Hiya~ ♥

 

In this tutorial, I'll be going over how to do flats and color your lineart quickly and efficiently, along with the tool property window and its features, so even niche cases will be covered!

 

If you have any questions or need help, please send me a message! ^ ^

 

The fill tool in Clip Studio Paint has a lot more features that were tailored made for us artists to use in our art and making the process of both filling and cell-shading a lot easier.

So we can get results like this just by using selections and the fill tool.

 

The Fill Tool

The fill tool is located at your toolbar and has an icon that looks like a bucket with a bit of paint coming out of it, you should be able to locate it by using this image:

 

We will go over all of the extensive features of the fill tool so hopefully, you too could save a ton of time in your artworks!

`Refer only to Editing Layer`

 

Refer only to editing layer is found under the Sub tool window, and is the first sub tool in the list.

 

meaning your fill tool will only pay attention to the selected layer, which if you use the fill tool on a layer below your lineart or sketch, it will fill the entire canvas and will require you to directly fill the line layer for it to interact with the line layer

Making it Ideal to fill background and flats shades across the canvas without worrying about any settings, the classic fill tool that pops to mind when you think fill tool.

 

It's also great to use whenever you wanted to fill the same layer with your lineart and have them merged right off the get-go!

 

`Refer to Other Layer`

‘Refer to other layers’ is where the magic starts to happen,

 

In Clip studio paint you have different layer types such as Draft Layers, Locked layers, Text Layers, Etc.

Using the ‘Refer to other layers’ sub-tool tells the fill to pay attention to those other layer types, let's use this cute bunny as an example before we go to our drawing.

By default using this tool will make sure the fill tool pays attention to all the layers,

 

So now when we color-fill the bunny, the fill tool will make sure to not go over where we have our lines! Even though we are coloring in a layer below our lines!

which is great however, in trying to color the body of the bunny and referring to all layers we accidentally didn't fill the whole body, we got stopped where the circle intersects with the body!

To fix that we will go over to the ‘Tool property’ Window,

In the Tool property window we have just opened look for the option that is called ‘Refer to Multiple’, this tells our fill tool what layers it should pay attention to.

click this icon that looks a bit like a lighthouse, its a ‘Reference Layer’,

 

and then back in the layer window With your line-art layer being your current highlighted layer,

Click the same icon from the top bar of the layer window and it will make that layer you currently have highlighted as a “Reference layer”.

It will also mark that layer as a Reference layer so you see which lineart layer is your current reference layer in just a glance.

Now that both the Fill tool refers to the reference layer and the layer is marked as a classified layer at the same time, the fill tool will only respond to the that layer's lineart.

Now we can go back to our Color layer and fill the body of the bunny!

As you can now see, the fill tool only pays attention to the bunny’s Lineart, and we have successfully filled the bunny’s body

 

Extra Tip 'Reference Folder Layers'

The fill tool can also be set to work with Folders that are marked as reference Folders with entire folders full of lineart-layers is particularly useful when you have multiple separate line-art layers like this: as Clip studio Paint’s Fill tool will refer to all of them.

`Layer In Folder`

Speaking of multiple lineart parts, we can also utilize the ‘Layer In folder’ Option,

that way we can have our color-fill layer in the same folder as all the lineart parts, and when we color-fill the fill tool we act as if all the lineart layers in the folder are a merged reference layer!

Layer In Folder is perhaps a simple and short explanation however I'd love to emphasize in the written tutorial how under-rated it is, because if you are working on large projects which has a lot of multiple parts in different folders with their own lineart, for example drawing a big orc with a lot of pauldrons and parts on it, just setting your fill to layer in folder and having a color fill layers for each part ea-folder in this example would save you an absolutely insane amount of time, -fangirling off lol ♥

Exluding of Layers

Another useful aspect of the fill tool is the ability to exclude specific types of layers when you are filling,

 

If you have your sketch layer in the same folder as your lineart and you have the folder set as a reference folder like we have established earlier you might run into an issue similar to this:

Or perhaps something like this

This happens because the layer of your sketch is in the reference folder, however, there is no need to sacrifice your comfort, the Fill tool in Clip Studio Paint has the ability to ignore specific types of layers you tell it to, set your sketch layer as a ‘draft’ layer. Right next to the Reference layers Icon, with the icon that looks like a pencil scribbling.

 

After doing that you can go over to your ‘Tool Property window’ and under the Exclude section, you can highlight the same Pencil Icon that has a small X next to it,

Now when you go ahead and fill in the color the same way you did earlier, it will ignore all the lines within layers that you have marked as a draft layer.

This can also be used to ignore text layers, locked layers, and the layer you are currently highlighting as well!

`Close Gap`

I have a gap here in my lineart it overflows and fills the hat as well, and that isn't something that I want.

To solve this issue, the fill tool has a unique and splendid feature in the tool property window called ‘Close Gap’.

Enabling it lets us have a slider with boxes next to it, the boxes are the default amount of pixels that the Fill tool will try to automatically estimate, the first being 1pixel, and the last 20pixels,

you can also adjust it to a custom number of your choosing by clicking the little arrow here and writing down your own number.

After some back and forth playing with the numbers in the ‘Close Gap’ feature in the Fill tool, we have successfully colored the Paint bucket we earlier tried to fill and had it overflow to the hat!

The ‘Close Gap’ Feature is also an extremely useful tool in the cases where you use textured brushes for the line art, it will help you automatically fill more unique line-arts!

‘Apply to connected Pixel only’

After coloring the bunny’s body blue I wanted to try and color the bunny different colors to see if any of them fit any better, however, I don't want to click all of the different body parts to change the color of each.

 

Instead you can easily change the color in one click by going to the Tool Property window and disabling the ‘Apply to connected Pixel only’ checkbox that is on by default.

Now when we click to fill the bunny’s blue body the Fill tool will go to all of the blue parts and change them regardless if they are connected to each other or not,

 

that way I can easily change between colors! And decide which one we like the most!

and the same concept can apply to our own artworks as well!

Just in one click ! =D

Tolerance

color filling my drawing, something you might have ran into before while trying to use the old school fill tool in other programs, which is if you’re like me and you like to sketch soft lines in your line-art the fill tool won’t paint over them correctly.

 

To fix that we can again go into the Tool Property window and locate the Tolerance slider bumping up the Tolerance slider to the right will increase the number of shades which

our fill tool, will determine as the same. You can also click the number to input your own number.

 

The tolerance determines the range of colors that the fill tool will consider the same color, meaning it will let our light grey lines slide and they won't be considered part of the line-art.

Bumping up our Tolerance has made it so fill tool ignored the lines on our hat and has filled it correctly!

Area Scaling

However sometimes our lineart might be a but crude or has some double lines such as bandages or just gaps as we thicken our line weight, when that happens the fill tool might leaves small white gaps in the lines as such:

Sometimes increasing the aforementioned tolerance can fix this issue, yet sometimes it can cause an overflow like this

 

Another great feature to fix this issue is the ‘Area Scaling’ property you might have already noticed in the Property window.

The Area scaling increases the number of pixels that are added extra on top of what the fill would normally fill.

Normal circle fill:

With Area Scaling:

And it worked! Increasing the Area Scaling has helped us fill the face correctly!

It is also worth mentioning that the ‘Area Scaling’ feature has multiple modes of filling that affect how the shape of the fill will look, along with filling to the darkest pixel,

here are quick examples of how each one looks.

Fill to Darkest pixel is useful because each line you draw has Anti-aliasing on it,

these few pixels of lower opacity pixels from the same color you drew with, they make the line look smoother.

Using to-Darkest pixel Mode in the ‘Area Scaling’ makes it so that regardless of how big your Area scaling is, it will never go past the darkest pixel of that line, for example, I’ll set my Area Scaling to a really high number and then fill it will go beyond the line,

This will net us a similar result to the aforementioned circle, which had scaling go over its lines.

I set my area scaling to ‘Darkest Pixel’ and it will scale the fill only up to that darkest pixel. Making it a mega useful mode when using the Area Scaling feature.

 

automatically now stopping at the line darkest pixel even with really high area scaling,

this option is insanely underrated for automated filling of textured pencil-like lineart.

Next are the Round and Rectangle modes, these usually change the shape of the fill to be a bit more angular or round, its sometimes a bit hard to see the difference, but it's worth swapping between them depending on what you are filling, I found that textured lines such as gapped lines, Angular seems to work better, while the round mode is great with sharper crisper uniform lines.

‘Fill up to vector path’

this is a great way to mark your own extra “guidelines” to limit the filling, for example, we can have this circle,

and we want to fill half of it with a wavy-looking fill, but we don't want any lineart on it, so we can make a new ‘vector layer’,

draw a wavy line on it.

and then with the ‘Fill up to vector path’ checkmark active in our ‘Tool property window’ on a layer underneath we can color-fill the circle.

Then we will turn off the vector layer we made earlier, and now we have a fill without any line! =)

`Enclose and fill`

Enclose and fill is a unique sub tool of the fill tool that is used for quick and efficient filling

as it acts similarly to a lasso selection tool

and will try to fill anything inside of its enclosed selected area

And what’s unique about it compared to the other fill tools is that you can simply make a color-fill layer underneath the lineart layer and have a multiple sectioned lineart such as this apple

 

and it will close and fill all of it without requiring you to click and fill each section

and instead will fully fill it in one Enclose and Fill

‘Paint unfilled Area’

‘Paint unfilled Area’ sub tool has its own unique method of working it operates similarly to close and fill.

Instead of having a selection tool that lets you lasso around the art to fill it quickly, you can instead go ahead and use a brush like fill that lets you draw over the lineart

and it will fill it in automatically based on the places you went over with your brush,

of course, you can use this on a layer underneath of the line layer

Target Color

There is also a unique property for both the Enclose and Fill subtool we discussed about earlier and the Paint unfilled Area we have just shown, that is the ‘Target color’ part in the Tool property window

Since there are a lot of these targets we are going to do a quick lightning round explaining what most of these do in a short and concise way,

From top to bottom!

 

All colors, it will target all the colors that are already present while you fill.

 

Only Transparent, It will only fill the transparent area in the drawing.

Area Surrounded by Transparency, fills anything in the canvas, anything outside the canvas won't be filled.

Only black, will color only the black parts of the artwork.

Only white and Transparent means that it will fill only the transparent areas and the white areas

Closing Notes

And now that we have a good grasp on the fill tool we can go ahead and fill in our drawings)!

I hope you found this quick tutorial helpful, it was part of the Clip Studio Paint Monthly Tips

If you want to see more like it and other drawing videos click my name ^ ^

 

Also If you have any questions please send me a message!