Introduction
Clip Studio Paint has tons of different features and sometimes it can be a bit overwhelming seeing the abundance of features that’s provided. So I will be going through one of the features called Layer Property and some ways to utilize all of the effects available!
Attached is the video version of this if you prefer to watch~
What's Layer Property?
Basically, Layer property can modify whatever it is in your selected layer. One of the good things about layer properties is that you can undo the effects by unselecting the options if you aren’t too fond of the results and turn it back on again with its previous settings, so no need to readjust anything.
Layer Property consists of 4 effects;
Border Effect, Tone, and Layer Color, which are available to all versions of Clip Studio Paint,
and an additional called Extract Line available for only Clip Studio Paint EX. They can save you a lot of time and make the process of your artwork much more convenient and fun!
Border Effect
First one up is border effect, my favorite out of the 4 effects. There are 2 types of border; Edge and Watercolor Edge. Edge give you the ability to create a solid border around an anything in your layer in just one click:
You can also adjust the thickness of your border and change the color of it by going here:
Watercolor Edge, on the other hand, can give you a watercolor effect to the edges:
What can you do with Border Effect?
Let me preface this by saying: these are just some of the many things you can do with Layer Properties, and the ones I’m providing here are just a small portion of the functions to give you some idea.
Edge
As I said before, Border Effect is my favorite and its definitely for a good reason. You can use this for some of the more obvious ones to do (stickers, accessories, etc.):
It’s actually pretty simple and straightforward to do, I just have to draw anything I feel would be fitting on several layers, in this case, I used 5 different layers: 2 for each of the cherries (1 for the stalk and 1 for the fruit) and 1 for the paw. Your layer would look something like this:
Then, rearrange all of them to your liking and merge all of your accessory layers so you can put a white border all around them. To merge the layers, select the layers (in this case, I merged all colored layers except for black) you want, right click, and select “merge selected layers”.
Last, you can simply turn on Border Effect on your merged layers:
Aside from simple accessories or stickers, you can also use this for backgrounds!
Another thing I like to do is coloring and rendering with Border Effect, specifically Edge. Here I’ll demonstrate by rendering a heart balloon.
First step is to draw the silhouette of the thing you want to draw, in this case, a heart.
Next, turn on Border Effect and adjust the thickness and color.
Lastly, click “lock transparent pixels” so you can only draw inside the silhouette and start coloring!
This method really helps since it saves a lot of time not doing a line art/outline.
Watercolor Edge
The lesser known, lesser used Border Effect, but still can be very useful if used properly!
One way I found very useful to use watercolor edge is to add some texture and variety to greeneries (bushes, leaves, plants, flowers, etc.) I use this very frequently and here are some examples:
Extract Line (EX)
Now onto the second one, exclusive to only csp ex, Extract Line. This option can turn your image into a line drawing, You can play around with the settings to your liking and you can even convert the colors to tones by clicking this:
If you use the “Convert to lines and tones” option, Clip Studio will automatically separate them into layers so you can control the drawing even more!
Now this feature is a HUGE time saver. Especially if you’re a comic artist, even if you’re not, extract line can really come in handy.
What can you do with Extract Line?
Now this effect, in my opinion, comes in very handy if you have a 3D model and you want to turn in into a line drawing.
As an example, I have this 3D room model here that I want to turn into a line drawing with Extract Line:
After adjusting the 3D model, turn on Extract Line and select “Convert to lines and tones”. Change the settings however you like to acquire the best result.
Once you’re satisfied, click OK and there you have it!
You can also disable the tones layer, leaving only the lines if you prefer to color it manually:
Tones
Have u ever seen someone’s gorgeous art and just go how do they add those screen tones? Here it is! Tones can give your art a stylized look and give a bit more pop to it. So basically, Tones reduces the color into black and white. So the darker the value is, the denser the tones will be. As shown here, the black one is much more dense than the dark and light grays:
To get rid of the white parts in the tones, change the density to “Use brightness of image” instead of “Use color of image”.
You can change the frequency and the type of tones. There are so many options ranging to simple ones to unique ones and I really recommend playing around with them and see the different types of tones available!
You can click the option to show additional settings to allow even more customization such as changing angles!
What can you do with Tone?
I and many other artists alike use tone screens on parts of a drawing. For me personally, I like to put them on parts that aren’t on the main focus, but its really based on your preference so make sure to try them out and see if you like it!
Here I have a drawing I made a while back that I want to add tones to. First, add a new layer and activate Tone. Then, to remove the white parts of the tone screen, change density to “Use brightness of image”.
Reducing the frequency can really help the tones to show. And you can also change the Dot settings but in this case, I’m settling with the default circle.
Now grab the a brush and start putting the tones to the parts you want. I find airbrush works best for this as it offers more control over the opacity/density. Aside from that, I also found that gray (or any color with a value of somewhere in the middle) works best for applying Tone, but you can definitely try another color and just keep in mind that darker value means denser Tone.
The tones are all black and we don’t want that! So you can now rasterize the Tone layer by right clicking it and selecting rasterize to turn it into a normal raster layer.
Turn on “Lock transparent pixels” to make sure you’re only coloring on the tones. And now you can change the color however your heart desires! I prefer to change the blending mode to multiply, but you can skip this part and go straight to recoloring them.
And here it is after I recolored the tones and lowered the opacity to 60%!
Another cool thing you can do is using Tone for background!
Basically the same steps as before, but this time, add the new layer below your drawing and lower the Tone frequency to <10.
Look at how cute that is! Plus it’s super easy to do. For anyone curious, I used the “Diamond” Tone setting and a frequency of 5.0
Layer Color
Now onto the fourth and last one, layer color. Layer color allows you to change the color of everything in the layer to the colors you selected. As you can see up there, you can select 2 colors, “layer color” will be your darkest value, while “sub color” will be your lightest value. In a way, this works a bit like Gradient Map with just 2 colors. Sounds confusing, no? Let me just show you:
Here I set the:
Layer color (darkest value) —> blue
Sub color (lightest value) —> black
So the result will be:
Black (darkest, layer color) —> blue
Gray (middle) —> dark blue
White (lightest, sub color) —> black
This works for all colors so make sure to play around with it to get the best result!
What can you do with Layer Color?
A thing I do with Layer Color on almost all of my works is changing my sketch into another color.
As you can see here, my sketch looks very colorful since I like to use different colors to indicate different parts:
Now you can turn on Layer Color, lower the opacity, and do your line art!
A good thing is that you can apple Layer Property effects to folders, so it’s very convenient for me who likes to sketch on multiple layers, I can just combine them into one folder without worrying about deleting anything.
I can't find Layer Property!
Worry not! it’s probably because you haven’t got it activated. To turn on Layer Property, go to Window > Layer Property. Make sure it’s got a check next to it!
Closing
Folks, I think that is all I can give you about Layer Property, and as I said before, there are so much more things to do with all these features so don’t hesitate to experiment and use them help you with your art as the ones I showed you are just some of the many things to give you an idea! Thank you and good byeeeeeeee
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