Introduction

Hello everybody!

 

Welcome back to my channel, I’m professor Crimsy and in today’s class I will teach you how to create a variety of special effects to improve your illustrations using blur filters and blur brushes in Clip Studio Paint. We will start off with a quick overview of all the available filters and brushes and then I will teach you step by step how to create my 7 personal favorite special effects using some of these tools.

 

These 7 effects include:

1. lineart enhancement

2. movement blur

3. glow highlights

4. distance blur

5. smoke

6. falling snow

7. 90’s anime filter

 

Of course, in order to demonstrate all these tips, I will use some of my own illustrations, including this brand new one that I made just for this occasion featuring my Oc Yukine. That being said, we have a lot to cover so without further ado, let’s begin the ritual!

Quick overview of the blur filters

Here are the test images (all my own artwork) without the filters.

Here are the images with the filters.

First off, let’s do a quick overview of the filters and brushes that are present by default in Clip Studio Paint.

 

Blur and blur (strong)

We have the blur and blur (strong) filters, these are automatic blur filters that have a set blur value to them. To really see a difference you typically need to use them multiple times, but it can be pretty subtle and the bigger the canvas and the least effective these filters will be.

 

Gaussian blur

Tthe Gaussian blur is by far the one I use the most in my art because it comes with a strength slider and a preview of the result that updates every time you move the slider which gives you a lot of control on your end result.

 

Motion blur

With the motion blur, a forward or backward directional movement is added to your blur. You can control its strength, its direction and how smooth it is, which is great for any element in your art showcasing lateral movement, like a character running or an object falling.

 

Radial blur

Where the motion blur is great to create movement, the radial blur is its equal when it comes to creating intensity. This blur filter is also directional, but instead of being linear, this one originates from a single point and projects the blur effect in an outward of inward direction.

 

Smoothing

The smoothing filter is pretty self explanatory, if you have a high amount of grain in your art, which happens a lot with scanned traditional artworks brought into a digital drawing software, this will serve as an anti-aliasing filter.

 

Mosaic effect

Another filter I consider to be a blur filter, but that was not included in the blur category is the mosaic filter, also known as the pixelate filter or the censorship filter. As its name indicates, this filter is pretty great to automatically pixelate an image to give it a pixel art look or to blur a certain part of your art that you want hidden.

Quick overview of the blur brushes

Alright, moving on to the blend and blur brushes, these are very self explanatory, but here’s how they work:

 

Regular blend brush:

Highly blurs colors as it blends them together.

 

Blur brush:

Blends colors by first blurring them, then mixing them.

 

Fingertip brush:

Drags and stretches colors while slightly blurring them.

 

Painterly blender brush:

Simulates the blending of paints.

 

Wet bleed brush:

Simulates the blending of watercolors.

 

Textured blender:

Does not blend as well, but adds a really nice texture on top of already blended colors.

Effect #1 : Lineart enhancement

Starting with a pretty basic yet very effective one, lineart enhancement is the best way to add depth and strenght to your lineart.

 

1. Select your lineart folder .

2. Right click the folder duplicate the layer.

3. Tight click the folder again and merge selected layers.

4. Now go to the top menu --> Filter --> Blur --> Gaussian blur. I left the value at 6 since my canvas is letter size, but you may want a higher value the bigger you canvas is.

 

As you can see, it makes a pretty big difference already, but if you want to go an extra step, you can also:

 

5. Lock the layer’s pixels and change its blending mode to multiply.

6. Pick a color of your choice and go to Edit --> Fill or use the shortcut Alt + del.

 

Now, not only does the lineart look bolder, but it also has a nice colored hue to it!

Effect #2 : Motion blur

Once you are fully done with the coloring and shading of your character, a nice effect you can add is movement blur. It may not apply in every scenarios, but in this case, it’s winter, the wind is blowing and many elements of my character are in motion because of it, like the dangling yokai lanterns, the ribbons and the bottom of the kimono and its sleeves.

 

1. To create this effect, isolate your character from the background by duplicating its folder and merging the layers together. It’s important to keep the original folder visible under this layer because we will be erasing parts of this image in the process.

 

2. To create movement blur, select the area in motion and go to filter --> blur --> motion blur. Adjust the settings to get the right strength and angle and press ok.

 

 

3. Erase the parts you don't want the effect to apply to and rinse and repeat for all the moving elements.

 

4. Once you’re done, you can also duplicate the layer to make the effect stronger, then merge the two layers together and play with the layer’s opacity until you’re happy with the result.

 

The final effect here is subtle, but I was not going for anything dramatic so it’s perfect as it is!

Effect #3 : Glow highlights

Next up, something that can really add a punch to your artwork is glowing highlights. There are many ways to create glow in your art, but here’s the three methods I use the most.

 

Method 01: glow with Gaussian blur

 

1. Create a new layer and put its blending mode on add (glow).

 

2. Choose a dark color in the same hue as the element you want to add glow to and draw on top of said elements with a hard brush.

 

3. Once you’re done, head over to the top menu --> filter --> blur --> Gaussian blur. Adjust the settings to make the highlights very blurry and press ok.

 

4. You can adjust the layer’s opacity and use the soft eraser to refine the edges of the glow and that’s it.

 

Method 02: glow with blur brushes

 

1. Once again go over the glowy parts with a hard brush.

2. Instead of using the Gaussian blur filter, go to the blend brushes and pick either the blend or the blur brush and simply blend around the spots of glowing areas until it looks smooth.

Method 03: glow with the airbrush

The third method is the simplest in my opinion, but it’s not as precise as the first two. You can simply grab the soft airbrush and gently dab on top of your element until you’re satisfied with the glowing effect. This is especially good for spherical glowing objects and wide areas.

Here,s the final result! Feel free to experiment with all of these methods, it’s really a matter of personal preferences how one chooses to apply them in their work. :)

Effect #4 : Depth of field

Now that our character is packing a punch, it’s about time we start giving some love its surroundings.

 

To create an interesting composition in your illustrations, it’s always important to add both background and foreground elements to it so that we get a good sense of depth from the environment around the character. We call this the depth of field effect.

 

First, let’s add our background elements, then our foreground and middle ones. Typically the further away those elements are from the character and the blurrier they get in the distance, so it’s fine if everything looks a bit rough, it won’t matter in the end. So in the background we have the sky and some snowy mountains, in the middle ground we have a pine tree branch behind our character’s umbrella and in the foreground we have two more pine tree branches to the top left and bottom right of our image. Of course, everything looks very flat right now, so it’s time to go on a Gaussian blur rampage!

1. Slightly blur the sky and the mountains independently, then merge the two together and blur them again. The goal here is to have them be very blurry to show how far away they are.

2. Slightly blur the pine tree branch in the middle ground. Having this one be less blurry will help accentuate just how far these other branches are from our character.

so lastly, strongly blur the pine tree branches in the foreground and we’re done! Now our composition looks pretty nice and we can really feel the depth in our environment.

Effect #5 : How to draw smoke

Moving on to a more tricky effect, let’s create some smoke coming out of the carved oni pipe our character is holding. This effect might seem fancy, but in truth, it’s only a few steps that you rinse and repeat many times until you get the desired result. Sadly, I lost my initial recording from when I created this smoke effect, so I will quickly go over the process again and I apologize in advance if the final result does not look as polished as the top one, as long as you understand the process then you should be able to reproduce it. :)

 

The trick is to go from broad details to small details and the hardest part is to get the right smoke shape at the start. What you need for that is a good soft paint brush like the round mixing brush.

 

1. Gently trace the shape of your smoke, imagine that it is very light and floating in the air in long thin strands, a bit like hair.

 

2. Then get the blur brush and gradually blur the strands of smoke that you just made. Don’t hesitate to erase to refine your shapes or if you feel like your smoke is too opaque.

3. From there, I used a combination of the flat marker brush and the fingertip brush to add more layers of smoke on top of what I already had. This is our medium level of details.

4. When you're happy with the result, duplicate the smoke layer, blur it using the Gaussian blur filter and put the blending mode on add (glow) as well as reduce both layers opacity.

5. On a third layer, draw the thinnest strands of smoke. For this I used the flat marker at a smaller size and simply went over the lines we made before to add this extra layer level of detail that makes it look like the smoke is slowly dissipating.

With these three levels of detail we end up with some good looking smoke, but there is still a few more steps to do:

 

6. ring the smoke layers in a group, don’t forget to put the folder on the blending mode ‘’through’’, then duplicate it, merge the new folder’s layers, put its blending mode on add (glow)

 

7. Blur it using the Gaussian blur filter.

 

8. Lastly, you can play with the layer’s opacity or lock the layer’s pixels to give it a colored hue and that’s it!

 

We now have a really cool looking smoke effect to go with our pipe accessory and it’s not too far off from the first one I made despite being done in half the time;;

Here's the final result! (of the first version, which I still like better)

Effect #6 : Falling snow

After all these complex effects, I’m happy to say that this next effect is refreshingly simple to create. Recreating the effect of falling snow is very similar to other particle effects like floating dust and rain.

 

1. Head over to the airbrush tab, grab the droplet brush and lightly dab around the environment to simulate falling snowflakes. The only things to avoid here is to make the particles too dense or big or to add too many, but otherwise that’s all there is to it.

 

 

2. When you’re happy with your snowflakes, go to the top menu --> filter --> blur --> motion blur and play around with the angle and strength until it feels like the snowflakes are falling and being blown by the wind.

 

 

3. Then, like we did many times before, duplicate the layer, change its blending mode to add (glow) and use the Gaussian blur filter on it to add some highlights.

 

4. After that, play around with the layer’s color and opacity until the snow has a nice shiny blue tint to it.

 

 

5. Do these steps again for the foreground snowflakes, but this time use the spray airbrush and make the particles size bigger to simulate snowflakes that are closer to the viewer,

 

 

6. Use the motion blur filter again, play around with the settings and press ok.

 

Note: Here I scaled up my snowflakes because they still looked a bit too small and gave them an extra pass of Gaussian blur to make them even more fuzzy.

 

7. Finally, duplicate the layer, put the new layer’s blending mode on add (glow) and the first layer on the blending mode screen and adjust their opacity to your taste.

 

And that's how you get really good looking snow! Now that winter is just around the corner, this feels like a very appropriate lesson. :)

Effect #7 : 90's anime filter

At this point we can call the illustration pretty much done, but there is one last effect to apply to it that will change everything, a nice, fancy looking 90’s anime aesthetic filter.

 

1. To achieve this, you must create a folder that will contain your entire artwork, duplicate it, combine all the layers together and hide the original folder.

 

2. Duplicate that artwork layer and apply a strong Gaussian blur filter to it.

 

3. Reduce its opacity to more or less 50% and merge the two layers together.

 

4. Next, create 3 new layers and duplicate your artwork layer three times as well.

 

5. Head over to the color set tab and make sure it is showing the standard color set because it has all the original RGB colors in it. Pick the pure red and fill the first layer with it, then do the same for the green color and finally the blue color. This follow the RGB order as you will have noticed.

 

6. Now move one of each artwork layer copies below each RGB layers and put the RGB layers on multiply.

At this stage, your image should look like this:

7. Merge the RGB layers to the artwork layer below them and then change the top two layers on the blending mode screen.

8. Now, remember that sort of 3D effect in those old RGB tvs because their color channels were slightly misaligned? We are going to create that effect moving the bottom two layers ever so slightly sideways, starting first with the red layer to the right and then the green layer to the left. It can be very subtle, but we do not want to move the layers too far apart otherwise it will blur the image too harshly.

 

9. When you like the result, simply merge all the layers together once more and that’s it!

 

 

10. Now all that’s left is to add a noise filter on top of our artwork.

 

Note: any filter will do, but I was recommended this noise filter a while ago and I love it, so I will recommend it to you as well. You can find it on the Clip Studio asset store for free, simply download it, fetch it in your download folder and drag and drop it in your canvas.

 

 

11. Change the layer’s blending mode to overlay and reduce it’s opacity to 30 or less and here you go!

12. Now, adding noise on overlay will darken your image a bit, if that’s not something you like, duplicate your artwork image and change the copy’s blending mode to screen, reduce its opacity to around 30% and voilà, you artwork it lighter again.

 

I just love this effect so much, it’s one of those effects that always looks good you know ? It would be even better if the art was initally drawn in the 90’s anime art style, but it still works very well nonetheless! :)

Final words

And at long last, our illustration is finished and dare I say, it looks pretty awesome!

 

Some of these might seem less important when singled out, but all these effects can really improve your art dramatically once combined together, so never underestimate that extra effort you put into them, it's all worth it!

 

Alright, class dismissed, I hope you learned something useful today and enjoyed the winter themed art. Have a lovely day and I will see you in the next one! :)

 

Kind regards,

 

• Crimsy