Hello! In this article called Digitize your 90's ANIME style drawings I will teach you how to go from a traditional drawing made with pencil, markers and paper to a digital illustration in the retro style of the 90's.

 

I will do all the steps from my iPad, but for the desktop version it is very similar.

What we are going to do:

We will start with this drawing

To finish with this beautiful illustration

It looks interesting, right?

You can see how simple and fun it is, so I want to invite you to watch the following tutorial called:

Digitize your 90s ANIME style drawings (VIDEO TUTORIAL)

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

What did you think of the video?

Now I invite you to watch a summary of the step by step:

Step by step of the process

1. Traditional drawing

We make a drawing as clean as we can, if possible making the line with an ink marker, much better :)

Then we took a photo of the drawing with our phone, trying to make it as good as possible.

2. Project Creation

We go to File - New. We choose the third option, and in the project properties we do it exactly as you can see in the image.

Size A4 and Resolution 600. We click the OK button to create the project.

Once the project is created, we delete the raster layer created by default.

And finally we save our project.

3. Import your Drawing

The following is just for those who work with their tablet, like I do with my iPad Pro, we are going to look at Simple Mode :)

 

Go to the Clip Studio icon located at the top left and activate: Switch to Simple Mode

And this is the interface of Clip Studio PAINT's simple mode, I haven't explored it much but I love how simple and clean it looks :)

We go to the top button of the layers panel and activate: Add from images

We select the image from the photo we took of our drawing earlier and adapt the image by scaling it if necessary.

Once we have finished, we activate the OK button.

When doing that it will ask us if we want to extract the lines from our drawing, of course we activate this option :)

A window appears at the bottom where we can edit the density of the line we want for our drawing, in my case I will set it to maximum.

At the end we activate the OK button to accept the changes.

When finished, go to the 3-dot icon to return to Clip Studio PAINT Studio Mode.

4. Monochrome

We select the line layer of our drawing, change its name and in the layer properties, in Color Expression we activate: Monochrome.

We edited the parameters to our liking, making the line look very well defined.

Some areas of the outline of my drawing did not turn out very well, if the same happens with your drawing now is the time to correct certain lines, with the pen tool we can improve our strokes.

5. Vector Layer

We select the line layer and with the right button we activate: Duplicate layer.

We deactivate the previous layer and we change the name of this new layer to Vector Line and with the right button we activate: Convert Layer

In this new window we select the Type parameter and select Vector Layer.

And we click OK to make the changes.

Now we have converted the line art of our drawing to vector strokes. This allows us to edit the line individually, play with the thickness of the strokes, among other things.

It's my favorite type of layer to make the lineart of my drawings :)

If we want to edit the strokes we can select the Line Correction tool, Adjust line size and we can edit our strokes.

Once we have finished we have the following result, we have improved our strokes even more.

6. Subview Tool

Let's go to Window, Subview.

And in this new panel we activate the folder icon to import a Clip Studio PAINT project.

The image I will use is the same girl, I will do this to take the original colors of my character. Also do not forget to activate the Eyedropper in this window.

If you want to paint with retro colors from 90s Anime, I recommend the following Color Palette that you can download from Clip Studio PAINT Assets.

7. Color

Now we are going to paint our drawing, for this we create a new raster layer below the line layer.

We changed the name to Base Color.

We activate the Subview panel and to paint we will use the Fill tool.

In the subtool we select Refer to other layers, so we can paint on a layer different from the line layer but this layer will respect the space of the strokes.

Also don't forget to activate in Tool Properties, Area Scale

And we activate the Subview panel again to choose the original colors of our character.

Another very useful tool is Paint the unfilled area, this allows us to paint the areas that are difficult to paint with the fill tool, being able to do it as if it were a brush.

And with the fill tool, with a single click we can paint the base color of our character. We can also paint with the Pen tool.

Now we create a new raster layer named: Shadows.

And we are going to do the same, we are going to paint the shadows of our character taking the original color from the Subview panel.

Now we create a new raster layer called: Cheeks. We will create this layer above the Line layer.

And with the airbrush tool we paint the cheeks, first the same color as our character's skin.

Then the red color to make the cheeks achieving the following result.

For the moment we have the following illustration.

8. Automatic Shading

Now we will see another option to make the shadows of our illustrations, to do this we deactivate the shadow layer that I created previously, and select the line layer and activate: Set as reference layer.

Now we select the Base Color layer.

And we go to Edit, Auto Shading

The following window appears where we can select different types of shading, I will choose the Standard option.

 

We can edit the parameters, colors and also the position from which the light comes, as well as its size.

It's not a very exact tool, but it's a good guide to make shadows quickly and easily, although I do recommend editing the shadow you've created, with the pen tool you can paint to make it even better.

 

As you can see below:

I previously taught how to use the auto-shade tool, you can see that article below:

9. Line color

We create a new raster layer above the line layer, named: Color Line and activate Apply to lower layer.

We paint and make the color of the line integrate much more with the colors of our character.

10. Fund

We activate the Material window and select a background, in my case I will choose a background with effects. And we drag it to the workspace.

We scale its size and see that it integrates very well with our drawing.

But we can improve it even more, to do this we will duplicate it, select the background layer and with the right button activate: Duplicate layer.

We duplicate the background layer 2 or 3 times and in each one of them we will activate the blending mode: Multiply.

 

Making the background look much better :)

11. Merge layers

We select the first layer in the layers panel and activate the option: New layer folder.

We change the name and with Shift we select all the previously created layers and put them inside this new layer folder.

Now with the right button we activate: Duplicate layer

And in the new duplicated layer folder with the right button we activate: Merge selected layers.

Now we have the entire illustration in a single layer, now again with the right button we duplicate the newly created layer.

And we change the name to Effects, we are going to work on this new layer from now on.

12. Effects

To add the effects more easily we will switch to Clip Studio PAINT's Simple Mode

In the tools panel we select the last icon, where the filters and effects are located, and activate Filters.

We activate applying the filters to the current layer

And a new window appears where we can see all the available filters. In my case I will select the Vivid filter.

We select it and activate it with the OK button.

Now we are going to add an effect

Again we activate that it applies the effect to the current layer

And to make the retro effect of the 90s anime the best effect is: Lateral Chromatic Aberration

And we activate the OK button to apply this new effect.

To do this from Studio Mode and the desktop version of Clip Studio PAINT we just have to go to the top menu: Filter, Effect, Chromatic Aberration.

Finally we will add one more effect, for this we activate the Effects tool.

We apply to the current layer

And we choose the Gray Noise effect

And we activate the effect with the Ok button.

In Studio Mode and Desktop version we must go to the top menu. Filter, Effect, Noise.

And we get the following result, I love it! :)

Finally we will switch to Clip Studio PAINT Studio Mode

13. Export your illustration

Let's go to File, Export to Photo Library

And we wait for the illustration to be exported.

The most professional option is File, Export Image, PNG

We can change the name

And adjust more parameters to export our illustration

We have a preview before exporting

And we wait for our image to be exported and then choose the folder where we want our illustration to be in PNG format or in the format you have chosen.

14. Final illustration in 90s anime style

This is the final result we have achieved.

I find it incredible that we started with a hand-drawn pencil and paper illustration and turned it into a 90s anime-style illustration.

We can achieve this and many more things with Clip Studio PAINT :)

I hope you can transform your drawings just like I did, see you in the next TIP!