Welcome

Welcome to this tutorial, we have a video version if you prefer that format:

we start

This time I want to share some tips when you want to draw backgrounds in Clip Studio Paint.

 

The first piece of advice I want to give you is about sketching, this is where we are going to brainstorm and more or less define where we want to go.

It is extremely important to define a canvas because this is the one that will help us create our compositions. For that we are going to create different sizes and shapes of canvas to try and experiment what we like the most.

Don't worry about the quality of your sketches, this is the point, your mind can suddenly make sense of some lines or shapes.

And for that we are going to use the frame border tool

With just one click it will automatically give us the rectangular tool and we can create a canvas as we want simply by dragging.

 

This will automatically create three layers for us

A background layer in which we can define the color that we want by double clicking

And it's going to create an intermediate layer where we can draw and everything we draw outside of that canvas, I don't know you'll see.

The third is our vignette and we can hide it by clicking on the eye if we want, we can create more canvases if we want but they will share the same layer.

Or we can create a separate vignette if we want to have each of our separate canvases if we want to define different ideas and have a better organization

Also within these bullets we can continue adding layers as we normally do to divide colors or certain things that we want to divide.

And it is that this helps us to have a better organization, this can make it easier for us to order

our sketches to help us define which ones are the best or if we are thinking about a particular concept and we want to make several images so we could see if they are congruent or something like that.

 

When creating compositions it is important that we focus on using few values. In this case we use black, white and gray. This should be enough to define how we want to guide the viewer through our image, what do we want them to see. When using colors and a lot of detail, we can lose sight of this and not define the idea that we really want to capture.

 

For this we can use the sale color palette

If you don't see it, you can click Window > Color Set

Here we can see the "set of standard colors" and it already gives us several values very clearly, Gray 70% Gray 30%, white, black, etc. and some colors that we can use. We can also see other sets and/or create our own. We can also download the ones we want from the Clip Studio Assets.

To create our own set we click on the key

Add new set and place the name we want

This will create a set of transparent colors that we can replace, delete or create new boxes that will have a color.

We simply have to right click on a square to see the options we have.

If we choose to change the name we can, that name will appear when we place the cursor over it.

For our composition we choose something like this

then we decided to add a little more detail to the background, a few trees and some foliage

We wanted to define something like a temple, monuments or statues out there.

With this idea already defined, I usually put everything in folders to have better organization and control, in addition to helping us in our next step.

With this idea already defined, I usually put everything in folders to have better organization and control, in addition to helping us in our next step.

 

Now we just have to select all our layers and drag them inside

 

So I can hide everything and I can also control its opacity in this case we will lower it to draw on this base and add a little more detail

This was the result of our lineart, we tried to be a little more specific, we tried to define the blocks of the temple and that these pillars are like monuments with tentacles and the heads that we see are something like an octopus type creature. The patterns of the tentacles are repeated to emphasize what it is about, and we add a small character that in the end we will not add but this helps us to define the scale of everything, if we add things that are very common for us this helps us to dimension the scale of all things.

 

The trees no longer end up enchanting us in this story but we are still going to experiment a little with them

 

Now we decided to experiment with the color, and we just put a tone in everything that we would see in the foreground and for the background we added a little color to the trees and their foliage.

We decided to add more vivid tones and tone down the rocks a bit to see more or less how it would look with all the grass around it, while toning the foliage a bit.

 

We started to detail a little more and for example to create a bit of the sensation of grass in all this green paste, we tried to create some parts where it would stand out, if we don't want to add too much detail this can be very useful to suggest what it is about.

Then I decided to change to the trees, although I liked what they did in the composition, it didn't make much sense to me in the story so we decided to add a waterfall and we decided to create a space in the back creating this "mountain" that could be seen in the distance also creating the illusion that behind there may be a lagoon or even some sea where all this water falls. And in the ruins we add a little mold or grass that is growing through the cracks so that it shows that a little time has passed in these ruins.

Perhaps this temple is rather the entrance to something like a cenote, these are like wells that are interconnected underground, perhaps it is a temple in a cenote... where they paid tribute to these creatures. I think all of this tells more about the story we're creating.

 

For these fields of flowers we use the Airbrush tool and the spray brush

 

Here we can use the size of the particles and vary this to give that feeling of both distance and variety.

We also added a few little green lines to make it suggest something like stems or branches.

We also added some small green lines to suggest something like stems or branches and we did the same this time using the droplets for other types of closer flowers.

For when I want to add details to an object, if I am separating everything by layers I usually use the "fit to lower layer"

This will allow us to paint only on the pixels that are painted on the bottom layer, so we don't have to fear if we go outside the area we want to detail, this is an example in the waterfall, brush from side to side across the entire canvas and only the waterfall was painted.

And we use the same for the Light and Shadow layers, in the case that we want to make shadows we can use the Darken mode in our layer and this darkens the tone that we have in the lower layer

And we use the same for the Light and Shadow layers, in the case that we want to make shadows we can use the Darken mode in our layer and this darkens the tone that we have in the lower layer

 

For the light layer we use the “Add shine” mode

 

 

For both things we can make use of the opacity to adjust how we want it to look, this depends on what our objective is.

This helped us to give the grass a certain effect so that it looks like a certain movement due to the wind.

 

And well, this was our result from this fund... I hope these ruins tell a story.

I hope that some of these tips will serve you and I look forward to seeing you in a future article. They are very well!