It is actually made up of little dots with different density, which when looking from far away, creates the illusion of value. If you are unfamiliar with these terms, you can take a look at a normal manga page and notice closely the part that covers in gray. These are often used in black and white manga, but sometimes, artists also use it in illustration to enhance the overall effect. Tone layer is made up of little visible dots, usually refers to as “screen tones”. You will notice that there are other useful layers, such as Gradient, Fill, and Layer Mask, but that would be more advanced and oriented toward specific use (which means not use frequently) and would not be covered for this beginner tutorial. So, I chose to discuss 2 more layers: the Tone Layer and Correction Layer. There is more type of layers, but I don’t want to throw in a bunch of information, especially since this is a beginner’s friendly tutorial. You can see in the video below how the edge is blurred after I enlarged the smiley face. When you use the function such as enlarging or minimizing with huge differences, it causes the image to lose quality, blurred, or jagged. You can do almost everything with raster layer, and in fact, the majority of your illustration will be done on raster layer, such as line art, paint, and blend. In the digital world, an image is comprised of pixels (or dots) that are so small and become unnoticeable when you zoom out (Unless you intentionally want it to be visible, such as pixel art, but that’s for another topic). Eventually, you will see little squares appear. To understand pixels, you can try to open an image and zoom in as far as you can. The first type is “raster layer”.ĭon’t be confused by the name, it just means that the layer is “pixel-based”. When first opening the menu, you will be overwhelmed by various types of layers, but in fact, there are only 2 major types of layers you will be working the most in. If you put the green paper down first, then the red paper on top, then part of the green paper will not be visible, and it is under the red paper. You have 2 sheets of paper: red and green. If you haven’t painted before, that’s okay. The paint you applied for the background will be under the paint you apply later for the foreground. For example, if you want to draw a scene, then you should draw the background first, then work your way towards to foreground.

If you used watercolor or any traditional paint medium before, you might already understand the idea. Let’s dive right in!īeginner artists are always confused with layers (at least for me), but Layer is an important function in digital drawing that helps artists save a lot of time.įun fact: I recently discovered that the maximum number of layers you can make on Clip Studio Paint is 10,000! Hello everyone, in this tutorial, I’m going to show you the basic principles of layer in digital painting, which includes understanding the basic functions, properties, types, as well as blending modes.

Clip studio separate colors into layers