Day: March 16, 2019

Flat Colours

flat colours

Adding flat colours is one of the pleasures of creating a comic in Clip Studio Paint but I found setting it up for the first time a bit technical so I needed to do a bit of searching online and watching YouTube videos to find some of the features which can be ‘hidden’, lurking in sub-menus. But once I got going the paint bucket worked well. It has a ‘paint unfilled areas’ options for getting the odd spots that inevitably get missed on the first pass.

The next stage is to add more colour using a virtual watercolour brush to get a bit of light and shade into the frames and I also want to try adding texture and a gradient.

There are also a couple of speech bubbles to add. The story seems to me to be self-explanatory without them, but it’s another technique that I want to practice.

Back to the Drawing Board

Roughs

Rather than drawing well, it’s important to draw what you enjoy.

Kamakiri Mai

In a step-by-step guide to creating an illustration in Clip Studio Paint, the Tokyo-based designer Kamakiri Mai suggests that it’s important to enjoy creating the rough draft for your illustration and not to worry too much about drawing well. She’ll even do a bit of writing to help create a back story for the imagined world of her illustration, even though that isn’t going to figure in the final artwork.

You can see that I’m not worrying about drawing well as I work out a four-panel comic based on an incident that amused me as I walked along the Gnome Roam trail at Newmillerdam a few weeks ago. My aim is to go through the process of telling a simple story as clearly as I can.

I’ve been doing a lot of drawings on my iPad recently but I’m surprised how many illustrators alternate between drawing on paper and designing on the computer. For example, my workflow so far has been:

  • draw the pencil rough
  • scan the rough into Clip Studio and draw the panels using the panel border tools
  • print out the blank panels at exactly the same size as my roughs
  • put the roughs on my light pad and trace the figures in pencil
  • ink over the pencil

The next stage will be to scan the line art into Clip Studio and start adding areas of flat colour

Link

Professional illustration process: Kamakiri Mai, Clip Studio Tips