Clip Studio Paint Anime Portrait Tutorial for Beginners

Ever wanted to make cute digital art that was also positive and affirming? I'm ItsHoneyB, an illustrator that has been freelancing for two years and illustrating for over five. I love shining a light on things like body positivity, affirmation, hair love, and more. I'm known for my anime-inspired style and using different color themes, whether bold and bright or nude palettes. I love the expressive eyes that come from this style. This type of portrait is different because of said stylization, creating a more fun result. I'm super excited to share how to achieve this result with you. In this class, I'll be sharing how I stylize art in Clip Studio Paint. I'll also be sharing lessons such as body positivity in art, how to create reference boards in Pinterest, how to get an anime-inspired style, and more. This class is perfect for any digital art novice or if you're already a digital illustrator, how to create a portrait in a more anime-stylized way. By the end of this class, you have created a cute digital portrait. Let's get into it. Now, let's talk about the class project. We're going to be creating a portrait of ourselves, a friend, a family member, or a cute reference. No matter where you're at in your art journey, you too should be able to make a cute portrait. The supplies and materials you'll need for this project vary. I'm personally using an iPad Pro and Apple Pen, but any device that takes a stylus should work. As for the program we're using, you'll need to have Clip Studio Paint available in the App Store or Google Play. If you don't have it, you can do a 30-day free trial whenever you start the class. This is my favorite app for creating quick, clean pieces. With vector lines, a perfect erase function, and more, it's definitely my go-to. You will also need a Pinterest board if using a reference that isn't yourself, a family member, our friend, etc. Semi-realism, cartoon style, and anime style are quick ways to get cute portraits. Today, we'll be going with our anime-influenced style. I would love to see your initial sketches and Pinterest boards. Please drop those in the project space and I'll make sure to interact. Also, I'll be sharing my students' work on my Instagram story that will turn into a highlight, so make sure to drop your Instagram handles as well. Body positivity, representation, and affirmations are all important to me, so I typically try to incorporate them into my art every so often. Lack of characters that look like me growing up influenced me to draw cute alternative black characters. As I grew up and started getting down about things about my body, I started surrounding myself with more positive media and making art that related to that as well. I choose different body types for references or build upon a base I draw. I usually make art featuring affirmations when I am feeling it, reflecting on it. Art is an event that is currently happening. I light up when people feel seen in my art as they tell me it made them feel better about something they dislike about themselves. I strongly encourage everyone to see beauty in things the world views as not as beautiful. This lesson will cover how to make Pinterest boards so you can have those references to break apart into shapes. I'll also be sharing my Pinterest board below in the projects and resources section of the class. If you don't already have a Pinterest, setup is easy. Now let's get into reference choices. I personally like cute or emotive references. You'll want to head over to the search button and use it to find inspiring images. I love drawing afro hair, so I'll be looking up afro shoot with flowers. I found the first one I want, so I'll click save. Create a new board and title it Skillshare class references. Now I'll pick out a couple more. All right, I love these so far. As long as you have at least three to pick from, you should be good. Looking at these images, which seems the most fun for you to draw? Are the easiest to start with? I really love this one. Did you pick yours too? Cool. Now that we've picked our references to use, let's break them apart into shapes. What shapes do you see in your reference? To help with this process, if you can't visualize, you'll want to save the image and import it into Clip Studio Paint. Click file, import from photo library. At this point, you can size your image up or down depending on how you want it for breaking apart said shapes. Now we're going to drop the opacity of this photo layer down. Click this button to make a new layer on top of that layer, and now you can pick either a pencil or a pen to make these shapes with. I'm going to be using a pencil called the Remy pencil that is available in Clip Studio Assets. We will be going over that soon. So again, what shapes do you see in your image? Let's start with the face. For her face, a basic shape I see is an oval, so I'll draw that out very rough. Next, I sketch in the second largest shape I see, which are her afro puffs. When drawing the eyes, I draw the whole orbital area. So we're going to draw a large oval, or oblong shape around the eye. When it comes to noses, I typically notice diamond shapes and circles. So let's make that diamond shape for the bridge of her nose and the circle shapes for her nostrils. Going back up to the eyes, I'll draw in two circles for the pupils. Since this is anime-influenced style, the pupils are often larger. The ears, depending on reference or stylization, are typically oblong shapes as well. So just like you would see the cheeks of a skull, I draw that in and I draw the mouth area. I draw the lips around that line. These are oblong shapes as well, but depending on your reference or stylization, again, you can add a cupid bow or different styles of lips. I'm quickly drawing in blocky shapes for the eyebrows just to have a semblance of said shape. Now, let's see what the sketch looks like alone. Go to your layers and hide the photo layer. Going forward, let's note some things we saw in reference, such as an oblong face with a defined chin. For the ears, they are ovals as well, are oblong shapes. The nose, again, is a diamond shape, including two circles for the nostrils. And for the lips, I draw in a skull-like line for structure. The basic shape of the eyes are circles. As I go forward, I'll define the circle shape and make it more angled. The pupil in the middle, or wherever it is pointed, is also a circle. This face typically surprises people, but it makes it easy to draw in an eyeline, eyelashes, and I already have an eyelid. And ta-da! We have our shapes. Save this and minimize and keep in the upper left corner to view with your reference as you draw. Next, we will be going over choosing a style and getting in your initial sketch in Clip Studio. First, let's go over the digital tools that we will be using to complete this sketch. Clip Studio Paint already comes pre-loaded with pencil tools and more. I love Clip Studio because you can easily import assets. If you want to use the pencil I'm using today, which is the Remy Pencil, follow along. First, let's go over the digital tools we'll be using for the sketch. Clip Studio comes pre-loaded with pencil tools and more. I love Clip Studio Paint because they have assets that you can easily import. If you want to use the same pencil I'm using, which is the Remy Pencil, follow along. I love the flow of the Remy Pencil for sketching because it feels like I am actually sketching on a piece of paper. To download this pencil, open your option bar, find the button that says window, click material, click download, and now click search for materials on Clip Studio Assets. Clip Studio Assets site will open and you'll see so many cool things and so many of these assets are free. Make sure you log into your profile and then hit the search bar and type in Remy Pencil. Here we have our asset that is free for download. This area here talks about the tool and you'll get to see the various tools in the file that you'll be downloading. I use two of these pencils. You're going to want to hit that download button that is red. Now you can open Clip Studio. Your material should be open. Select your brush. This will always be on the top but you can also search the brush in this box. You're going to want to hit the clipboard button that is located on the bottom left of this menu and it will register it to your subtool palette, which is the one that is highlighted. Upon clicking into your tool, you'll see the Remy Pencil is now downloaded. Since I had this before, I have two versions. Let's start. This area will allow you to play with settings for your brush. For sketches, I typically go with a mid-size but depending on the resolution of your canvas, you may need to go larger or smaller. This is a 1080 by 1080 canvas which is great for apps such as Instagram, posting, Facebook, etc. There's different textures for the brush to be used with but I stick with the default. You can also play with stabilization which will smoothen your lines. I like to go for somewhere around a midpoint for sketches and when I finish up with my line art, I will definitely do around 90 to 100. Now that we've got our sketch brush selected, let's get to sketching. Looking at my reference and the plotted points I marked, I'll start with the face. We're gonna go in with that basic face shape we saw earlier, which was an oval with a defined jaw and chin. Now we're going in with the shapes we saw for the eyes. During my second sketch phase, I tend to sharpen the front of said circles for the eyes. This creates an almost semi-circle shape. Now we can draw the pupils in the direction they're looking. Again, since this is anime influenced, the pupils are often much, much larger. Going in with the nose, you're either going to draw a diamond or a triangle and to finish it, of course, the two circles for the nostrils. Now let's draw that oblong shape in for the ear. An important distinction here is to make the back of the head behind the ear and the jaw sitting in front of the ear. I stylize and simplify a lot of things, but this definitely helps make it look better. Again, for the lips, we're going to still draw in that cheek shape that is skull-like. Then of course, we draw in the lips, which are half circles or oblong shapes. The structure of the skull helps me draw them in easier, especially when it comes to different angles. Now let's add in her neck. The base of the face is done. Now let's work on the hair. I block in shapes like this so I can go over them later. Again, the basic shapes I see for the hair are circles. The shape roll for me even applies to accessories. In her afro pics, I see circles, squares, triangles, and rectangles. We're again blocking out the eyebrow shape. Also, for future portraits, eyebrows hold a lot of the emotion of the character. So whatever emotion the character is feeling, if you're wanting to express it, make sure you really push it through with the eyebrows. Next up, we'll be refining our sketch. I draw an eyelash line in the middle of the eye. You can do a strikethrough of an eyeball halfway to get where this would sit. We're going to go over that line and define our pupils. We continue refining the rest of the eye through the eyelids, the bottom lash line, etc. Now we're doing the same on the other eye. Let's draw in those eyebrows. The lasso tool that is located up here is great for moving around certain objects or pieces of your drawing that you think would look good if they were just nudged a little bit. So I often play around with features, including eyebrows, eyes, noses, etc., just for it to work better. Now we're drawing in the nose. So we have the nose bridge. We can now define the nostrils. So let's draw that shape in there. Now we're going to define her lips. She has a noticeable cupid's bow, so we're going to make sure to draw that in. Let's see what it looks like without the base sketch. Just hide that layer by toggling the eye. I'm adding a bit of smirk to the character. Now I'm focusing on the angles and the face. So we attempt to mimic it over here, but in a softer way. Some artists draw sharp, some artists draw softer. My features are usually softened out somewhat. Now let's look at our reference again. We're doing curly hair, so we're going to keep the line art pretty loose. I'm drawing a curved or angled hairline depending on the reference. This is just a starting point for me to draw my lines. And now finally drawing in those afro puffs with quick lines, quick squiggly lines. Now again, let's see what the sketch looks like without the base sketch. Looking good. An important thing to do is look at your piece when it is mirrored. So you're going to want to hit that option bar again. Go to edit, which is on the top-ish area. Click that and then go to rotate our flip canvas. Flipping canvas has allowed me to see that I did not like where the eyes positioned or the size of it. So we're going to make that smaller. We're also going to reshape the face to look closer to the reference. So we're bringing out the cheeks and bringing in the jaw line. Let's use that lasso tool again to now bring in the rest of the face since we have redefined the jaw. We're finally done our sketch phase. Let's move on to the line art. Clip Studio has special layers for vector lines, which are vector layers. Click the new layer button that has a 3D cube. Now that it is clicked, you should have a new layer in your layers that has that same 3D cube. You can now use any pen tool or pencil tool, etc. and it will be a vector. The pros of vector layers are having a perfect erasability, the ability to change the width of your line art after drawing, and more. I'll show you a couple now. So let's say you're drawing and you have some lines that go out of bounds or you fix your lines and you want to go back and erase, but you don't want to mess up your line art. Vector eraser will erase those lines perfectly as long as it's on a vector layer. Another one of the awesome things is the line width changer. You can change your lines from narrow to thick and thick to narrow just like this. You just take the pen and go right over whatever you want to thicken or narrow. If you don't roll the pen over it, it won't thicken, etc. This is very good for adding line weight at the end of more dramatic images or if you want even more stylized line art. For my line art, I am using the brush called G-Pen. This comes with the Clip Studio program. I personally turn my stabilization up to 90 or 100 percent just so my lines flow smoother. When I'm building out my layers for the line art, I typically try to have the facial features on one layer, the face shape on another, and sometimes the hair and accessories, etc. on its own layer as well. A quick tip for line art is to make one smooth line. I notice a lot of people will have these jagged lines because they keep picking up their pen instead of following all the way through. You don't want to make these little stops while you're drawing. You just want to run all the way through as smooth as you can and it will produce an awesome finish. Once again, I do put most of my accessories, etc. on its own layer so when I come back to erase, I can take care of the stray lines without worrying about my other line art. Now we can finally finish the rest of the line art. For the hair, depending on what texture you're drawing, I would definitely look back at the reference. For curly hair, it's more free squiggly shapes depending on the texture of course. So if you have your stabilizer up to 90 or 100, lower that so you can get these free flowing shapes. And just like that, we're finished with our liner. Now to the fun part, coloring. Now we're to my favorite part in the process, well the beginning of my favorite part in the process, coloring. Let's get into coloring. We will be using the magic wand tool for this section. Click the magic wand tool here. In this section, you will find the settings of the wand. Depending on if my liner has open spaces or if it is completely closed, I'll adjust the settings of the gap closer. I have put all of my liner into one folder as you can also do by clicking the folder button and dragging all of your line art into the folder. I've also made a new folder for my coloring. We're going to be using the magic wand tool and the paint bucket to do our flats. If I'm drawing someone straight from reference and not just using the reference for a pose, I will sometimes use the color picker to help me do my flats. Of course, I don't use the exact color picked, but I will use something that is close to or up against the color that was originally picked. With our magic wand selections, if something was originally missed by the magic wand tool, you can quickly select and paint bucket fill those spaces via the bar that pops up beneath. You can also use the magic wand tool to select spaces of color you don't want and pick the burst option. Well, it looks like a burst to me. That'll help you identify it and it'll erase whatever's in that space. So we're just going to continue the color picking, magic wand tool, and paint bucket fill process throughout the rest of this piece. The skin, the hair, and the accessories are all on different layers color-wise. I do this because it allows quick changes to just that layer. You can hit selection from layer, create selection, and pick a color that you would want it to change to. You can use this to play around with colors to see which colors work best together and how everything would look on your canvas. Another quick way to color is using the alpha lock button. Clicking this button means that anything you color or draw will be only on this one layer. I use this a lot when I'm doing vitiligo pieces, freckles, etc. Another cool way to change colors is using the select, select color gamut, and using the color picker tool to select which colors you'd want to change. Now that we're done with our flats, let's head on to rendering our image. There are several styles you can use when rendering your art. Today I will be implementing three layer types to shade, highlight, and add dimension. We will be using the layer modes screen, linear burn, and multiply, all available in this box. Let's set our new layers layer mode to linear burn. Now let's change the color. I like to use pinks, purples, or somewhere in between to shade my characters. I just like the way it looks. So using the method we learned before, let's go to select the skin color, selection from layer, create selection, go back to that new layer, click your pen tool that you're going to be using to shade, make it to a width that you would like. Now you can start shading. I always shade underneath the neck unless there is a light coming from below or behind. That is also the thickest portion of shade that I usually have on the face. We're going to continue shading under and behind, under and behind because the light is coming from the right side of the image. So I shade underneath the ear fold. I shade on the back side of the ear and around the accessory. I shade the lip lines and under the nose. Now on the next new layer, you want to still select the skin tone and set it to screen. Now you're going to use the color picker tool and use that as your highlight color. I go again to the right side of the face because that's where the sun is hitting. I personally stylize my art by having the nose highlights around the nose. I highlight around the eyebrows. Then I'll also highlight some of the neck, just a small bit. After this, you can play with the opacity of the layer by going back to your layers and dropping down that opacity until you get to somewhere that you think it looks nice. Now I continue to shade and highlight the hair, flowers, accessories, etc. I also use a multiply layer for the top lip that is 65% and the bottom lip that is 45%. For the eyes, I use the lower percentage multiply to make the pupils. I then use the higher opacity multiply to create arcs over both of the pupils. I create a screen layer and select the lightest color to make sparkles in the eyes. I make an add glow layer above that to add extra sparkles for more pop. Finally, I create another screen layer with the same color and use the airbrush on the bottom half of the eyes, making white highlights on the upper layer. If you want further rendering, you can keep on adding layers and layers. We're going to pick the skin color again and we're going to make a new layer or select a layer that already has the multiply layer mode. When it comes to the further rendering, I typically think of makeup tutorials, honestly. I'll take the airbrush in the same skin tone on multiply, contour the forehead, shade underneath the jaw, and shade underneath and around the nose. For highlighting, you're going to get that screen layer and you're going to select the skin color again. Same thing with makeup. I take an airbrush and I highlight the areas that I usually see, which are the middle of the forehead, the bridge of the nose, the tip of the nose, and the under eyes. And then you're going to take your blending tool and blend all of this in. If it looks too bright to you, again, just play with the opacity of the layer. This is me seeing it with and without. I'm going to bring it down a little bit more. That looks better. One of the things I love that adds dimension is blush. Picking a skin area that has already been shaded by the multiply and moving your cursor over to red makes for a great blush for the skin tone. So you're just going to use the airbrush to apply the blush to her cheeks and possibly eyes and blend that out. Sometimes I also apply it on the nose, the forehead, the chin, and the lips. Again, you can create several layers for rendering. I like to make my highlight around the eyes and nose very bright. I also love using the gouache brush pen because it creates texture. But that is all up to you. I also do just like using the airbrush sometimes for a great soft effect. But if you're using the gouache brush, make sure you're also using the gouache blender. I think I'm going to add a little highlight to her cheeks over here to make them pop a little bit. Highlights on the eyes also make the eyes pop forward as well, so that's a cool thing to add in. Now we're going to highlight the lips just a little bit. That's too bright for me, so I'm going to bring the opacity down. I'll also be making a note of each brush I used for you guys to look at just in case they aren't in Clip Studio Paint so you can download them in Assets. Now that we're finished with our piece, we can move on to final touches. That's your golden star because you finally got to the end of lessons. Good job. Let's hear it. Round of applause for you. You should have a cute portrait by now, but we have some final touches that can make it even cuter. Let's go. You thought we were done? No, I don't think so. This piece deserves to pop just a little more. So what can we do to make this more interesting? First, let's put everything in one folder. Make a new folder and put each folder underneath that folder so everything is in one. Just like that. Move your character into center frame. Make sure you have white or a color you like that goes with the image. Select it. Now experiment with different background colors. I have a light brown. I think I want to keep brown, but we're also going to try blue. The blue is too bright for me, so we're going to stick with a brown, but we're going to try out different browns. And yeah, I like this brown. Now we're going to select and create selection from that new folder we made that contains everything. We're going to create a layer over it and make it pink or purple or pinkish purple. Now make sure you have that folder with everything in it selected and make a layer above it. Use the paint bucket tool with either pink, purple, or somewhere in between. Change the opacity and pick a different layer mode such as soft light or overlay. We're going to be using a bit of both this time. So for this layer, we're going to have overlay and keep it on three percent. Then we make another fill layer above that. Use a purple pink. Make it soft light and set it at four percent opacity. Now we're going to select that folder again so we can have the whole image. We're also going to make a new layer underneath that folder so it goes underneath the image. Let's pick the color white. Make sure you click white as your color. Hit edit and then click outline selection. We're going to choose the first option here and we're just going to see how this looks. Let's bump it up a little bit. That is a little too thick for me, so we're going to go back. We're going to pick the same option but we're going to turn down the size of the white. So take that 20 and make it a 10. Hit okay and that looks perfect. I'm making one more layer with that same white and using my g-pen that I used for line art to make sparkles around the image. And finally, add that signature. I usually like to add mine close to the figure just in case it gets somewhere and it gets cropped etc etc. I tweak it until it flows with the piece more for me. I may also change the opacity or the color so it flows more with the piece once again. Now we can remove the reference image. We can have this as another slide on Instagram but this would probably be the first one. Now we're finally done our finishing touches. And just like that class is finished. I can't wait to see all the amazing work you've done and I hope you've enjoyed the class. Make sure to upload your projects to the project gallery and add your Instagram handles when you post since I'll be sharing all of my students work on my Instagram at itshoneybee.