Are you ready to step into a world of vibrant creativity and learn the secret to crafting modern kawaii pop art using Clip Studio Paint? In this quick tip, you'll discover how to expertly combine layer properties to breathe life into your artwork with a burst of colorful energy.

A Classic Style with a Clip Studio Twist

You’ve likely seen a lot of famous Pop Art with its bright and bold colors, graphic elements, strong linework, and pop culture references. Did you know that this classic style is making a big comeback with a modern kawaii twist? Yoshitomo Nara and Takashi Murakami are considered pioneers of this style and have paved the way for vibrant, playful art that celebrates Japanese pop culture, anime, and manga.

 

With a little bit of innovation, we can combine Clip Studio Paint’s existing tools to replicate some of the core elements of traditional pop art to join this trend digitally!

The Layer Property Palette

The Layer Property palette is available in Studio Mode on your computer and tablet. You won’t have access to it when using Simple Mode, so it’s important to switch back to studio mode when utilizing these features.

 

You can find the Layer Property palette above the Layer palette, by default. If you don’t see it or it isn’t in your User Interface, you can go to Window > Layer Property and make sure that it has a checkmark next to it. Otherwise, click it to add it to the interface.

The Layer Property palette has four effects we can apply to our selected layer. For this style, we’re going to use Border Effect, Tone, and Layer Color.

You’re probably familiar with Layer Color if you do a lot of linework or inking. The default color is similar to a nonphoto blue pencil, so, when you apply it to your sketch layer, it makes it very easy to see your lineswork over it.

Combining Tone and Layer Color for Punchy Halftones

The Tone effect in the Layer Property palette converts the layer to a halftone pattern. The standard use of this is for halftone printing in comics, but we can utilize it to get the halftone pattern common in pop art.

 

Here I started with a shadow layer on the hair with the Blending Mode set to Multiply (this removes the background color when we apply the Tone effect to our layer).

In the Layer Property palette, select Tone. The standard settings are a Frequency of 60, Density based on the layer color, and the pattern set to circle. Lowering the frequency increases the size of the pattern, but 60 worked in this case.

This gives us a nice pop art look to our shadows, but the standard color is greyscale. Not very exciting or kawaii pop art, is it? If we get creative and combine effects, however, we can achieve a completely different look!

 

Here, I’ve activated the Layer Color and switched the main Layer Color to a bright green to complement our character’s hair. Using Layer color in this way, on top of tone, colors the halftone pattern, letting us overcome the greyscale limitation of the Tone effect!

Using Halftone Dot Shape Options for Extra Wow Factor

We can get even more creative with this combo. In our tone pattern (dot settings), we have over a dozen shape options! Let’s use some more to give our image some additional cuteness and variety.

Here we have our character’s school uniform shirt. It’s a nice color, but let’s see if we can make it more interesting.

If we turn on our Tone effect, we can change the dot setting to another shape. Let’s try hearts. We can scale down the frequency, also, to make them more visible.

 

Be careful when scaling your frequency down very low, though. It’s best to view your image close to full resolution when setting the frequency since it will look right when zoomed out, but the dots might be intersecting when your view is zoomed in. So aim for a frequency where the size of the dots doesn’t change when zooming in and out of your image.

It’s looking good, but can we make it even cuter? We sure can! Let’s apply a Layer Color, but this time we’ll add a sub color. That will color the area around the dots, giving us a base color for the shirt.

How Layer Opacity Effects Tone Density

You might not be able to get the right look and feel to your halftone pattern using just the frequency option in the Layer Property palette. Maybe it just looks too dense, overall, and nothing you’re doing is helping.

 

Here we have our flaming rooster, but the star pattern is too big and difficult to read well.

If we reduce the opacity of this layer, we can control both the size and density of the halftone pattern on top of our settings in the Layer Property, itself.

Using Border Effect for Bold and Punchy Outlines

Another core element of Pop Art is heavy, graphic outlines. When we’re drawing our linework by hand, we can control this pretty easily, but what do we do when we’ve added shapes and other custom elements to our scene?

 

Applying the Border Effect set to Edge, we can create a strong outline of any thickness and color to layer or object.

Here I’ve applied a nice teal outline to a Flash pattern. This is a type of Speech Bubble. So, as you can see, this layer effect can be used on anything you can add to your image that would, otherwise, be very difficult to modify.

 

Border Effect can be used anywhere you might want a stronger outline or more separation between elements. Of course, it also works great for text elements to give our piece a more graphic feel!

Finishing Up and Painting with Transparent Color

To finish up, we can add more tones to our characters and background. Using Blending Modes like Multiply, we can create a subtle, overlaid effect.

We can control the size of the halftone dots to create a gradient look by painting with transparency using a soft airbrush. Sweeping over the edges will gradually shrink the dots in that area (similar to how lowering the layer opacity shrinks all of the dots uniformly).

Now, all we have to do is combine these techniques with bold, bright colors and a kitschy theme, like convenience store goodies, and we have a completed pop art illustration in a modern kawaii style!

I hope this has inspired you to give this style of art a try and experiment with the features in Clip Studio Paint! Stray creative and keep creating!

Watch This Tutorial on Youtube