Hello! In this article I will teach you how to animate a character in Clip Studio PAINT, it will be a very simple animation so that you can also do it.

 

Whether you have the PRO or EX version you can make this animation.

What we will do:

As you can see, it will be a very simple animation to make, so that you also get motivated to animate your own characters, starting with animations as simple as the one I will show you in the following video:

TUTORIAL: How to animate a character in Clip Studio PAINT

Remember to activate the subtitles in your language, you will surely find it.

Step by step tutorial:

Now we will review through images.

1. Creation of the Animation Project

Let's go to File - New. We choose the last option, the Animation option. And we respect the measurements that I show in the following image:

2. Set up animation project

When creating an animation project, by default an animation folder is created with an animation cel. We are going to delete this folder because I will show you a great way with which we can work with animation cels in Clip Studio PAINT.

Now let's go to the timeline and create a new animation folder

We rename the animation folder in the layers panel and inside it we create a New layers folder.

And inside this layers folder we create the following layers:

• COLORLINE

• LINE

• LIGHT

• SHADING

• BASECOLOR

• SKETCH

Once we have created all the layers we are going to go to the timeline to activate the Assign cel to frame option.

And in the window that appears we select drawing 1 and click OK.

3. Save project

In the icon at the top we can save our project in the folder that we want on our team.

4. Animation Sketch

We select the Sketch layer and make the first key pose of our simple animation.

Then we go to the timeline, to frame 10 and create a new animation cel.

When creating a new animation cel, it respects each of the layers and names created previously, which is great because it saves us a lot of time.

We can activate the onion skin to see the previous drawing and be able to guide us when creating this second key pose.

And we have key pose 2 on frame 10.

Then we create the Breakdown on frame 6. By activating the onion skin we can see the previous and subsequent drawing to make this drawing in the best way.

Let's go to frame 4 to create an intermediate drawing. Activating the onion skin will make it much easier to make this drawing.

Finally we go to frame 23 and activate Assign cell to frame and select drawing 4, this will be an animation cycle.

While it doesn't need to look like an animation loop, this drawing will be helpful when adding it at this position on the timeline.

5. Animation Sketch

It's a simple animation but it looks great

6. Animation Cleanup

Now we will select each of the layers called Sketch of all the drawings and we will activate: Change layer color

And we lower the opacity to 25%

We select the layer called LINE, which is a vector layer. And we select the Pen tool.

And in Subtool we choose Textured, in size 10 or 20. And we make the line of each of the drawings in our animation.

This is how our animation looks totally clean. Simple but great!

7. Animation Color

In Clip Studio PAINT we can use color palettes and many of them can be found in the Clip Studio PAINT Assets.

 

One of them is the following and I highly recommend you use:

We select a color and with the Fill tool we will paint each of the drawings of our character.

But first we must make sure that we have selected the option: Refer to other layers, to be able to paint in the best way. We activate this in Subtool.

We select the corresponding layer, in this case the BASE COLOR layer and we will paint each of the animation drawings with just one click.

 

You will see occasions where very small spaces remain unpainted, we can correct that with the pen tool.

8. Shadow Animation

Now we will select the Shading layer of each of the animation drawings, to paint the shadow of our character.

9. Animation Brightness

We select the LIGHT layer and add some simple glows.

10. Animation Background

For the background we will use one of the Clip Studio PAINT materials, either one of the default ones or downloaded from the Clip Studio PAINT Assets.

 

We grab it and drag it to the work area.

11. 2D Camera

Let's go to the Animation menu - New animation layer - 2D Animation folder

With the Operation tool we reframe our camera.

And for our camera to work it must have elements inside it, to do this we take all the layers of our animation and put them inside the Camera layer.

12. Animation Export

Let's File - Export Animation - Movie

We give it a name

And very important, we must activate: Apply 2D camera effects

And we export our animation as a video. If you want to export your animation as an animated GIF, it's quite similar, let's see it!

13. Final animation and conclusions

As you could see, we have learned to do the entire process of a simple animation, I hope this motivates you to be able to animate your characters.

 

I always recommend starting with something simple and this article will surely help you :)

 

See you in the next TIP!