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Hello!

 

I’m .avi. I work as a professional game illustrator and creating comics and webtoons is my hobby.

 

One of the aspects of creating comics and webtoons I enjoy the most is playing around with backgrounds and effects to convey a character’s mood as best as possible.

 

In this tutorial, I‘d like to share tips on various tools and functions available in Clip Studio Paint that I use to achieve the effects I aimed for with examples from the webtoon I’ve been working on.

TOOLS

Saturated line

I regard this tool as one of the best inventions of all time. It’s so versatile and saves so much time!

You can download many subtools, or play around with the default ones.

⚠️ Just keep in mind that after using these tools on your canvas, you need to switch to the Operation tool to modify the effect! ⚠️

With the rectangle you can adjust the size of the area.

The red center point defines the point where all lines converge.

💡 QUICK TIP! 💡

You can temporarily hide the circle by holding Space.

The Sub Tool Detail palette allows you to change the length and thickness of the lines and set random distribution with Disarray and Grouping.

By dragging the square handle connected to the center you can rotate the lines’ overall position.

Sometimes I duplicate the lines layer and set it to a darker color. By moving the handle, I can just shift the lines a little to have a double color effect.

✨ The lines don’t have to be straight! ✨

By right-clicking the red line and adding new points on it, you can make a circle of thunder!

If you select the points and right-click again, by selecting Switch corner the sharp corners turn into curves.

✨ But that’s not all! ✨

 

You can change the brush used for the lines to add even more variety!

 

You can pick from the various presets or set your own brush.

This tool is far from limited to only focus lines and speedlines; go ahead and experiment with all these possible settings!

 

You can make a cartoon flare for an explosion, a poster-style background for your heroic characters, a pop effect after something suddenly disappears, a halo of stars, angry spiral, or even a flower!

The only thing you need to worry about is what the characters have to say about it…

Stream line

The Stream line tools work the same way as the Saturated line tool, only following a line or a curve.

 

The Gloom preset is wonderful for creating tension, distress, speedlines or even a rain of hearts!

Special rulers

The rulers are all powerful allies for drawing!

 

For effects I use the following ones:

📐Parallel line

By setting up the parallel line ruler, you can not only draw speedlines, impact lines and such; I like using it with blend brushes to make a cartoon speed background effect.

📐 Multiple curve

The handle of the Multiple curve allows you to set it into perspective, and make speedlines for objects moving in a curve.

 

I use this ruler especially for the movement of the windshield wipers :3

📐 Radial line

Radial line is a quick solution if you just need to draw a few focus lines and don’t want to use the Saturated line, or for drawing quick guides for radial effects.

📐 Concentric circle

This tool is a great help for drawing shock waves and the like.

 

I often use it in combination with the Radial line, like in the case of the base for this shattering glass effect:

Straight line tool + vector layers

The Straight line tool may seem too simple for making effects, but it’s quite the opposite!

 

If you use it on vector layers, you can then tweak it with any of the Correct line subtools!

For example, this flare was made just by drawing several straight lines roughly radially.

In the Correct line tool, Control point check the Adjust line width option.

If you click and drag a point to the left, the thickness of the line becomes smaller, and with dragging to the right, the line becomes thicker.

 

This allows you to quickly create random rays of light for your explosion!

Another example is this maze background.

I used the Straight line tool to make a grid on a vector layer, erased some lines to create a maze pattern, which I then transformed.

Liquify tool

The Liquify tool is magic made real – not only it allows you to make subtle adjustments to any raster layer, you can use it for interesting background effects, like marbling!

Just paint some random blotches of colors on the background and play with the Liquify tool to make swirls and waves.

 

In a moment you have an original background for your distressed character!

Another way I use the Liquify tool is to create light borders around characters in comedic scenes:

While I could use the Layer property palette’s Border effect, I prefer making a selection of the character’s silhouette by Ctrl-clicking the layer folder icon, expanding it a few pixels and filling it in a new layer behind the character.

 

Then I use the Liquify tool to expand the border.

 

This way the pointed shapes don’t turn round and the border gets uneven, giving it a cut-out feel.

Brushes

Brushes have endless possibilities, just take a look at all the ingenious effect brushes people came up with and posted to Assets!

 

 

They’re great time savers for signs like noticing, sweat, anger, and the like. Another great group consists of speed lines and impact effects.

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Since I like painterly effects, for the snow wind effects I made a lot of brush-stroke-like brushes with particles.

They make use of the dual brush where one brush is the painterly stroke while the second one is made up of splatters and particles of snow. I love using them for gusts of wind and the snow splash effect with motion lines that the car makes.

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Metaphoric effects are great for comedies, which led me to make a bunch of figurative brushes.

 

Apart from common question marks, I love using contextual metaphors, like when the guy wonders what the top secret mission could be about or when he’s suddenly faced with a flock of little kids.

In this case the vector layer is especially helpful because it allows me to precisely place the chickens at angles that make them look like they’re walking over the character, and evoke the feeling of goosebumps.

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Sprays of particles are a category on their own – they can add a lot of fluffy, comedic or intense feeling to your scene just by varying the shapes, colors, density and placement.

Flying unspecified particles, especially with motion blur, can significantly contribute to the dynamic movement and intensity of the scene.

Bokeh lights are generally used for gentle and positively emotional scenes, I often use them in exaggeration, like here where I wanted to show the childish admiration of the character’s boss…

… Or in this scene, which was meant to be like melting sugar, because the guy learns that the kids found cigarettes which he had been deprived of.

 

But the bokeh wasn’t nearly enough, that’s why I added metaphorical images like birds chirping and unicorns sliding down rainbows to make it look as ridiculous as possible :D

 

In this panel, where the character thinks he’s getting paranoid, I used a downloaded Halloween ghost brush to inconspicuously mix little ghosts into the snow as a candy for attentive readers.

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Oh, and sparkles… ✨⭐🌟

 

Sparkles are priceless, especially when it comes to comedy. I love using them for all kinds of effects, like glowing eyes or circles of excitement!

I’ve made many kinds of sparkle brushes for circles and spray, they’re available for download in Assets:

In the process of storyboarding, these five pointed stars have somehow become the kids’ personal effect. Even if the children aren’t in the panel, the sparkles show that they are present, excited and more than ready to get on the guy’s nerves…

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I should probably mention that I mostly use this flat brush that responds to rotation. It gives effects and painting altogether a more dynamic feeling, which I like.

Blur

Blur brushes are destructive, so I leave them for the very last stage of effects where I make merged duplicates of layers that I want blurred.

 

To emphasize movement in the scene, I use this great motion blur brush from Assets. Perfect for blurring flying particles!

In a darker scene that’s meant to be blurry and disorienting I often combine blurring the out-of-focus parts of the panel using the basic blur brush with a softly textured haze.

No effect

In some cases, no effect is the best effect of all, like when the character is lost in thought, or, like in the next example, the empty background is used to emphasize the emptiness of the cigarette pack:

LAYER TRICKS

Masks and clipping layers

If you find that your effect stands out too much in a few places, you can mask it with a layer mask.

If your layer is set to one of the lightening modes, you can “mask” it by clipping another layer on it in normal mode and paint in black on it, since black is ignored by these modes.

Similarly, layers in darkening modes can be “masked” with white.

With the clipped layers, you can also add subtle color shifts to your original effect.

Brightness to opacity

If you want to use an epic effect that’s unfortunately without transparency, you can solve that by using the Edit > Convert brightness to opacity function, which turns light colors into transparency.

If you want to keep the bright part, just invert the colors before you run the function and then invert them back.

 

(The color inversion is done by Edit > Tonal Correction > Reverse Gradient, but I’ve been using the shortcut CTRL-I since forever so I had a hard time finding it in the menu >_<;; )

To keep the colors of the flare:

🟠 1. Duplicate the layer.

🟠 2. Invert colors of the duplicated layer to make the flare black.

🟠 3. Go to Edit > Convert brightness to opacity.

🟠 4. Ctrl-click the black flare layer icon to create its selection.

🟠 5. Switch to the original layer and click the Mask icon in the Layer palette to make a mask from the selection on the original layer.

🟠 Now your colorful flare is ready to make your scene even more epic!

Gradient map layer

Gradient maps are the underappreciated best allies!

 

Is your epic effect the wrong color? Just clip a gradient map layer on it!

 

🔸 1. Right-click the layer on which you want to add the gradient map.

🔸 2. In the contextual menu select New Correction Layer > Gradient map and hit enter.

🔸 3. Right-click the gradient map layer and select Layer Settings > Clip to Layer Below (my shortcut is Num* but I have no idea if that was the default shortcut, if not, I recommend setting it).

🔸 4. Double-click the gradient map layer icon and set the gradient to fit your scene!

 

You can use it not only to adjust the colors but contrast as well!

For example, I made these painterly brushes to work with background and foreground color, but it didn’t have the desired effect. That’s why I just use them with any dark and light colors and clip this gradient map on their layer to make it colorful.

Combining everything!

Combine all these tools, various brushes and images with your imagination to create epic effects!

 

Most of the examples shown are made up of several saturated lines, glow brushes and particles, like the explosion.

This panel was intended to give off the feeling of the trope of getting struck by lightning to come alive, but not in the positive subtext.

I modified the bubble of the kid’s remark that the guy takes as a grave insult into a lightning bolt.

The background was made by stacking loads of images, lightning brushes, particles and blurred copies of these layers on various blending modes.

Conclusion

This tutorial’s goal is to serve as a cue to have creative fun with expressing emotion in your works with the tools CSP offers.

 

Hopefully, it has been accomplished, and you are ready to set your creativity loose to have a blast making the coolest effects for your comic! 💥

🌟⭐✨ If you enjoyed this tip, it will make me happy if you give a like so that I know I’m doing things right, eventually leave a comment on where I could improve :) ✨⭐🌟