Introduction

Hey guys, welcome back to another tutorial!

 

It's teacher Crimsy again, and in today’s tutorial we will dive into the process of creating manga pages, but more specifically how to use 8 different rulers and special rulers in order to create effects like surprise and fast movement, as well as create simple objects, symmetry and perspective, among other things.

 

Basically, the ruler toolset in Clip Studio Paint can create multiple types of curves which serve as guides for your pen stroke to snap and trace onto.

Ruler #1: The Curve Ruler

Let's create some panels for our manga pages!

 

With the curve ruler, I can create the shape of my panel by selecting the straight line option, holding down the left mouse button and pressing shift to get a straight line and releasing shift when I need a certain angle.

 

When you get to the last line, a dot will appear and once you click on it, your two lines will fuse together and complete your shape.

 

What I like with this option is that you can then pick up the pen tool and it will snap on your panel line and allow you to play with the thickness of the lines which gives your panel a more dynamic look!

 

TIP: Feel free to right click on the ruler symbol and toggle the ‘’show ruler’’ on and off to see the results without the purple line. This also entirely deactivates your ruler so you can free hand on the same layer if you wish.

 

 

Ruler #2: The Linear Ruler

Alright, now that we have interesting looking panels, let’s dive into the content of those panels.

 

There is not much I can add to the first panel seeing as it’s a close up of the character’s face, but for the second panel looks a bit empty, so let’s grab the linear ruler and create a few reference lines to simulate a window frame which will provide more interesting lighting and composition to our panel.

 

With the linear ruler, you can click and drag any number of lines onto your canvas and use your pen tool to trace along these lines.

 

Note that all these lines are disconnected from each other and the pen may only trace as far as the line goes as well as only snap onto one line at a time, depending on which line is the nearest to your pen.

 

TIP: Press Shift to get straight or 45°lines.

 

Ruler #3: The Radial Line (Special Rulers)

With the first three panels complete, we can now move on to the fourth panel and for this one I’d like to get this kind of surprise effect that’s very typical in mangas where you have all lines converging in the center of your image to make it more dramatic.

 

You can try to draw it by hand of course, but the results won’t look very clean or professional,

so what I like to do is:

 

1. Go back to the ruler tab, select the special ruler option and with this ruler, you’ll notice here that we have a drop down menu with multiple options to choose from.

 

2. Select the ‘’Radial Line’’ option and then click wherever you want your centre of attention to be and it will create this purple symbol which will then become our guide.

 

3. Trace a few lines and you will notice that now all of our lines converge towards our purple guide.

 

Ruler #4: The Parallel Line (Special Rulers)

In the second panel, I hand drew a few straight lines in the window to create this reflective glass effect, but if you go in the special ruler settings, you can find the ‘’parallel line’’ option and it’s so much better to create this kind of effect, especially if you’re someone who struggles at drawing straight lines in general.

 

1. Simply drag the curve on a new layer, keep holding down the left mouse button until you get the angle right and then release it.

 

It will generate you a thick purple line and once again this will be your guide when tracing your lines. So let’s just do a few lines, reduce the opacity a bit when we’re happy with the result and there you go, now your lines are perfectly parallel to each other and it looks much cleaner!

 

Ruler #5: The Figure Ruler

Now that the four top panels are done, we’re down to one last panel for this page and this one is of the close up view of the grisly content of our character’s cup.

 

Let’s go back in the rulers menu and click on the ‘’Figure Ruler’’ option.

 

With the figure ruler, you can create various shapes like circles and rectangles and also rotate them and with the polygon shape, you get the option to customize the amount of sides in your shape so you can make triangles, pentagons, etc. These shapes can also add up, so they’re perfect for drawing objects of all kinds. This instance being a pretty simple looking cup.

 

1. Select the circle option and drag it until the shape fits our sketch.

 

2. For the border of the cup I created three circles, traced over them with the pen tool and then erased the unnecessary parts.

 

3. Then I picked up the Curve ruler again and used it to draw the curved body of the cup by switching from the straight line option to the Spline option.

 

I repeated the same process for the cup handle too, but for the liquid inside the cup I used the figure ruler again.

 

TIP: Note that you can apply regular transformations to this ruler if you want to slightly modify the shape or size or your shape when needed.

Ruler #6: The Concentric Circle (Special Rulers)

There is only one last ruler that I wanted to show you guys in this page and it’s only a small detail, but I thought it was a really nice example in this case and it’s to add a simple ripple effect on the surface of our liquid here to show that the eyeball bobs up and down in it.

 

To create this effect all you must do is:

 

1. Go back to the rulers menu, select the ‘’Special Ruler’’ option and in the drop down menu choose ‘’Concentric Circle’’.

 

2. Then simply left click and drag the circle from the center of the cup up until the edge of the liquid and without moving the mouse (because we want no rotation), left click once again to validate its position.

 

3. Finally, draw some lines on the surface to simulate some ripples on water and you will notice that the pen can only draw the strokes in accordance with our purple circle guide.

 

Leave some space between the lines for a better effect, you can also reduce its opacity, duplicate the layer and blur it to add some shine to it and that’s it, this is how I create ripple effects in Clip Studio!

 

Ruler #7: The Perspective Ruler

The second before last ruler I want to show you is the perspective ruler. We don’t need it for anything too complex right now, it’s only to draw a few lines for the walls but I thought it was important that I at least showed it to you so you know it’s there.

 

Let’s go back to the ruler tools and select the ‘’Perspective Ruler’’.

 

1. Start your first line by left clicking near the top line of your wall and release the mouse when you get the desired angle and repeat the same step for the second line to form an X on your screen.

 

Basically, the point where the two lines cross become your center and the wider you make the angle difference between the two lines and the more intense your perspective will be.

 

TIP: Note that your lines will always converge towards your center when working with one point perspective so keep that in mind when thinking about the composition of your scene.

 

In the context of our room here, we want the viewer to be able to get a sense of scale through the environment. In this scenario, the creature is much bigger than our main character so by showing part of the ceiling and how big the room is, we allow the viewer to truly capture just how terrifying this monster is from an almost first person perspective.

 

Ruler #8: The Symmetry Ruler

Let's get into inking part of our creature using our final ruler, which is also my personal favourite one: the Symmetry ruler.

 

In order to use this one, simply go in the rulers menu and select the ‘’Symmetrical ruler’’.

 

1. Left click in the center of the face where you want the symmetry to originate from and drag your mouse to create the desired angle.

 

TIP: You can also hold shift if you want a straight or 45 degrees angle.

 

As you can see, now when we trace our lines, the symmetry holds up perfectly!

 

But there is still one issue that most people will have at this point and it’s the fact that the eraser tool will not be working along with the symmetry tool and that’s very problematic if you want to draw a whole illustration using symmetry.

 

Lucky for you, the fix to this is very easy:

1. Simply select your eraser, click on the subtool menu icon here

2. Once the subtool menu window opens, go to the ‘’Correction’’ tab and check the ‘’enable snapping’’ box.

 

This box is active by default on all types of pen, but for some reason it’s not enabled for erasers by default so you must activate it manually.

 

Now close the window, start erasing a few things and everything should work perfectly!

 

Final Pages

Conclusion

I have to say making this tutorial was super fun and I hope that even if you don’t like horror in general you will still be able to make good use of the tools I showed you today and make awesome manga pages with them anyway! ;)

 

Let me know if you found this tutorial helpful in the comments below and don’t forget to like and subscribe if you enjoyed this video, it helps support the channel in return and motivates me to create even more resources for you guys whenever I’m not a corpse lying in a corner of my apartment somewhere. <3

 

Have a beautiful day everybody!

 

Best regards,

 

-Crimsy