Hello! Today I come to show you the best functions that I have found in clip studio to paint my works, the truth is there are quite interesting ones that you may not know so stay with me until the end.

First I want to show you some of the most basic… and it is how I have organized my interface

to make my painting process a little more comfortable.

 

Preliminary

On the left side I keep all the windows that can be hidden in a stage of the process among these the new color mixer function of clip studio paint, I also keep the material windows where I can manage the downloads of brushes and other materials that we will talk about more ahead.

 

Finally, I always keep a miniature version of the entire image. This helps me to have a broad perspective of the illustration while I am adding details and in this way I always have an idea of how the result is looking in a general framework.

Now let's move on to the brushes I use and how to install them from the asset store. First we go to the clip studio launcher and click where it says clip studio assets

This will redirect us to a page with all the community materials, there are some paid and some free.

We are going to look for some very specific ones that I really like, for which I will leave the images with the names of the packages here and it is only to look for them in the search bar.

These are some of the brushes that I like the most and to install them is super fast, we go to the window of the tool that we want to install, we click on add sub-tool (1), then we look for our brush to install in the pop-up window (2 ), we select it and click add to palette (3). and ready it will be added as a sub tool immediately

 

Now if we have everything ready to start painting

 

Let's create a new document:

 

In which I am going to choose a resolution for printing on A4 paper with 300 dpi which is the minimum number of pixels per inch for printing.

If you wish, you can increase the size; but for my current needs this one works perfectly.

 

sketch

We started a fairly general sketch which I'm only going to worry about getting the main idea and then adding more detail later. For this one I am going to start with the brush that comes with clip studio called “round mixer” in a size of 60 - 80px. to have a general silhouette as you can see below.

Then I switch this layer to sketch mode which changes it to a light blue one perfect to continue drawing on it in this way. It can be created in several ways, one of them is by clicking on the blue button with white or pressing the key combination “control + B”

So I am creating multiple layers of details to continue polishing the drawing with more and more details each time.

Lineart

So when I have my idea ready I can go to the lineart that in clip studio it is wonderful to do it I am going to show you the tools that we will use to carry out this work

 

Let's use a vector layer

 

the draft in intersection mode which will allow us to be able to make the cuts quickly just where two lines intersect

With this simple concept we have everything to make our lineart and then move on to painting.

Color

With the clean lineart we are going to make our base to paint, we are going to take advantage of the paint bucket with its way of enclosing and filling, but be careful we must select and put the options of the paint bucket in the reference layer and choose the lineart as layer of reference just as I show here later.

now on this we add in separate layers the colored parts of our character using the clipping mask which will allow us not to get out of that color base that we created previously.

 

In the image indicated above is the clipping mask icon or adjust to lower layer and below indicated we can see how the program shows us that this effect is active

we add a layer of shadows and ambient occlusion in multiply mode to start obtaining volumes on our color base

During this process I also take the opportunity to save my colors with the paint mixer so I don't need to create complete palettes but I can mix and test while I'm painting.

The next step is to add the highlights in overlay and overlay brightness mode, this will depend on the image we are making but basically they would look like this as shown below.

I also add a new layer to highlight some details of color and lights a little more so that it looks more dynamic I do this using the same layer modes

Finally, I would like to improve the background a little, so I add a simple gradient for the background and that allows me to better set this environment, I do it using the gradient tool

And this is the final result. I hope this tutorial has helped you to start painting your drawings with clip studio, the truth is that it has very useful tools that greatly speed up the workflow from the sketch to the final result of a digital painting.

 

Here you can review the tutorial on how to use the clip studio paint color mixer: