Hello everyone and welcome to my 2nd tutorial, how I lip sync in Clip Studio Paint. This is my approach and how I go about lip-syncing without audio scrubbing, which is a feature that helps in scrubbing through audio to animate with. Watch the video if you want more info and see my hands-on approach. I hope you learn a thing or two. Without further ado,

LET'S GO!!!

- Act out your character’s audio *first*

Be sure to act out your character's line before lip syncing. Say it like how your character will say it. Mirrors help a lot. Please get a mirror.

- Take note of your lip’s movement

You can do this by writing out how the audio sounds (for example, my character says, “Ugh”, but to me he says it like “Uuuughhh…”). Write it down on a new layer and draw mouth shapes along the letters below. This helped me get a feel of the mouth movements, as I used my lips as a reference with the mirror.

- Timeline label

I add timeline labels to know when my audio starts and ends visually, because sometimes my timeline can look messy with so many Animation folders. Timeline label helps, so I don’t have to scroll down to look at the audio’s position.

You can create a timeline label by going to "Timeline Menu" —> "Label" —> "Create timeline label".

- Rearrange your frames to suit the audio

Arrange your animation frames again and again until it moves well with the audio. If your playback gets laggy, turn off other animation folders and just focus on the mouth movements.

- *MASTER TIP!* Move the middle-to-end drawn mouth frames 1 step or 2 after the audio ends

This was a tip I learnt years ago. Try this, say, “Hey”. Literally, say it right now, and notice that the sound “escapes” your mouth before your mouth closes. So apply this real-life appeal to your mouth movements to give your mouth animation near-realistic quality.

And that’s the end!

I hope you learnt something out of this approach of mine. I hope Audio Scrubbing is added soon to Clip Studio Paint. It would help a ton!

Check out the finished animation here

Thanks, and have a great day! :D