 Hello, I will be guiding you through Clip Studio Paint today and showing you how I personally use this program and have everything set up. This video is sponsored by Clip Studio but it has been my main art program for years and I'm really happy to be bringing you guys this video. So this here is the default layout of Clip Studio Paint, but you can arrange the pellets however you like. To get started I'll show you how I arrange it for myself. To move any of the windows, just click and drag on them and drop them wherever you like. To get rid of any windows you don't need, drag them out and click the X. If you need to get a window back, you can get it from this menu here. So now I'll speed things up and arrange the interface. So this is roughly how I like to have everything set up. On the left I got the navigator, the tool properties and the sub tools. On the right I have all the color related stuff, I don't really use anything aside from the color wheel, color history, sometimes these sliders and sometimes this color set. This here is the quick axis where I've made custom shortcuts, I'll show you how to do that as well. Auto actions are also here, it's related to the quick axis. Tools and layer properties are here and layers and history are here. Oh and remove the timeline because I'm not really doing animation. You can save your workspace over in this menu by clicking here on register workspace and giving it a name. It's going to show up in this list so you can retrieve your saved layout anytime. You will also save your shortcut settings for you. So let's make a new file. These are the settings I normally start out with and the settings I've used in the drawing that I'll be working on today. To get started let's look at the preferences first and then shortcuts. There's a couple of important ones, such as here, under file you can enable autosave right here, enable canvas recovery and set the timer for how often you want it here. With the performance you can set the amount of undo steps that you have so the amount of times you can press Ctrl Z before it runs out of steps to undo. And make sure that this virtual memory path is on a drive that has some free space on it. And as a side note there is a light theme to clip studio as well and a slider to fine tune it. Next a quick word about shortcuts. You can find your shortcuts over here in the shortcut settings and the modifier key settings. I recommend you get familiar with these as you learn the program and change them to what feels comfortable for you. So I do want to give a special shout out to a couple of shortcuts such as the shortcuts to change brush size can be found right here under options brush size palette and also the pop-up palette. I've bound these keys to my tablet pen and with this feature I'm able to call forth a temporary color wheel or a temporary brush window so I don't need to move my arm to the side of the screen all the time. So those were under shortcut settings and pop-up palette. Some more shortcuts can be found in the modifier key settings and these are only for keys such as control alt shift and so on. I have swapped out the eyedropper and the object from control to alt because I use the eyedropper shortcut a lot and I feel like control is a lot easier for me to press than alt so you can do that here too if you like. But do look through this menu because here are a lot of very useful shortcuts that you might not have known about before. I'll briefly go over the panels and what they're here for. So the navigator I basically just used as a thumbnail view of my drawing. I don't really use these buttons because I have shortcuts for all of them but therefore flipping rotating and moving your canvas. Here under two properties you have settings for your tools and subtools are different options for your tools. This color stuff is for picking your colors or for seeing your color history. Quick access are my personal shortcuts. Speaking of that let me show you how to make them. So to make your own quick access shortcuts you go here create a new set. Let's make a new set. So set 2. So let's say you want to add a button here to make a new layer because let's be honest the button over here is kind of small. You right click the menu and go to quick access settings. And in this menu you can find all the things that you can add a button for. It's pretty similar to the shortcut settings menu. So making a new layer would be under layer and new raster layer. So if you click it and click add it's going to appear here. Now let's say you want a button for making a new clipping layer and that's more than one action that you can't find in the menu that I just showed. You can actually do that by using auto actions. Now this is kind of more advanced stuff but I wanted to show this anyway because when I was learning how to do this I had a bit of trouble finding information aside from the official clips to the website. So to make a new auto action you click this button, give it a name, new clipping layer. And then you click this red button and it will start to record what you're doing. So let's click this, make a new layer and then press the clip to layer below button here. And now we're done so let's click this top button. So there you have an auto action for making a new clipping layer. You can double click it to check that it works. So double click it and a new clipping layer shows up perfect. So to use this as a button in your quick access menu go ahead and right click to go to the quick access settings again and in this menu go to the auto actions. Find where you saved it, it's probably in the default category unless you made a new category and find the auto action that you made. Now you can add it to the menu here and there we go. Now I can make a new clipping layer with just the press of one button. You can also change how these are viewed here on the menu by going here to view. I have it on tile 4 columns because it suits my screen size well. You can have a list too for example. Now this actually applies to most of the menus you have in clip studio such as the color history from this menu in the corner. You can change the size of the tiles. You can also do that over here in the brush menu. Here change the view of the brush selection as well as the layers. You can change the size of the thumbnail and how it displays. So let me go over all of the tools next. Here we have the zoom tool and the hand tool. I use these pretty much all the time. The shortcuts for them are C for zoom and H for hand but you can also use them using spacebar and control spacebar. And under the move tool there's also the rotation tool which is normally bound to R I believe. The operation tool is primarily for dealing with 3D layers or with timelines or vector lines. This move tool here is for moving the contents of your layer but I don't really use this because using control T for transform lets you do the same thing except also being able to resize and skew whatever you've selected. So next are the selection tools. Selection tools let you select a certain area and then you can only interact within that area you selected. So now that I've selected this square I can only draw inside this square. Here you have all the buttons for the things you can do with this selection. The most useful one is probably this bucket here to fill the selection. But another useful one is control shift I for inverting the selection so then you can interact with everything except the part you initially selected. The auto select tool is another way to select things not manually but it can automatically select a range of colors for example. On the next line here we have the pencil, pen, airbrush and brush. These are all your drawing tools. I highly recommend looking through these menus here the sub tool menus and trying out all the different ones. See what the program has to offer and what you like the best. The pen tools are particularly nice for doing clean line art and the airbrush for doing really soft shading and gradients. The brush tool has some more brushes than have a more traditional feeling. The eraser lets you erase yeah that's pretty self-explanatory. But I should mention you can also erase using the brush tool by selecting this transparent color here so what you're painting is not a solid color but transparency. The eye dropper tool can pick any color straight from your canvas so say for instance I wanted this exact gray from this end of the brush stroke I could get it with the eye dropper tool. And as I mentioned before you don't have to click this you can just hold down alt while you're using the brush tool but I've changed it to control personally. Now the blending tool or specifically the blur tool within the sub tools of the blending tool is one of my favorite tools within Clip Studio Paint. It lets you make really nice soft edges because you can set it here to increase the intensity of the blur based on how hard you're pressing down on your pen. You can make really nice gradual soft edges. This decoration tool here has all the fancy decorative brushes. These are really fun so do look through these as well. There's all kinds of stuff like plants, special effects, flowers, patterns, you name it. Next up we got the gradient tool, you can make nice gradients, you can also customize your own gradients here. And of course you can download other people's gradient sets as well as you can brushes and pretty much anything else from the Clip Studio assets. So next the bucket tool, that's another one of my favorites because Clip Studio has a feature that even if your lineart has a little gap you can use the bucket tool and this closed gap setting to be able to use the bucket tool even if there are gaps in your lineart so as you can see with that setting turned on even though there is a massive gap in this oval here it doesn't overflow to the entire canvas. And using this tool here the figure tool you can make straight lines, boxes, perfect circles any of that stuff. So if you happen to need a perfect circle go here pick the ellipse, hold down shift, drag it out and there you go. But I should also note that you can make straight lines also using the brush tool and then you just click somewhere on your canvas, hold down shift and then click again somewhere else like that. Now the ruler tool is also great, the perspective ruler is especially great if you like drawing backgrounds. But a less known feature is the symmetrical ruler. You actually have this thing that you can set it to cut your canvas somewhere in half and then whatever you draw will appear on the other side. Next up this tool, this rectangle, this frame tool and the speech bubbles therefore creating manga I don't really use them so I won't go too much into them. Text tool is for text of course and lastly this correct line tool is for dealing with vector lines. So I'll show this to you guys in a second after I explain what vector layers are. So layers you can think of them as like a stack of paper whatever is on the top of the list will be the top paper and on the bottom the bottom paper so if I were to click this button to make a new layer paint something in on top of this scribble here it will naturally be on top and if I move this one now below the layer with the black scribble it's going to be below. So if you think of them as stacks of paper you'll be good. These normal layers can also be called raster layers because what you're doing is basically coloring in individual pixels. Now on the vector layer on the other hand you're not coloring in individual pixels but the program is saving each line as like data. So if you draw a line you can edit this line in any way you want by pressing control and then dragging these points. There's also something useful you can do with the eraser tool. Now here in the settings if you select this middle one erase up to intersection it's going to erase the vector line all the way up till the point where it meets another line. So if you have something like this you can simply do this and this and you'll get a perfect cross. So thanks to these features vector layers can be great for line art. Now this tool that I skipped over before this you can use to further edit your vector lines. So for example this correct line width tool you can click here to thicken or narrow the line and set the amount of pixels at a time that it takes away or adds to it. So then if you just select this tool and go over your vector lines they'll get thinner. So if you're unhappy with your lines you can use this tool to edit them. I personally don't do line art with vector layers just because I'm used to sculpting the lines as I go in this way with with the eraser which you cannot do with the vector lines. So that's all personal preference but it's a very useful feature that's good to know about. When you're dealing with vectors you're also not going to lose any quality when you edit the lines. You can skew them make them smaller larger it's not going to change the quality. Another very useful feature of layers is the clipping layer function. So it's this button right here clip to layer below. I even have a button for it in my quick axis menu like I showed before because I use this feature so much. So what it does is makes it so that whatever you draw on this layer is only going to show up right on top of the layer that it's clipped to. So you cannot go outside the bounds of that layer but if you unclip it now you can see what I actually drew. But when it's clipped it's only going to show right on top of that black screw. A similar thing can be achieved by using the transparency lock here which makes it so that you cannot interact with any of the transparent pixels on this layer only the pixels that you already colored with something like so. Masks are also something I use sometimes when I want to hide something but I don't want to delete the actual data in case I want it back. So you can use a mask by painting in with this transparent color once you've selected the mask. It's going to essentially just erase but here's the thing you've erased it on the mask and if you ever want it back you just go back to the mask pick any solid color and you can get it back. So that's all I wanted to say about the technical stuff. Let's start painting. I'll explain my process as I go and show you the tools and features in action. I'll start off with just the rough sketch of my character. In this stage I often use control t to transform my sketch and move some parts around. I first pick the lasso selection tool select an area circle it then do control t and then move it around. If you hold down control while you're transforming the selection you'll be able to skew the selection not just resize it. Doing this can make the lines blurry but it doesn't matter when it's just the rough sketch. Make sure to also flip your canvas occasionally so that you'll be able to spot out the things you need to fix in your rough sketch. So over here I'm using the airbrush to color in the background. To start off coloring the character I normally make a flat base with a gray that's slightly darker than the background. Slightly lighter would do as well as long as you can make out the silhouette. After that's done I just start adding in the flat colors. My sketch layer is set to multiply so that the colors from underneath this sketch show through. Also here I made an adjustment layer specifically the color adjustment layer so you can make those by right clicking a layer going to new correction layer and here you have all the different adjustment layers that you can make. These are not layers that you can paint on but layers that will change the look of the existing painting. Using the color balance layer I added more blues and more magentas to my rough colored sketch so it works better with the environment that I'm going for here. And then it's painting time. Enjoy the time lapse! This part is where I consider the rough sketch to end and the polishing part to start. I make a mask on the sketch lines layer and use the airbrush to softly fade out some parts that I felt were too strong. Then I just merge the entire character sew the lines and the colors into one layer and started working on top of that. This part where I'm starting to polish the drawing is so much fun for me. I recently moved to this kind of workflow because the traditional way of going from sketch to line art to flat colors to shading with tons of layers felt too restricting and slow. This method is more difficult because you're basically doing everything at the same time but I find it a lot more fun. So from this point I kept going for another hour and a half due to my perfectionist self being hard to satisfy with something rough and painfully like this and looking back at it now I really should have just stopped right here. The progress after this point doesn't really improve the art anymore. I do still like the final results of course but I'm not gonna have you sit through that part where I'm just nitpicking and making it worse so I'll skip straight to the end to show you guys the way I did the final adjustments to finish this drawing. So here we are at the finished drawing. Let me explain all these layers that have appeared here. These are mostly adjustment layers. Whenever I'm done rendering the character I usually pile these on to fine tune the finished look of the drawing. I mentioned it before but you can make adjustment layers by right clicking on a layer going to new correction layer and then picking the one you want from this menu. So the first one I have here is a tone curve. With the tone curve you can specifically increase or decrease specific parts of your drawings values. So like the ones closer to zero are the darker tones and the ones up here are the lighter tones of your drawing. So I've just made the dark parts a little darker to create more contrast in the drawing as you can see. The next one is a gradient map. I like to use gradient maps sometimes to unify the colors a bit more so these are some gradients that I've downloaded from the clip studio assets page and yeah I just try some random gradients most of the time and then go through these until I find one that looks nice or interesting and then decrease the opacity of that layer so the effect is not as strong. So what I've done after these two layers is flattened the entire drawing onto one layer because I wanted to use blur tool selectively on the entire drawing and I've also used the mesh transformation tool to tweak some parts of the drawing a bit. If I felt like anything was out of place I would fix it with that. So the way you do that is go here to edit to transform and mesh transformation then you get this grid and you probably want to increase the amount of these squares that you can drag so here from the tool properties I put the maximum amount of vertical and horizontal points and then using this you can drag any of the points to move your drawing around. I have a shortcut for it in my quick access menu because it's a lot easier to just click this button here than to find it in the menu every time. Here is just my signature and next this lighting layer is just here to make things lighter as the name implies. It's a bit hard to explain so I'll just show you so let's make a new lighting layer and turn the old one off. So I'm going to pick this magenta color from next to the jaw and as you can see it's only painting in this color on top of the colors that are darker so it's not affecting any colors that are lighter than the one I picked and then lastly I've added another tonker to make everything just a little brighter. I also try to add some grain and the way you add grain is make a new layer go here to filter render and pearling noise then you tweak this to be however you want click okay and put this on overlay and then reduce the opacity and that makes for a pretty decent grain filter so I tried that but in the end I didn't really like the look of it so I decided to just disable it and that's basically that for this drawing. Thank you for watching my tutorial if there's any videos you'd like me to make let me know in the comments. I hope you have a great day and have fun creating art!