Hello fans of shiny and sparkling things!

In this tutorial, I will show you how you can easily paint and draw jewelry, be it golden, silver, or bedazzled with lots of gems! We will cover choices of colour, shading techniques, layer settings and much more to ease your workflow (like magically changing the colour of gems)!

 

With that Intro, let's get right into it!

Preparing the References

Having references at hand is always a good idea, especially when you only have a vague idea of what you want to create! To make looking at reference while drawing easier, Clip Studio has a very useful feature called the subview window!

To open it, go to the "Window" tab and go down to find the "Sub View" Option and click on it to make it appear on your Workspace.

Once it's open, click this tiny option here. This will prompt you to upload pictures (in our case, references that we looked up beforehand)

Once you have a picture displayed there, you can use the eyedropper tool to pick colours from the Sub View window [super useful!]

 

And with that, we have our reference at hand and can get to work on those beautiful gems and metals!

Colours for Gold and Silver

Choosing colours for reflective materials can be hard since...well...they're reflective (meaning all kinds of colours bounce right off of them!)

 

However, I will now show you what to keep in mind when colouring and shading metals so that they don't end up looking muddy and grey!

We will be using 4 shades for colouring and shading metals in this tutorial:

-Highlight

-Base Colour

-shade 1

-shade 2

 

After colour picking from a few reference pictures, you can see that gold mostly stays withing the warmer shades, getting more red as it gets darker. So while you can use these palletes I prepared here or colourpick from a reference of your choice, just try to keep the shift of hue (from yellow to red) in mind as the shades get darker!

[As shown with the red arrow in the picture above]

 

Silver works similiar to Gold, however with grey tones, you can more easily tell the difference between warm and cold greys!

 

For WARM and COLD greys, the hue shifts to a purple (so the warm tones get "colder" and the cold tones get "warmer")

 

With grey you can either stay within a more realistic colour pallete and keep it grey or stylize it, maing it more colourful (like adding purples and blue into the mix!)

Painting/Shading/Rendering Gold & Silver

As shown above, the colouring procress concists of 5 easy steps:

 

1) fill in the base colour

 

2) block in the first shading colour. Since metals are reflective, the shape of the shadows looks very unusual. You can either take these step by step pictures or real life pictures as reference! [Just keep in mind where the light source is!]

 

3) Blend the first shading colour. Be careful not to overdo it!

 

4) Block in the second shading colour. You will only need very little of this colour.

 

5) Blending! Once again, don't blend to much! The shapes of the shadows still have to be distinct.

For Silver it's generally the same process, but with the other colour pallete!

 

So: Base Colour, shade 1, blend, shade 2, blend and you're done!

Making Metals Shine with Layer Modes

This step is technically optional, but you may find that your metal jewelry is lacking that special shimmer and shine...

 

Luckily, there's an easy fix for that!

By creating a new Layer and clipping that one to our gold and silver [like shown above] we can easily airbrush more highlights on our jewelry. The clipping layer ensures that whatever we draw here only stays on what we have already drawn on the layer below it (aka the one that it is clipped to)!

Clip Studios "Add Glow" Layer Mode is perfect for making things look extra shiny and glowing!

 

You can play around with the amount of highlights and the opacity yourself here! [I personally like setting it to about 35%]

Painting/Shading/Rendering Gemstones

Gems come in many different shapes, colours and cuts! The way a gem is cut very much influences how it reflects light, so be sure to know which shape of gem you're drawing!

These are only a few (badly drawn) examples of gem cuts! I recommend looking up which kind of gem you want to draw so that your jewelry turns out even better!

Using a similar technique as with the metals, we start by blocking in a darker colour of the base colour (remember: shadows get colder! So for blue, we move towards purple on the ring!) and carefully blend it. Since gems are partially see-through, there will be shadows and reflections on all of the sides of the gem (as you can see in the picture above).

Just keep in mind where the light source is and think of the different sides of the gem as tiny mirrors reflecting light!

 

Repeat that procedure with yet another shading colour and - as with the metals - add less of the darkest shade!

Making gems shiny with the help of Layer Modes

As with the gold and silver before, the gems you drew may be shaded, but they are still lacking that glowing, magical shimmer that we know and love, so let's fix that again!

Like with the gold before, airbrush a bright highlight colour over the gem on a seperate, new clipping layer! You can decide yourself which Layer Mode you like best, but I think Add (Glow) works very well here too!

Now, to finish it off, draw these very distinct reflections on each of the sides of the gem (as if it were a mirror or something) with white or a very, very light variation of the base colour.

[Like you see above]

We will set this Clipping Layer to "Hard Light" (you can also use "Add Glow" if you prefer) and set it to a percentage that we think looks good!

 

 

And thus, you have yourself a beautiful, shimmering gem that looks straight out of a magical fairytale!! Congrats!

Magically change Gem Colour with Tonal Correction

Now, if you painted a gem in one colour, but suddenly want it to be another colour, there's an easy solution:

Tonal Correction!

To do this, you will first have to merge the layers you used to paint your gem, however! Just click on the symbol circled in red below (or select the layers you want to merge, right click on them and select "merge selected layers")

To get to the Tonal Correction Menu we need for changing the gems colour, simply click on the "Edit" tab, go down to the "Tonal Correction" tab and select the "Hue/Saturation/Luminosity" option as shown in this picture!

Now that you have the window with the three sliders opened in front of you, you can play around with the hue, saturation and luminosity as you please!

The "Hue" Slider will easily change the colour of your gem, for example, from blue to green or red (or purple, or pink!) The possibilities are endless!

And with the additional help of the Saturation and Luminosity slider, you can even turn your gems black or white!

 

 

Just play around with the Preview turned on and see what kind of colours your gems can turn into!

End

So now, with all this newfound knowledge, you can go out there and draw beautiful jewelry and crowns and accessoires as well!

Thank you so much for reading!

 

I hope you have fun bedazzling your characters and your art with shiny gems and shimmering metals!