Intro

So today's tutorial, I'll be showing you how the shading assist feature of Clip Studio Paint can help you with your colorization.

 

This feature predicts where the shadow should be depending on where you placed your lighting within the canvas.

VIDEO TIPS

If you are not really into reading, you can check out the Video Tutorial!

A. Understanding Shading Assist

So before this feature can help you properly, we should try to understand how the feature works.

 

Let's start with a simple shape. A sphere, a cube, and a cone with a line art.

You can put all the layers in a folder and the shading assist can still detect all the layers within the folder as one single layer.

To add the Shading assist, Drop down the "edit" in the menu bar, then find Shading Assist.

Or, since there isn't a shortcut for this feature, we could do some workaround for an efficient workflow.

 

While you're on the application, click the layer you want to add the Shading Assist, then press Alt, which underlines some letters on the Menu Bar. That means those underlined letters are the shortcuts for that specific option, then press "E" to dropdown the Edit, and you'll notice that on the Shading Assist, there's a letter F inside a bracket that is being underlined, which would be the shortcut for the Shading Assist.

 

So in quick action, Select the layer you want to add the shading assist, then press Alt, then E, then F, and it will spawn the Shading Assist Window.

But if you really wanted to add a shortcut to it, you can do that in your free time by going to File > Shortcut Settings > then changing the Category to Menu Commands and Find the Shading Assist under Edit.

B. Shading Assist Settings

Now in the shading assist window, you can choose a different type of light source whether a directional light or a ball of light.

in a ball of light, the distribution of the shadow will be unequal, depending on the diameter of the light, while the directional light source has equal distribution to all distances.

to study this feature, let's use the standard preset first and see how it goes.

As we can see, it's ignoring the line art completely and went only to the base color by default, so therefore, with or without line art, it will create the same prediction.

So the prediction will be based completely on the base color shape and can't read a 3d space. Even if it has an empty space between them, it would still do the same prediction. But if it has a huge gap between each color, it will now consider them as different objects.

But if you add a different shade on the sides, the program will see this as a different object since it has a different base color and wouldn't read this as 3D space.

Now if you check this box called "refer to lines on reference layer", it would make the line art a separator, but make sure you've set your line art as a reference layer, or else, you won't be able to check the box.

Now we understand something about how this feature works, we can now adjust how we want the shadow to be by adjusting the settings.

 

If you checked the Reverse shadows, the program will attempt to predict as if the light was from behind the objects.

Now you could also adjust how thick or thin the mid-tones would be.

 

And since this feature uses some common blending tools of the application, it is easier to understand, and changing its color isn't really confusing.

Having the freedom to control the color is very useful especially when you want to have some realistic transition of skintone such as changing the midtone to orange as it would portray subsurface scattering.

You could also add a division of shading by dragging the slider. You'll be able to notice the division because it has different shading. You can do this up to 3 divisions.

You could also set the shading value of each division by double-clicking these numbers. The larger the number, the darker it will become and the number on the left side should be larger than the right. Making them equal will basically turn both shadings into equal value.

You could also change the Shadow Type into Smooth Shading and since we will be doing some semi-realistic in this video, we should use this right? From how it looks, it still looks good, and it has different setting than celshading for maximum control, and from here, it only requires a few adjustments to make it look right.

But in my case, I may prefer the celshading because it will be easier to check the possible errors of the shading. The feature is good but it doesn't always give us the accurate result, and besides, we could still do something from celshading to make it look smooth shaded.

Now once you press OK after adjusting the settings, it will create 3 or 4 different layers based on what you set from the shading assist window.

C. Applied to the Artwork

Now that we know the very basics of this feature, we could try this to our simple artwork here and see what we can do about it.

I'll be keeping the line art layer in this drawing as it should be the guide for shading assist.

You can still include line art in semi-realism as part of your style but what I want to do here is lineless paint, I wonder how much shading assist can do about lineless artstyle.

Since we want to do a lineless painting, we should replace line art with Ambient Occlusion since Ambient Occlusion is the only way to separate colors from each other and create depth between them.

If you don't know what ambient occlusion is, think about shadow, and there are very dark areas every corner that's why we can tell that the space isn't flat. Real life doesn't have line art and Ambient Occlusion is one way to tell that there's a corner within that area.

Light can bounce everywhere but cannot reach every corner, and that corner is where the light is occluded hence ambient occlusion.

Adding Ambient Occlusion is simple, you'll just gonna need to use lasso tool select some areas you wanted to darken, then use the edge of the softbrush to get the sharp and soft effect of the shadow.

Now, when we're going to apply the Shading assist to this work, we can use the Evening Preset as our global Light source and use the Directional Light. Now adjust the settings accordingly.

The color choice of the preset is actually good. They've used a color that would make the shadow look somehow Blue-ish because of the light of the sky that's being provided.

For the Crystal Glow, we can just use the standard preset and then change the color and tonal value of the shadow.

The tricky part is mixing the 2 lighting but we'll gonna figure that out later on.

 

For now, let's fix the shadow first before we mix them together.

 

D. Edit the Shading

To edit the shadow, you have to merge the 2 layers that have multiply blending modes on it.

 

Once you merge them together, it will turn to a normal layer then you can just reapply the multiply mode.

 

And also you can change the layer color to make it less confusing from one lighting to another.

To repaint them but still uses the same color that it has, you can use the eyedropper tool to pick the color but make sure to change the reference settings to the current Layer.

Now you can normally use brush and eraser but hide the Tone 1 first because we can edit that later on.

To edit the lighting part, which is the Tone 1, you can do the same thing but you should avoid this layer overlapping on the multiply layer so .

 

To do that, you can simply Ctrl + click the thumbnail of the multiply layer so you could make a selection, then invert the selection, by pressing Ctrl + Shift + I, so you'll be only painting on the other side.

Now you can just repeat the process for the Crystal Glow.

E. Mix and Overpaint

Now we're going to mix both shadings.

 

One light should be less than the other, so in this case, Sunlight always appears as a stronger light so we lessen the opacity of the Crystal Glow but this would depend on you.

Then for all the shadings, you'll just gonna need to blur the edges using a blur tool with at least 60 intensity of the blur.

 

Here you can just use Gaussian blur, but when want to keep some edges, that's why we're manually doing the blur.

Now here you see that the shadow is pretty messy but given time, we could still make the blurring more precise but we'll just gonna overpaint it anyway so what you see now is enough.

 

The last thing you'll gonna need to do now is overpaint. The feature only gives you a rough idea of how the shading would look then of course you still need to have a better grasp on shading to make it look better.

So far, by the looks of it, it's already gave us something. You'll just gonna need to readjust the value and add one layer on top of everything, then overpaint things manually. Don't forget to reset the eyedropper tool when needed.

The purpose of this feature is to help you start, not entirely do all the work for you. To make it look very good is still on you.