Hello, my name is fiamm and I would like to teach you how to create a simple animation in CLIP STUDIO PAINT, with which you can learn and practice so that you can create your own animations and let your imagination run wild.

This will be the animation we are going to create.

Let's start.

create project

The first thing will be to create a new file in CLIP STUDIO PAINT, we will select the animation option, we will name the project, we will also choose the size of the canvas in this case it will be 830 wide, 900 long and the number of frames will be 24.

Now let's see the basics of our workspace, the first thing that I think is quite important when animating would be to have the timeline window at hand, you can find it at the top in windows and selecting the timeline option weather.

Now we have the timeline at the bottom.

 

In the new window that appeared we find a small menu where we can see the play button that helps us to see the animation in motion, the option to play in a loop, we also find the option to create a new folder, to insert a new cel animation and enable onion skinning.

 

Remember to save the project, in files there is the save option, and make sure the project is in CLIP STUDIO FORMAT.

sketch

Now we are going to create our first sketch. The first thing will be to delete the animation folder that was created by default, and then we insert a new vector layer.

The next thing is to start drawing our sketch, you can choose the brush you want.

The sketch is quite simple which serves to guide us, we are going to insert a new layer of vectors, and lower the opacity of the previous one to our liking; in this new layer we make the lineart of the animation.

 

Remember that we are only going to draw the parts that will not have movement.

first animation

Now we are going to create a folder where we will start animating our fox's ears.

 

The option to create a folder is found in the timeline window.

Now we are going to insert a layers folder inside the animation folder, and inside the layers folder we insert a vector layer.

In the vector layer that we inserted, we are going to draw the ears of our fox, following the sketch.

Let's click next to our animation cel in the timeline window and insert a new animation cel; automatically a new layer folder will be created just like the previous one.

 

In this new cel, we are going to activate the onion skin which will help us to guide us from the previous cel and we draw the first movement of the ears.

 

The onion skin is found in the timeline window.

 

We repeat the same procedure, we insert a new cel, and we will activate the onion skin in case suddenly it does not appear already enabled; and proceed to draw the next move.

And we repeat the same procedure with the fourth animation cel.

Now we press the play button and see how it turned out (you can press the button while you are making the drawings to see how it turns out).

 

We're going to move the cels around the timeline, so the animation doesn't start and end so quickly; we are moving and pressing play to see how it is going.

Once we have the order that we like best, we can move on to animating the fox's tail.

second animation

Now we are going to animate the tail of the fox, the procedure is quite similar to that of animating the ears.

Let's create a new folder.

We insert a new layers folder, inside the folder we insert a vector layer, and we begin to draw the tail guided by the sketch.

The next thing is to insert a new cel next to the previous one. A new layer folder will be created automatically, just like the previous one.

 

We activate the onion skin and draw the first movement of the tail.

 

We carry out the same procedure as above three more times.

 

Remember that in each new cel we are going to draw the next movement of the previous one, as was done previously with the ears.

 

The next thing is to modify the positions of the cels to our liking and remember that you can press play to see how the animation is turning out.

In this case, the positions remained as they were.

Color

Now it's time to color our animation, the first thing to do is create a raster layer below our lineart layer.

 

In this new layer we will start to paint the fox, but only the parts that do not have movement.

Now we are going to paint the background, for this we are going to create a new raster layer, and we will put it below the color layer (hide the two animation folders from view to be able to paint the background well, to hide them you just have to press the little eye that appears next to each folder).

 

And ready we can start painting it.

We are now going to give color to the parts that have movement, we are located in the folder of the cel that we are going to paint, and we insert a rasterized layer.

And now on the new raster layer we start to paint the ears of the fox.

The same procedure is performed on the other animation cels. A raster layer is inserted inside the layers folder of the animation cel we are painting.

 

Now we continue painting the tail of the fox, for this we do the same procedure that we used with the ears.

After having everything in color, we can add some details like the shadow of the fox in the snow.

 

If you want to share your project, the first thing is that you save your animation as I showed you at the beginning, then you just have to go to file, export animation and choose the format you want it in, in this case the one I used was animated gif.

And that's it, as you can see it's a fairly simple animation with which you can learn the basics when it comes to animating, it may seem a bit complicated at first, but then you'll notice how easy it can be.

 

I hope you will venture into creating your own animation and remember to have fun in the process.