles in your language, if you don't find it, leave me a comment and I'll gladly add new subtitles in your language.

Tutorial: PIXEL ART Animation in Clip Studio Paint

What did you think of the tutorial?

We saw step-by-step how to make a Pixel art style animation in an easy and simple way.

Step-by-step on how to make a Pixel Art animation

Now I invite you to review what you've learned, step by step through a guide that will support what you learned in the video tutorial.

1. Pixel Art Animation Concept

This is the animation idea I will create in Pixel Art style.

2. Project Creation for Pixel Art Animation

File - New, and we create an Illustration project with the following characteristics:

And our project is created:

Then we go to the menu: View - Grid

Initially it will look like this:

Let's go again to View - Ruler/Grid Settings:

And in the settings window, we leave the following values and click OK:

And our project is ready to start drawing and animating. Don't forget to go to File - Save and save your project.

And we incorporate the guide drawing to animate on this base:

We will use this layer as a sketch, so we activate Layer Color and lower its opacity to 50%

3. Pixel Art Style Animation

Here are some great brushes for drawing pixel art style.

In my case, I will use the Pen tool with the G Pen sub-tool, setting smoothing to the minimum:

We begin to draw the character's body, everything that will not have movement, on a raster layer outside the created animation folder.

Now we animate the character's hair blowing in the wind, using only 4 drawings from the animation folder. We delete the frames we don't use.

And this is the hair animation we achieved with only 4 drawings. Remember that our animation will be a cycle.

We add the eye animation in another animation folder, creating 3 different drawings: open eyes, closed eyes, and semi-open eyes.

And we do the same with the background elements, creating a new animation folder and animating 4 drawings.

Achieving the following result:

4. Animation Color

First we are going to paint the character's motionless body. To do this, we activate the fill tool, in the sub-tool we activate Refer to other layers, and in Tool Properties we deactivate Area Scaling.

And we create a new raster layer below the character's body line layer and name it: base color.

Achieving the following result for now:

5. Color of the Animation of hair, eyes, and animated background

With the same Pen tool, we can paint the color of the hair animation. Remember to create a folder with the same name as the frame, and add the layer with the hair line inside this new folder. This way, the timeline will read this created folder as a frame, where we can add as many layers as we want.

And for now, we have the following result, looking good, right? :)

6. Background Color

We create a new layer called Background, Grass, or Lawn and go to Edit - Fill, and color the background.

7. Highlights and Shadows of the Animation

We will create new layers over the base color layers, we will call them shadow color or highlights and activate the option: Clip to Layer Below, so we don't worry if we go outside the color.

And for now, we have the following result:

8. Petal Animation

Next, we will create a new animation to further enhance our work. We create a new animation folder and will make 4 drawings for the movement of petals that will appear above the scene.

9. Edge Color

Now, to make our animation even prettier, we are going to color the edges of all the elements in the scene. To do this, we will select all layers containing the edges of all elements and activate the option: Lock transparent pixels.

Then we go to Edit - Fill, to color the edges, for example, of the leaves:

See? It looks even better :)

And this is what we have achieved with this simple but beautiful animation.

10. Export your .gif animation

Now we will export our pixel art animation as a GIF. To do this, go to File - Export Animation - Animated GIF:

In the settings, we leave it at the size with which we initially created the project and click OK:

And this is the GIF animation in the original size we worked on for our project:

11. Export your Full HD .gif animation

The first thing we must do is scale our project without losing quality, and you will realize that by doing the project this way there will be no problem.

Let's go to Edit - Change image resolution:

This is the original size of the project:

And by just adding the number 0 to both the width and height, we can enlarge the project size. The scale automatically changes to 10, we leave the resolution at 72, and click OK:

And we have a 1920 x 1080 pixel project without losing quality:

Go to File - Export Animation - Animated GIF: