Hello and welcome to another Clipstudio Paint tutorial.

 

Today, I'm going to show you how I quickly add base colors to drawings using reference layers and fill tools.

 

To make this even more challenging, I'm going to do all the base colors in just two layers: one for the character, and another for the background.

 

This is especially useful if you're a comic artist like me who needs to color several panels in a day.

For this artwork, you can see that I drew the character and the background in different layers.

 

This is for me to demonstrate to you the usefulness of the reference layer in terms of keeping your colors where you want them to be.

 

Let's color our character first.

 

To do that, go to your character's lineart layer and set that as your reference layer by clicking on the lighthouse icon in the layers panel.

Then add a new layer beneath your reference layer, and using the close and fill tool, draw around your character and watch the colors fill in.

As you can see, since we set the character lineart as the reference layer, the colors will only fill in where the lineart is and will not spill over to the background. You may want to tweak the settings of your close and fill tool though, to fit your needs.

 

Now that we've given our character her base colors, we can now add more color detail, this time by using other tools like the reference all layers fill tool, the lasso tool, the brush tool etc.

If you want to switch reference layers, simply go to your layer of choice and click on the lighthouse icon again to set that as your new reference layer.

 

In this case, we're going to the background lineart and turning that into our reference layer. Just like before, we add a new layer beneath the reference layer and start coloring using our fill tools.

 

And that's how you quickly add base colors to your lineart using reference layers.