Hello! My name is Liz Staley and I’m a long-time user of Clip Studio Paint (I started using the program back when it was known as Manga Studio 4!). I was a beta-tester on the Manga Studio 5 program and for Clip Studio Paint, and I have written three books and several video courses about the program. Many of you probably know my name from those books, in fact. I write weekly posts on Graphixly.com and on CSP Tips, so be sure to come back every week to learn more Clip Studio Tips and Tricks from me!

 

When you’re first getting started with anything, it’s part of the learning process to make mistakes! However, there are mistakes that can be avoided when starting with digital art. Avoiding these mistakes can save you time, frustration, and make the learning process a lot more enjoyable!

 

In this article we will cover the following topics:

Not Using Reference

Leaving Basic Drawing Skills Underdeveloped

Using the Wrong Size Canvas

Not Using Layers

Not Using Canvas Flipping

Putting In Too Much Detail

Using Black for Shadows

Too Low Contrast

Not Making Backups

Quitting Too Early

 

Let’s get started!

Not Using Reference

I don't know where this came from, but I've seen many people of all ages just starting out with drawing who think that looking at references while drawing is “cheating” or “not allowed”. Well I am here to tell you that this is not the case! In the black outline below is a drawing I did of a red panda, and each of the photos around it are references that I looked at to complete that drawing. Each reference contributed to my overall understanding of how the Red Panda looks.

So remember that it is not forbidden to look at references! Especially if you are just starting out. You need to learn how to see things as an artist does, and the only way to do that is to look at objects and draw them.

 

That being said, it is NOT okay to trace someone else’s work and try to pass it off as your own. Tracing can be a good exercise when you are starting your art journey, but tracing exercises should stay in your personal sketchbook or on your hard drive.

 

 

Leaving Basic Drawing Skills Undeveloped

Back when I was starting with drawing cartoons and comics in high school, I thought that doing realistic art, figure drawing, and learning how to draw environments was pretty boring. Why draw that stuff when you can draw characters beating each other up and shooting ki blasts?!

 

As I went in to college and in the years that have passed since then, I have definitely seen how really mastering the building blocks of drawing improves your art. There are still things I struggle with a lot (no one would ever call me a color theory expert and I am far from the best artist ever!) but I feel like in the past few years as I have worked more and more on the building blocks and working from reference my drawing and coloring have really made some huge improvements. This is especially great because as an adult I have almost no free time, unlike when I was a child and teen and could spend hours and hours just filling sketchbooks. If you are just getting started as an artist, start from the basics like line, form, and texture, and work up to more complex things like perspective and figure drawing. If you start when you're younger then you will also have more time to devote and will improve much faster!

 

 

Using the Wrong Size Canvas

Now to the first mistake that is digital art specific. Some beginner digital artists don’t pay attention to their canvas size and resolution when they start a new project. However, these two things are extremely important. If you don’t set your canvas size and resolution correctly at the beginning, then you may run into problems later on if you decide to print your drawings.

 

To print your work with decent quality, you will want to set your image resolution when creating your file to at least 300dpi. This is the dpi that printers default to, and anything less than that will look pixelated and blurry when printed.

 

In the screenshot below the top image is 100% zoom with a 300dpi image, and the bottom is 100% zoom at 72dpi. Notice how much larger the 300dpi version is! This allows for better image quality and allows you to zoom in more when working.

 

 

For a much more in-depth discussion of this topic, check out this previous article of mine.

Not Using Layers

Layers are honestly one of the best things about doing art digitally! Instead of having to worry about doing something to mess up the work you’ve already done, the way you’d have to when working on a painting or a drawing on paper, when working with digital art you can create layers. These layers allow you to work on one part of an image without changing anything on another layer. Think of it like a stack of clear plastic pages, where you can create your sketch on one, then stack another on top and do your ink lines, then add color on more layers!

 

Working on layers also provides other benefits, like being able to add special effects, change transparency, and adjust colors.

 

 

Not Using Canvas Flipping

Flipping your canvas horizontally while drawing is very, very useful. There is a trick with drawing on paper that you should occasionally hold your drawing up to a mirror and look at it in reverse. Because artists spend a lot of time looking at a piece of art when we’re working on it, it can be difficult to see things like proportion issues and uneven features. Have you ever been working on a drawing and thought “There is something wrong here and I don’t know what it is!”? This trick can help with that! However, when working digitally we don’t even need a mirror!

Simply click on Edit - Rotate/Flip Canvas - Flip Horizontal.

Now you can look at your image reversed, which will help you see any errors that need to be corrected!

Putting In Too Much Detail

Remember that just because you can zoom in digitally and draw every strand of hair on a character’s head, or every bit of fur on a cat, doesn’t mean that you should. Drawing every strand of hair especially doesn’t look right because hair naturally clumps together into larger strands.

 

Plus, zooming in to draw every tiny detail can mean a ton of wasted time, because once you zoom out to the size someone will be viewing it online or as a print, that detail will probably be lost. Too much detail can also make a drawing look cluttered and busy.

 

Remember to zoom back out to the size that someone will be viewing your work at to see if your details are being lost at that size. As you continue to make work digitally, you’ll start to learn how much detail to put in to make your work come to life but without wasting time on details that are just going to disappear.

 

 

Using Black for Shadows

This is one that I definitely did at the beginning of my digital art journey. Shadows are dark so… they should be black, right? Well, not necessarily! Though black shadows can look awesome in a high-contrast moody piece, or as a black and white ink drawing, in most cases using black for shadows makes the piece look drab and lifeless. In the screenshot below, the shadow layers are both the same blending mode and transparency, but the one on the left is black and the one on the right is blue.

Cool shadows are also more natural looking because they’re what we see every day in nature! So a good rule of thumb for most lighting is cool shadows, warm highlights.

Too Low Contrast

In addition to using the correct hue for shadows and highlights, you also want to make sure that there is enough contrast between your light and dark areas to convey the scene and lighting. Though there are some lighting situations and moods where low contrast is appropriate, drawings tend to look more “3-D” and pop more when there is a good amount of contrast between the light and dark areas. In the example below, the lighting on the left has too little contrast between the shadows and highlights, especially for being a moody scene lit by fire. The right side though has a high amount of contrast and so has more depth and better conveys the mood.

If you are unsure about your contrast level, there’s an easy and non-destructive way to check! In Clip Studio Paint simply go to Layer - New Adjustment Layer - Hue/Saturation/Luminosity. Then turn the saturation slider all the way down so that your drawing turns black and white. Click OK to create the adjustment layer. Now you can turn the adjustment layer from visible to inactive to quickly check your contrast!

Not Making Backups

At some point in time all digital artists will have an equipment failure of some sort. Whether it’s a hard drive going up in smoke, an iPad stopping working, or even a house fire or flood taking out your equipment. This is why it’s a smart idea to make backups of your work. Ideally, you should have two backups - one on an external hard drive or thumb drive, and one that is off-site from your regular equipment. This usually means some kind of cloud storage. There are tons of different cloud storage options out there, but I strongly recommend one that you can set to make backups automatically so that you don’t forget and end up with a backup that is months out of date.

Quitting Too Early

Finally, many artists quit drawing and trying far too early. Unless you have natural talent, art is a skill that takes hours and hours and hours to learn. It’s very easy to feel discouraged, especially at the beginning (and, coming from someone who has been doing ‘the art thing’ for decades at this point, it’s easy to be discouraged even after hundreds of thousands of hours of learning, too!).

Art is about the journey, not the destination, and the work that you think is fantastic today will look awful compared to how far you’ve come in a few years. Keep backups of your past work and look back at it after a year or even a few months to see how you’ve improved. And remember that if you love creating, don’t give up on it! Just keep learning and practicing - after all, that time will pass anyway so you might as well spend it doing something that you love!

Conclusion

These are the most common mistakes I’ve seen beginner digital artists make. Hopefully you can avoid them!

For more information on CLIP Studio Paint, please visit https://www.clipstudio.net/en or https://graphixly.com