One of the main advantages of Clip Studio Paint is the use of 3D object to help you with perspective/composition/anatomy etc. It’s one of the feature for which I’ve fallen in love with the software 7 years ago.

One of the most difficult thing is drawing in perspective, every beginner struggle with. And you struggle with it especially if you’re a comic artist, in which you don’t always have the luxury to be always precise and sometimes you need to wing it…

 

An example is this page I’ve done for my comic Bunnyfables. The last panel had a pretty difficult perspective. So if you’re a beginner or worse… On a short deadline, you can have some problems in doing the perspective correctly.

But there is a way to be REALLY fast on in posing your character. But first you need to download some assets from Clip Studio Assets

 

Things you need to download

You need to download two things from Clip Studio Assets

 

1. A cube, the official Celsys cube ID:1686052

 

2. Everything, and I mean EVERYTHING useful in the pose section. Just click on Detail on the right of the search bar and click on pose

A little disclaimer

What I’m showing is How I like to work from start to finish. I prefer to start with the background and after that creating the characters. The trick I’m showing you can be used directly with a character model, starting with the cube is just a personal preference based on how I work.

How to set up the perspective

Now here comes the really lazy way to set up your perspective.

 

1. Take your page, with your frame

2. Put in the frame layer the Cube

 

3. Adjust the cube until you’re satisfied with the perspective you’re looking

Now you’ve just set up your perspective. But how you will ask?

Simple, every 3D material has a linked ruler that decide the perspective of your cube

 

But usually that ruler is hidden, so you can’t edit it directly, but:

• You can edit it directly just by clicking over it.

• You can duplicate this ruler to another layer, just by pressing ALT+click and drag

 

So, once you’ve found a perspective you like, you just need to duplicate the ruler to a new vector layer and you’ve your scene perspective.

Something like this.

I usually prefer to draw first the background and later the characters. So I will explain the next step, after I’ve drawn the background.

 

Posing your character

Now we have our little BG, now I just need to add the other character.

Doing it it’s easy, like shamefully easy. I just duplicate my cube layer, by right clicking the layer and click on [ Duplicate layer ]. And I put the copy inside my character folder, is not necessary but I like to keep it clean and tidy

Here’s my layer stack after doing this. Now we just select the Character Perspective layer… And we add the 3D model of CSP, it’s in the [ Material ] palette under [ Body Type ], click and drag it on the layer, what happened? The body type just snapped to the perspective you’ve created.

Guess what we will do now? As if we are in Blender, we kill the default cube. After this homicide we just click and drag one of the downloaded poses onto the 3D character model. And we move the character in position… and done.

We have our character ready to be inked.

Alternative

In case you have a different kind of background, or you don’t need to ink your backgrounds or something like that. Don’t worry just take your 3D character, click on the ruler and change the vanishing points until they’re a little bit until they’re more or less in the same position as the background perspective. You can see this method in the video.

Conclusion

With this method you can have with a single step all the ruler for your scene. You can use as a base for your first perspective ruler whatever object you want, but I just find it easier with the cube.

Plus, whatever 3D object you put in the cube layer will automatically have applied that perspective ruler.

 

In a way this is the saint grail of fast/lazy scene set up.

Self-promotion

Ok… Now you’ve seen how much useful 3D for your drawings is. But is this all? What would happen if you can create a drawer with movable parts? Or even better a Room with movable parts? Or even better a whole city shoot with interchangeable houses? OR EVEN BETTER your own posable 3D character?! OR EVEN BETTER A MACHO DICE!

You can learn how to do this and more with the manual I’ve written, Clip Studio Paint by Example. You can learn how to do this and more with the manual I’ve written, Clip Studio Paint by Example.

Like an invisible lineart that is still referred by the [ Fill/Auto select ] tool. Or a way to create 10 colours variation of your character in 1 minute circa… Or how to create a Narwhal brush…

 

 

Plus regarding brushes I sell on my website, Lennybunny.com, single brushes and brush packs for Clip Studio Paint.

And with this that’s all !