Practice: Learn how to color an illustration on Clip Studio Paint

This is the 3rd note for an illustration by a beginner.

Today's illustration

Next left illustration is the one before I learned and right one is after I learned. I haven't finished coloring shades and shadows because I would update the original illustration after this practice. This time, it's gonna be easier to see the difference of 2 illustrations when you turn off a dark mode.

Before	After

In this time, I learned how to color an illustration. These are summaries for what I changed on Clip Studio Paint.

Change a layer structure
- Before: Line layer is below a color layer
- After: Line layer is above a color layer
Create new layer for a character silhouette to clip from other layers
Enable some options to color more cleanly on Fill tool
- Fill narrow areas
- Fill up to vector path

Here is the links to today's illustration on my SNS accounts.

Link to Pixiv

I tried these steps to improve this original illustration:

Self review my illustration
Pick up a few things I need to focus on improving
Learned how to do
Draw my illustration by new way

1. Review my illustration

What can be better

An upper body can be more straight. Right now, it's a little bit leaning to the left
Head might be bigger or shape might be wider
Stripes, especially gray lines, of arms can be bigger so it's gonna be impressive and noticeable
Outer frame line of a chracter can be sharpen and can remove a tons of circles
The shape of shoes can make it better. Actually I didn't see a real shoes while I was drawing
Knee can be wider so that we can avoid making an impression that she has big muscles in her thigh or calf
The shape of the crown can be better wider to the top from the bottom. Currently, it's almost flat
Sleeves of her arms can be shorter and can be drawn and make different impressions
There are transparent spaces surrounding lines due to anti-aliasing
Skin colors can be changed to more pink from yellow
The ribbon of her sidetail hair can be more rounded so that it can make a feeling an shape of the hair. It's too straight right now
Each pleats on the skirt can be separated more. Now it looks flat a lot
The dark blue part of her skirt can be more lighter. Maybe white lines or yellow lines can be bigger and more noticeable.
The central line of deep gray stripe lines can be wider
It might be too flat color. It might be relieved by increasing the number of colors?

What was drawn well

It took time but drew her full body
Stripes of her costume. This requires a lot of works, but drew well with drawing lines over and over instead of using Fill tool
Draw the hairlines of the back of her head but it looks natural
A gradiation of the ribbon on her back
Frill of a skirt
Vertical ratios of bodies, from head to shoes

2. What I learned

This time, I picked up There are transparent spaces surrounding lines due to anti-aliasing from what can be better and learned how to color on Clip Studio Paint.

I hadn't learned it so much, and sometimes couldn't fill some empty areas very well even though I tried to use "Paint unfilled area" on Fill tool and didn't work as expected. I thought it was because I enabled an anti-aliasing option of the vector layer, but also I was sure there was a way to solve it. So, I spent time to learn and solve it on this time.

At first, I watched these videos for coloring:

From the videos, I noticed I colored my illustration differently.

The order of line and color layers is different
- I also didn't use some options due to this difference
I didn't prepare one color layer of a character to clip from other layers
- One layer to be painted by single color
- It's something like silhouette layer. I do not know how to call this layer

Structure of layers

It seems layers of some illustrators are ordered by

Special effects like highlights
Line
Color

But I drew my illustration by following orders

(Lines over colors)
Colors
Line

So I followed other illustrastrators structure and tried to color my illustration by this structure.

Create a layer to draw a color with a character

Next, I actually didn't prepare one layer for a clip from other layers, like next image:

But it seems some illustrators do this before start coloring details not to draw outside of a character. So I decided to follow this and learned how to do, especially it could reduce my mistakes.

In order to fill a character from line layers, we can do it relatively easily by using Auto select and Invert selected area on Select menu.

Choose Auto select tool and select the area except a character
Select Select > Invert selected area
After select a layer to fill by a single color, click Fill icon on the command bar, which is under the menu bar

This should work. You may fill an area which you do not want to, in that case, undo and choose the areas when you select on Auto select tool.

Enable useful options for coloring

These are options I missed or I couldn't turn on

When you choose Refer other layers on the Fill tool, enable Fill narrow area under Close gap. You may need to show it from Show [Sub Tool Detail palette]... menu.
Enable Fill up to vector path option
- I didn't use this because I originally show color layers above the line, not below the line layers. And this option made my illustration worse.

Just coloring an illustration

From the above things, I colored my illustrations without changing line layers. Next images are those of before and after I applied what I described on this page.

As you can see, it improved a lot because there is no empty space surrounding some lines like the lines of her back ribbon. Because we do not change anything on line layers, there are some lines that should be hidden by the back of the ribbon or the crown. I also prepared outer frame line from the silhouette layer with "Border effect" of such a layer.

Before	After

Then after I cleaned up some line layers, then I made the illustration posted on the top of this page.

Tried to mix line colors with the colors from surrounding areas

I also compared when I tried to change line colors to mix the colors from surrounding areas, by creating new layer from color layers and apply a Gaussian blur, but my original approach didn't improve it at all because I clipped the layer from the line layers and empty spaces I failed to draw didn't get changed.

Wrap it up

So, even if I turn on anti aliasing on vector modes, I can improve coloring significantly I didn't doubt my layer structure isn't so much different from others for some reasons, so it's always better to check what other illustrators said if something doesn't work, tried it, and compare what the result would be.