Intro

While going through some of my old traditional drawings, I stumbled upon a charming little line art. I decided it would be the perfect candidate for a digital transformation using Clip Studio Paint. Join me as I walk you through the process and bring this illustration to life in the digital world!

Part 1: Lineart Extraction

Since Clip Studio paint have two modes on Ipad, I’ll be showing you how to do it in both Simple mode and Studio mode, wich is also the only available version on computer.

Simple mode

Import image

On the right side of your screen, you'll notice a large plus icon in the Layer Palette. If you long-press this button, it allows you to add images directly from your device by clicking on Add from images. I used a third-party app to scan my illustration, but there are many options available. Ideally, choose an app that provides a clean image with minimal shadows and light reflections on the paper.

Extract lines

When you add the image, fix the proportions and hit ok, a dialog box will appear asking if you’d like to extract the lines, which I chose to do. This will open a palette filled with effects, and the default effect, Extract Lines is the one we’ll be using.

At this point, you can skip directly to painting phase if you’d like to procede from here. just make sure to clean up your lineart and you’re good to go.

Studio Mode

For those using the computer version, or if you prefer working in Studio Mode like I do, the process is a bit different.

how to switch to studio mode?

First, click on the three dots in the top-right corner of the app. From the menu, select Switch to Studio Mode, which provides a more advanced interface. Don’t worry though, it’s still intuitive and easy to navigate.

Import Image

To add an image from my gallery go to file > import then you select your file from it’s location. For me it’s in my photo library.

Converting layer

Let’s go to layer > convert layer. Here I’ll be choosing raster layer in type and in expression colour I’ll be choosing grey. This will allow me to modify the contrast of the image without having to worry about colours.

Fixing dark and light tones

Next, I navigate to edit > tonal correction> brightness and contrast. Brightness controls how light or dark the image appears, while contrast enhances the difference between light and dark tones. You’ll be the judge here, adjusting these settings to make your line art stand out in the best possible way.

You could stop here if your initial line-art was well defined but for me, I’m doing to add another step by going back to Edit >tonal correction > level Correction. Here you see I have 3 sliders under this graph. From left to right we have the shadow, mid tones and highlights, you don’t need to fully understand these concepts but if you play with them a little bit you’ll understand how they affect your image. Here I dragged the shadow slider to the right to make the dark tones darker and dragged the mid tones a little bit to the left to make them slightly brighter.

Remove background

To remove the white background and keep only the line art, I went to Edit > Convert Brightness to Opacity. It worked perfectly since I can paint on the layer beneath the line art.

Now from here I have a decent line art and all I have to do is clean it up.

Using the eraser I tried to clean this drawing as much as I could to prepare it for later. It might be time consuming, but this can come in handy for people who uses tabs without a pen, or are still getting used to drawing digitally

Vectorizing the Lineart

Same as we did earlier we go to layer > convert layer type and we select vector layer. This will turn the drawing into a vector.

If you’re not familiar with vectors in general, it’s basically graphics using mathematics and not pixels; it will help out my case by modifying the line-art in a more precise way.

Working with vectors is pretty simple and here I’ll be using the vector eraser that you can find under the eraser category. Which will help you erase a full vector like I just did, you of course can use normal eraser which will break a vector into two so use them in a way that suits you. Now with my eraser I’ll go and clean up the rest of my illustrations.

Here I figured my line art was a bit too thick to I went to the operation > brush size and reduced it to a thickness of my liking. With the same operation tool, I can select a vector and modify it by moving the vector points.

To modify control points of your vector, I went to control point that you can find in the line correcting tool category. With that you can move control points, add another one, delete another one and so on. And with that I was able to fix most of my sketch.

I had to redo some parts of my sketch as it was old and some parts like the hair were just too bad.

Smoothing line art

Let’s go to the operation tool and scroll down to brush shape. And here, I selected pencil. And voila, problem’s gone!

Part 2: Flat colors

Coloring line art

The first step I like to do is to change the colour of my line art, you can simply go to operation tools > select main colour, and as you can see you can change the colour to anything, like such as blue, orange, whatever. For me, I went with a cold grey.

I also already have a layer clipped to my line art layer where I’ll be adding some colours to make my line art more fun, so I airbrushed some pink, purple, light blue, and several other colours that I’ll be using in my illustration.

Solid Colors

After that, I added a folder where I will be putting all my fat colours because I find it easier to paint on different layers. After that I clicked on my vector layer and set it as a reference layer and started adding the colours using the fill tool.

For me I like to just put each category in its own layer, like skin, hair or clothes. don’t be afraid to create as much layers as you need, don’t worry clip studio paint will never set a limit to your layers number, but not that the more layers you have the more resources it will require, so be smart about it!

See Through Colors

To make the fabric on the stomac area looks see through, I simply added a layer for that part then lowered the opacity to my liking.

Part 3: Add shadow

Shading is by far my second favourite step after line art, because  it gives the illustrations more dimension. To do that I’m adding a layer on top of my folder, set it to multiply and lowered the opacity. I will be using this shade of purple for this purpous, and after I determined where the source of light should be, I figured how the shadows are going to look like.

 

 

Understanding anatomy will help you but you can always rely on a reference. For me I still have a long way to go but I think I did a decent job.

In here you can see I used the lasso tool to put the shading color, then I used the colour mixer, specifically the blur tool to blur the edges, and you can see some parts are much more blury then the others depending if it’s a drop shadow from another element, or simple the shadow of that element in itself.

Note that I also used another multiply layer to add the blush and lipstick.

Part 4: Add light

I’m adding a layer on top of my shading layers and set it to add glow and start adding the highlights to the lips, nose, cheeks. I’m adding highlights right next to the shadow in the fabric to give it a glossy look, so it looks like satin fabric. And added highlights to the side of the skin where the light should reflect.