Hello

Here I bring you a tutorial on how to make a moving illustration from scratch in Clip Studio.

I am an amateur cartoonist, I just came to share some of what I learned in the program and found useful, if you have any advice after seeing the post you can leave me your comment, I would be very grateful.

 

It's a fairly simple GIF in terms of drawing complexity, but what could take a lot of work would be to give movement to the 3 characters.

Okay, let's get started:

The first thing is obviously to open the program, go to FILE, NEW and click on Illustration. Once here we define the dimensions that our Gif will have, for this example I used one of 1280 x 1024. Then, in Basic Expression Color, we select it to have Color, that is up to you, you can do something monochromatic too, everything is valid.

Next we select the Create moving illustration window, we set it to contain 8 cells and below we select the speed, one of 8 fps, in my opinion it is quite natural like this, I recommend it. Then we click on ACCEPT.

Get your pencil ready:

Once we have created the work area where we are going to make the gif, it is time to organize our creation. There are many ways to make animations, each artist has their own methods of course. I will only show here one way to achieve movement in an image. This is how it worked for me and you can certainly find more direct ways to do the same, but maybe some of what I will explain will be useful to you.

 

Enough of words and on to action-

The first thing is to go to the Command Bar, which is where we will be able to create a New Folder. We click on New Folder and introduce a raster layer into it. Here we will make our Initial Sketch (Our planning of everything that will be in the scene), and we will name it with a name that is easy and quick to find, for example: Initial Sketch. We are not going to complicate things too much.

Step #2:

Let's start listing the steps, it will be better this way.

Once our folder has been created with its corresponding raster layer, we get to work. I clarify that I am not going to emphasize on tools and this is a tutorial based above all on achieving the movements. Returning to the subject, here you should already have a sketch of what you want to be in the scene.

3:

With your sketch established, choose a character to start with (if you have several to choose from, if you only have one because you decided so from the beginning you will skip this step), well, less talk and more action.

Now for this character we are also going to create a new folder with a raster layer inside, and we are going to give it a simple name (ex: Subject 1).

 

 

In this folder you will draw your entire character in great detail. Don't worry, nothing will happen to it. We have the lock option in the command bar to make sure nothing happens to it. You can feel comfortable polishing it as you wish.

The purpose of this folder is exclusively for our character because everything that will not be moved from it will be found in it. It will function as a background in simple words, and we will do the same with each character that the scene contains.

 

4:

Now that we have our first character done (referring to the artistic line), we will decide which parts of it will be moving. In this case I chose to make his right hand, head and also his left arm move along with his hand.

Having decided this, what we will do next is go to the first animation frame, which is located in the animation folder that is created by default at the beginning.

CLARIFICATION:

We will only use the animation frames to make the parts that contain the movements of our characters and some object that is also moving in the scene (like the drum cymbal as in the Gif I show as an example) or they could also be clouds, rain, sun rays, leaves moved by the wind and whatever else we can think of.

 

5:

What we will do now is trace the parts of our character that will be moving in the first animation frame. Once traced, what we will do is secure our first frame with these already traced parts with the lock found in the command bar.

6:

Having the first frame secured, we will do the same work but in reverse in the folder where the initial sketch of our character is located (that is, in the folder of Subject 1), since this sketch, as we said before, is going to work as a background, we erase the newly traced parts and we are left with the fixed part of our character, this fixed part will be in all the frames that we are going to animate of this character.

This is what our immovable part of Subject 1 should look like

7:

Having the immovable sketch finished in the Subject 1 folder and having already traced them on the first frame, what we will do next is go to frame Nº2.

 

Once here we will activate the onion skin that is above the timeline, and it will reveal the parts of frame 1 in violet (in my case it is that color that the movements of the previous frame appear in, I think it comes like that by default).

 

8:

Having activated the onion skin we can begin to give life to this character, what we have left to do is to reason a little about how the movements should be so that they look a little like reality, we are not going to be so specific, the objective is to make them coherent and to be able to understand what is happening.

This is what our character should look like at this point in the process.

 

9:

For the second movement I chose to close the character's eyes, open his mouth, stretch his left arm outwards with a slight movement of the left hand and also flexed the fingers of the right hand inwards.

Here you can see the rest of the movements

I'm going to skip going into a detailed explanation of the gradual progression of the movements in these 5 frames (THIS GIF ONLY CONTAINS 5 FRAMES OF MOVEMENT). If you need help on how to achieve the movements because you find it a bit complicated how they have to be to represent a particular action, you can record yourself on video doing the movements you want to draw and then watch them on the screen, that can help a lot.

10:

What could cause a problem in this GIF is when painting what is in motion.

To do this, what I did was create a folder exclusively containing the color of the 5 frames and obviously this folder will be found below the animation folder that is created by default.

Then we add a raster layer for each of the 5 frames that are in the timeline to this (MOTION COLOR) folder. It may happen that the size of the raster layer, once we create it, is too large and extends throughout the entire animation, which we do not want to happen because each of these raster layers has to correspond to an individual frame since it will contain the color of the moving parts of each frame. To solve this problem, what we have to do is modify the size of each layer as we create it and we will do this with the tab that appears when we place the cursor of our mouse over the raster layer that we are going to modify.

 

This is how each raster layer should be below its corresponding animation frame. (In the form of a little ladder).

In these raster layers we can easily place the color of all the moving parts of the 3 characters and if there were more characters we could also place the colors of the moving parts of these characters.

11:

What we have left to do now is to paint the immovable part of Subject 1 (the folder is of course called Subject 1 and it is the one we created at the beginning after having made the initial sketch).

Once this immovable part is painted we can continue with the other characters, creating an individual folder for each one where its immovable part will be contained, and its moving parts will be found in the animation frames (in the animation folder that is created by default). The color of its moving parts will be done in the raster layers contained in the folder (MOTION COLOR), as we explained previously and in simple words it is to repeat the procedure that we carried out with our SUBJECT 1, as well as with each character.

Finally we can take care of the background, which as its name says will be found in the background of everything, it will be the last folder that will be found below all the other folders, we give it details and colors.

With this we conclude and now we can enjoy our animated GIF or illustration with movement as we like to call it.

 

I hope that some of what I said throughout this brief tutorial has been useful to you and if something seems unsure or you want to know a little more, write me a comment, because I would love to be able to help you with whatever you need.

A warm greeting, see you.