Hello! Welcome to this tutorial for designing a Papercut style Christmas card in CLIP STUDIO PAINT. I will teach you step by step how to create it, likewise I leave here below the materials that I used from CLIP STUDIO ASSETS.

I also leave the video where you can see the complete process.

Step-by-step video tutorial

Now, without further delay, let's get started with the tutorial:

A friendly warning: this tutorial makes use of a lot of layers 😊

Layers and more layers

We create a new document in A4 format. Then we draw a guide with the tool: Ruler >> Guide. In order to verify that our composition is centered.

We create a new layer and using the tool: Fill >> Refer only to edited layer. We click and paint it a solid color.

In my case I used the color: 353535

We click on: New raster layer and instead of filling with a solid color like the previous layer, we are going to select the tool: Selection >> Ellipse. We hold the shift key of our keyboard and draw a circle, then we select: Invert selection >> Fill and paint a new color (In this layer I used the color: 837563)

Now, in the same layer we select the tool: Guide >> Symmetric ruler. We draw the guide in the center and with the Pin brush we begin to place them in the lower part of the ellipse, the idea is that in this plane the pins are small compared to the layers that will be created later.

We repeat the previous step: create a new layer, draw an ellipse, fill by selecting "Invert selection area", we use our symmetric guide and make use of the pine brush. Increase the size of the brush and do not completely cover the pines that are in the bottom layer.

In this layer I used the color: 624C54

We repeat the previous steps; of course, we must change the color. In the green layer (color: 2B6855) I did not place as many pines as in the previous cases, one or two will suffice. We create a new layer, draw the ellipse and fill (color: D05552) in this step we can put aside the pine brush and with the tool: Selection >> Rectangle. We draw a little house, I recommend that you do not design very complex structures or characters, as all your work would be lost later on.

We draw some small mountains with the tool: Selection >> Lasso and fill.

 

In a new layer, we select the stars brush and with white color we print a few to work as decoration of our card.

We are almost done creating new layers. But for the moment, we create a new layer, we make use of the Ellipse tool and fill with white color (FFFFFF) we return to the pine brush and trace one to the right side, then we create a new layer and trace a pine tree again, in this In case we place it on the left side slightly larger than that of the lower layer, we need this separately for a process that I will show you later.

Papercut effect

Once we have our composition already made, we go to our penultimate layer (the brown one) and duplicate it two more times; done this, we are located in the last layer, we right click: Selection from layer >> Create selected area.

Once the selection is created, we take the black color and click on Fill. Now our cape is completely black. We repeat this step with the penultimate layer, but instead of black we will fill it with white.

 

We return to our black layer, select: Filter >> Blur >> Gaussian Blur.

We will get a control panel where we can, to everyone's liking, increase the amount of blur, I used the value 138.73. Once we are happy with the result, we click OK.

To give it an effect of greater separation, in the same black layer with the keys: Ctrl + T we modify our shading effect, the ideal is to drag the figure towards the center, to create the illusion of shadow.

We are located in the penultimate layer (the one that we paint white) and simply with Ctrl + T we drag slightly to the right side, the ideal is to create the illusion of a paper edge.

We repeat the previous steps in each of the layers (black color + white color) except for the white layers, here we are only going to apply the shadow effect (the black layer + Gaussian blur)

To decorate the card a bit more so that the edge of the white ellipse does not show so much, I used the snowflake brush, to give a more delicate touch to the composition.

 

We select our last layer (the one with the pine only) and duplicate it, place ourselves on the bottom layer, paint it black and apply the Gaussian blur once more. After this step, we position ourselves on the white layer and with the selection tool >> Rectangle. We select the middle of the tree, then copy and paste, this clipping will be on a new layer.

We duplicate our half tree, apply Gaussian blur once more. Once this is done, we select both layers, then we click on: Edit >> Transform >> Free transformation and drag our middle tree to the center.

Once we are happy with the result, we merge both layers, then we duplicate, and with Ctrl + H we flip our half pine, we place towards the center and we combine both layers. Once again we duplicate that layer and with the free transformation tool, we reduce its size, our tree is done, we combine all the layers (DEL PINO) and that's it.

 

So far this is our result, we could write a message and it would be all, but to give it a greater paper effect it is necessary to apply a texture.

The name of the texture that I used is: Plaster-Monochrome Texture, it can be enlarged or decreased according to the effect we are looking for, in my case I increased it to highlight the lumpy texture of the paper; then we decrease the opacity of the paper.

At this point you can leave your composition like this, but personally I like to vary the weight in each of the layers, so I emphasize that this step is optional. What I do is: in the texture layer click on Adjust to lower layer, now, not all the image is intervened, and with this I take the opportunity to duplicate and modify it in each of the main layers of the card (the ones that have color)

Final touches

The texture darkens the card considerably and that is not very to my liking, so I create a New Correction Layer >> Brightness and Contrast, and modify to regain the vividness of the colors a bit.

Finally we can write a message, you can place it in the center of the card, or on the lower right side.

And that's it!

Remember to combine all the layers (if you no longer have to do any editing) and save it in the format that best suits your needs, in my case I chose the png format.

 

I hope this tutorial is useful for you.

I wish you a very merry Christmas and a prosperous year 2022.

A hug!