BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATION

Clip studio is really the ultimate software for creating monochrome/black and white illustrations and comics. Unlike photoshop and other software, Clip has been designed to streamline your process and help you create excellent art. Over the past few years I have slowly moved away from other painting software and found Clip Studio to suit almost all my needs as a comic creator and illustrator.

Yes, for me the software still nears a few simple tweaks here, but that’s what this tutorial is all about!

 

I have tried to break down the process as detail as possible so that beginners and experienced artists can follow along.

I am going to go through a pretty detailed process for creating a B/W illustration. I usually find that if I try to rush this process, or skip a step, (a common mistake of mine) my work doesn’t come out half as well as it could have.

 

Also note, you can apply this process to your style. We all have our own style, or we need to discover it over time, but don’t feel the need to copy what I am doing, just apply the steps to your own illustration.

 

Most importantly have fun. It can always be seen in art which artist enjoys creating their work. Draw and create art that you enjoy, and its going to be more rewarding as well as more successful.

 

This is the style and quality of the final image we will be working towards:

SETTING UP

1.Start by creating a document in grey scale. Select illustration for document type, rather than a comic page. A4 is a good size for small illustrations, let's go with that. Then set the Basic Expression to Greyscale.

 

2. Set up your layers. I think you should have the following:

 

Rough – very loose sketch where you can throw lines around, draw big forms

Sketch / Pencils – Tighten up your sketch with clean lines that you can follow with your inks.

Inks – Where you can focus on line weight and spotting your blacks, as the underlying drawing is already done.

Tone – Optional, but tone can bring life to your black and white illustrations

Effects (optional) – Here we use various effects to create visual impact.

 

Place the layers in the above order for the best workflow.

3. Setting up your tools.

As any expert knows, tools are key to a great result. As the same time its true, a poor craftsman blames his tools... so don't over rely on them either. Below are some of the tools I love in Clip Studio:

 

— For pencils, I like the Perfect Pencil (with tilt support). It can do clean lines or shading at larger sizes and is a versatile pencil brush.

 

— For inkers, you can import my inking set or just use your favourite pen tool, or the default pens that come with Clip Studio.

 

My pens are the default brushes tweaked and edited to feel quite natural and have a bit of ‘tooth’ to them so you feel like you are inking on paper. The default G-pen and the textured pen are both great. Clip has some powerful settings, so feel free to play around, making the tools just right for you. Just remember to make a duplicate of the pen tool you are playing with, so that you keep the original settings on file.

My two inking brushes you can download for free:

— For our grey tones download the incredible Watercolour set by ×ェ×:

— For effects download the Gold Splatter brush:

More info for setting up your tools is available here:

Finally, don't forget to set up your brush pressure settings - this is VITAL! To do so just go to Clip Studio Menu> Pen Pressure settings.

 

I like to set mine to the below, which works well for me, and helps the inking process look natural:

ROUGHS

Roughing is the time in the illustration process where you can play, experiment, and go wild. Think big, relax your hand, think about the big shapes in your layout, and DO NOT even consider drawing in the details. Instead think about the way forms flow, object perspective and impact on the page. Keep things moving, free, loose and don’t be afraid to erase parts of your layout and start again.

1. Setting up the layer

Even though we are doing a monochrome (non-colour) illustration, I find it handy to have your rough sketches in a different colour to your pencils and inks. It’s a technique that has been used by cartoonists and animators for decades, and it helps differentiate the different parts of the illustration process in our minds.

 

 

To set up your rough layer:

A. Select the rough layer in the layers panel.

B. Click on the Layer Property Panel button, then select Layer Color from the drop down menu:

C. Set the rough sketch colour you would like to use. A bright blue or magenta usually works well:

2. Roughing in - Two ways forward

I will demonstrate two ways to do your roughs.

The first is the classic approach, using the pencil tool. This is similar to what you would do on a sheet of paper, using light, fast linework to rough out your drawing:

 

VERSION 1.

The video process of making my rough drawing V1:

Thie final image:

VERSION 2.

Another way to rough your drawing is to use a bold ink brush. Let's try the Rubin 02 Pen brush.

A. Select the Rubin 02 Pen brush.

B. Bring up the size to 17pts.

C. Rough in your big shapes, thinking about flow, impact, shape. Don’t do details. Think overall page layout.

 

Rough V2 video:

 

 

Final Rough V2 image

3. Decision making.

 

Do as many roughs as you want, the more the better. Depending on your project and the amount of energy you might come up with 5 to 10 roughs before selecting one to finish. I decided on the Dog character illustration, although I may come back to the bearded sailor one day.

 

In conclusion, roughing allows you freedom, as you don’t have to worry about the final result, you worry about creating something you enjoy, and playing. Its an essential part of the artistic process, and shouldn’t be left out.

 

I decided to go with my first sketch with the dog.

 

4. Opacity of the Rough layer.

 

Take the opacity down to about 30%. Now we have a nice soft coloured base layout on which to work, and we can start deciding on our lines and forms.

SKETCH / PENCILS

Your sketch / Pencils layer is all about deciding which lines to use, and refining your sketch. You will have sorted out hierarchy in your rough layout, now is the time to decide how the linework will look, and other elements you want to add in.

 

1. Using the perfect pencil previously downloaded, start drawing with a black colour the lines you want to establish in your illustration. This is a refining of your underlying rough. Toggle the rough on and off to see clearly what you are doing. Below is a video lapse of me doing my pencil lines.

2. Once you have your lines established, its important to do what is called ‘Spotting your blacks’ in comics. This is deciding which areas will be mostly black.

A. Create a new layer and call it blacks. Place it under the sketch layer.

You want to roughly sketch in where your shadows will lie under the form. Example below:

 

Blacks sketched in behind the main lines:

Final Pencils video:

3. Large negative shape (optional)

In my Black and White art, I often like to have one large negative area of black. In this case I did a black circle behind the dog’s head:

A. Create a new layer and name it Circle.

B. Select the ellipse tool

C. Make your selection, and click the bucket icon. This will fill the area with black. Then take the opacity of the circle layer down to about 30%:

 

4. Reduce the opacity.

Finally reduce the opacity.of your sketch layer to about 30% and we are ready to apply inks!

INKING

Inking is a key part of creating a stunning black and white illustration. Some things I wish someone had told me about inking:

• Change the size of your brush depending on the details you want to create

• Focus on varying your line-weight. This will make your illustration more dynamic

• Don't be afraid of black areas. They make the artwork 'pop'

• Look at reference. Fins an artist you like and copy their style and lines for a while. They have a lot to teach you, just by looking at how they problem solve and approach inking.

• Close objects = more details. Far away objects = less detailed. Learn how to simplify and don't zoom in too close.

 

Let's get inking!

Using the ink brush you prefer, or one of my Rubin 01 or Rubin 02 brushes, begin to ink in the linework. Follow the sketch layer and focus on:

• texture

• line weight

• smooth and ragged lines

• Dark area and light areas

Below is part one of my inking process:

Now we have the illustration partly inked, we are going to edit the Circle layer we just created of solid black. We are going to delete parts of the Circle layer so that the dog’s face shows through.

 

A. Select the ink layer and set the layer as a reference layer. This is very handy, as it will be used as a reference for your fill bucket, even when used on other layers:

 

B. Select your circle layer, then select the bucket tool. Make sure your bucket tool is set to ‘refer to multiple’ in the settings, and close gap and area scaling is on:

 

C. Set your colour to transparent, and begin to click the areas you want to delete within the dogs head. As the bucket is referring to the reference layer (your inks layer) it will only delete areas within the linework. Make sense? Example below:

 

D. Finally, select the lasso tool and select the areas within the head you couldn’t properly erase with the bucket tool.

Now hit the fill icon once you have selected the areas. As your colour is set to transparent, this will just delete the areas of the circle you have selected:

 

E. Select the Circle layer in your layers panel. Now take the layer transparency up to 100%.

3. Spotting your blacks.

Spotting your blacks is an important part of the inking process. It creates dynamic, and rhythm in your design.

 

Drop Shadows:

While inking an element, try to imagine where the light will fall on the form below. For example, the flowers and leaves drop shadows onto objects below them. For example:

 

And now with drop shadow blacks spotted:

Spotting large areas of black:

For large areas of blacks, create a new layer BELOW the inks layer.

Now you can ink in the areas you want all black behind the INKS layer, not worrying about the foreground elements, eg:

 

 

Example of me spotting my blacks, with the INKS layer still set as reference layer, and then erasing the sections that intersect with my INK layer elements. I do this using a layer mask.

 

4. Finish off your Inking process.

Remember to focus on areas of detail and texture. Vary your line strokes and always LOOK AT REFERENCE! :)

EFFECTS

Now, let's add some texture to our illustration with some ink splatter effects.

 

1. Import the splatter brush to your brush tool panel. It should show like this once you import.

2. Set brush to colour mixing, otherwise it won’t look inky enough

3. Now, using this Splatter brush, we are now going to erase parts of the black circle behind the dog to give a splattered contrasting effect. Select the Circle layer and then create a layer mask.

 

4. Set your splatter brush to transparent instead of black.

 

5. Begin to splatter the circle behind the dog, adjusting your pressure and size as you go:

 

6. Now to create a black spilled ink splatter effect, click on the effects layer, change your splatter brush colour to black and begin to carefully splatter ink on your page. Don’t worry too much about overlapping parts of your design. We will adjust this soon.

 

An example of me using the splatter brush:

7. Now create a layer mask on your effects layer and using the pen tool, mask out areas that you don’t want effected by the splatter:

Before the masking:

After masking:

All done with effects for now!

TONE

Tone can add depth and dynamic to your artwork. I like to use the watercolour brushes to lay down my tone.

 

1. the main water colour brush I use from ×ェ× which you should have set up earlier.

 

My favourite brush is this one:

2. Select your tone layer and set your foreground to black, background to a mid-grey tone.

3. Once you have set your background colour to grey, make sure you click back to the black foreground colour, as it sticks on the background colour if you don’t do this.

 

4. Then simply begin to paint in your tones, example videos below. Remember to vary the size of your brush, larger size for larger areas, reduce the brush size for smaller areas.

 

5. As you paint remember the following:

A. Make sure you think about keeping some areas mostly dark and some areas mostly light. This creates balance and impact to your illustration.

 

B. Remember to think about hard shadows, and where objects in the foreground drop shadows onto objects in the background, like so:

 

5. Finished product should be something like this level of detail:

SCREENTONES (Optional)

I have only just started playing with screentones recently and Clip has some excellent tools to get you going with screentones.

 

1. Create a layer called screentone

2. Click on layer properties and make the layer screentone based:

3. In the frequence settings on the layer properties, Set the frequency of dots to whatever you want, or find works best for your illustration. The less frequent, the thinker and fewer dots will be used.

4. Select your watercolour brush again and start painting in the tone like so:

5. Use a layer mask and the pen tool to erase the tone you don’t want on that layer.

6. Optionally create another layer of tone, this with a smaller frequency and apply that as well to areas you want tone in. As I said, the smaller the frequency, the bigger the screen dots.

7. Optionally create another screentone layer, with a very small frequency, like 7. Change your colour to white, and you can paint white tone on your illustration, like so:

TEXTURE

I like to drop a texture over my finished tones to add some variation, randomness and, well, texture to my tones.

You can download my go-to texture here, or you can just find a nice texture on google:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1d_GjrwfUR70_X-07F8TBuKAwsXX0C6Yz

 

1. Go to File>Import>From photo library on the iPad

Or File>Import>Image on the desktop version of Clip

 

2. Resize the image to cover your whole design, then click Layer>Rasterize

3. Click on the layer, the click layer colour:

4. Select black for the layer colour

5. Set the layer properties to Overlay

6. Adjust opacity to suit your artwork, I set mine to 38%

THE FINAL IMAGE

It's been fun creating this tutorial. I think it's detailed enough it should be easy to understand, but if you do have any questions, I will be happy to try to answer them. Good lunk in your Black and White art creations. Don't skip steps in your image creation, do as many roughs as possible before starting, and I think you will create some amazing artwork!

 

I hope to do more tutorials in the future. Don't forget to like this tutorial if you like it, and connect with me on social media:

@dropthedrawings on twitter and instagram