Tag: digital art

  • 5 Quick Ways to Recolor Your Line Art in CSP

    5 Quick Ways to Recolor Your Line Art in CSP

    Is black line art getting you down? Do you want to see how different line colors change your art? Are you just bored and want to play with some stuff in Clip Studio Paint? Great! This is the place for you! Read on for FIVE ways to recolor your line art in CSP!

    Pro Tip: Keep your line art on a separate layer (or layers) until you’re ready to merge everything together.

    Clip a New Layer to Your Line Art

    Create a new layer above your line art layer. Clip that layer to the line art layer by clicking the icon with a dotted square on top of a solid square.

    layer clipping clip studio paint csp

    Now anything you do on the new layer will only show up where your lines are, kind of like a layer mask. You can turn clipping on and off by clicking the icon again or hide the layer itself. Clipping is super useful since you won’t be editing the line art layer directly and you can experiment away without messing up the bones of your art. It also gives you the freedom to use multiple colors, gradients, tools, and effects.

    Lock Transparent Pixels

    To recolor your line art this way, it needs to be a raster layer. Select the line art layer, then click the lock with the little squares behind it.

    lock transparent pixels clip studio paint csp

    This is the quick and dirty way I recolor all kinds of things, BUT I always (try to remember to) duplicate the layer I’m working with because this changes the existing art. This is the equivalent of alpha locking in Procreate, so all it’s doing is preventing you from making marks in the blank space.

    Change the Layer Color

    If all you need is to quickly switch the color of your line art to something else, this is your best bet. Select your line art layer, then click on the drop down with the two color squares. Select the color you want your lines to be and it will change.

    change layer expression color clip studio paint csp recolor your line art

    You can change the color expression of any layer, but this works especially well for anything you where need to make single color changes. You can also toggle it on and off by clicking the icon, so you aren’t stuck with it if you don’t like it later.

    Convert to Drawing Color

    Truth time! When I first saw this option lurking in the Edit menu, I thought it was supposed to make my line art match my color layer. You know, convert the lines to the color of my drawing. Then of course I couldn’t understand why it didn’t work! It’s probably because that’s not what this Clip Studio Paint feature does. Convert to Drawing Color changes your layer to the color that you are drawing with.

    So for this method, select your layer, then select the color you want. Go to the Edit menu and click on “Convert to Drawing Color” and your line art will change to the color you picked.

    recolor your line art

    You’ll probably want to duplicate your layer before playing with this feature because it does make changes to your work and you can’t turn it on and off.

    Use an Auto Action to Recolor Your Line Art

    Finally there’s auto actions. This is a set of predefined steps that you can run automatically to save time. If you find yourself making the same edits to your work every time, an auto action will probably help. If you don’t feel like making your own, there are lots of free ones available for download from Clip Studio Assets. Auto actions for changing the color of your line art are no exception!

    There are a bunch for free that you can play around with and some work better than others. Seeing how other users build their auto actions is also a good way to learn new things about CSP!

    Pro tip: Lots of CSP assets are labelled in foreign languages. Label them as soon as they’re downloaded so you know what they are later!

    clip studio paint auto action

    Now that you can change the color of your line art, what should we learn next? Drop a comment below and tell me what CSP tutorials you want to see next!

    Thanks for reading! If videos are more your style, this info is on my TikTok and YouTube pages!

  • Prompt O’ Ween 2023

    Prompt O’ Ween 2023

    Prompt O’ Ween 2023 was super fun! It was also really tough and I hate having to say that I sort of didn’t finish. I only got to day 20 this year because this whole year has been kicking my butt and October was no exception. What to do??

    It was October 31 and a Tuesday, so I had a select few hours outside of work and trick-or-treating to get 11 pieces done. The way I saw it, there were three options:

    1. Do 11 fast sketches. Like, really fast.
    2. Don’t finish.
    3. Use AI.

    The problem with quick sketches is that when my brain wants to finish a piece, the piece gets finished. It won’t matter if it takes a few minutes or a few hours, which is part of how I end up so behind on art challenges. Giving up on the whole thing didn’t feel like a great option either. Quitting? Ew.

    AI-Flavored Prompt O’ Ween 2023

    So that left only one option. I used AI! There’s an app called StarryAI (this isn’t a promo, it’s just what I used) that lets you train the AI on your own style. I hadn’t opened the app in a super long time because the whole topic using AI to make art is pretty dicey. But it took 50 credits to train it on my own art style and I just happened to have enough credits to train the AI and get my 11 Prompt O’ Ween drawings.

    You can add up to 30 images so I quickly scrolled through my phone for 30 finished pieces (including the 20 I had done for Prompt O’ Ween 2023) and dumped them in. One by one, I entered the prompts for days 21 through 31, getting four images back for each one.

    The results were interesting. They didn’t totally hit the prompts and weren’t what I would have done, but that’s mostly because I entered only the prompt and no additional information. What was really cool was that it sort of hit my art style. Most of it looked like stuff I would do. Some of it was better than what I might have done, which is a total mind job. It was also oddly inspiring and gave me some ideas on things I might want to try.

    The Art!

    Finally! The results!

    The AI Images

    How do you think Prompt O’ Ween 2023 turned out?

    You can check out previous years here!

  • Prompt O’ Ween 2022

    Prompt O’ Ween 2022

    Day 19. That’s as far as I made it through Prompt O’ Ween 2022. Booooooo!

    Normally I would just power through and finish up that last little but late, but this year was just too dang busy. Honestly overall it’s been hard to keep up with regular stuff. Throwing a daily challenge on top of it all *might* not have been the best idea…

    These were the Prompt O’ Ween 2022 prompts:

    Prompt O' Ween 2022

    Out of the 19 I got done (plus one that my son did <3), I think most of them turned out pretty good! There were a couple of clunkers, but definitely a few that pretty much *have* to be prints.



    Want to see prompts in action? All the time lapses are here!

  • Art for KjARTan’s Sake?

    Art for KjARTan’s Sake?

    Sorry for the cringy title. I put it down as a placeholder figuring I’d come up with something better by the time I got done writing this. You know what else was hard? Coming up with a project for Kjartan Slettemark! He was edgy and political. As much as I admire his work, political is not something I do here. I want my community to be a safe place to chat, to be silly, to talk about a good/bad/boring/exciting day without any judgement. 

    On top of that, Kjartan loved his plastic and how do you digitize that? Looking back at Nixon Visions, I could have taken his image and processed it in a bunch of different ways, but in the end it was something else that spoke to me. The Poodle costume. 

    kjartan slettemark poodle costume

    I love everything about this thing. The best part is that it all came about because of a typo. Six months of work to prove a point against system that dogged the man for years over his mental health all because they couldn’t spell. So good!

    Then I came across this image: 

    kjartan slettemark marilyn pose

    That’s when I knew I needed to paint a sexy KjARTan poodle and that’s exactly what happened. One layer, black and white, done in one sitting. 

    kjartan slettemark sexy poodle painting

    It was so much fun to paint! A little dark, a little weird – it’s the kind of art I love to make. So there you have it, my little homage to Kjartan Slettemark!

  • Sesame Street Drama

    Sesame Street Drama

    Tenebrism is one of my favorite art concepts! The only problem is I get a little heavy handed with my shading. So for this month’s project, which centers on tenebrism and chiaroscuro, I wrangled that urge to make every shadow pitch black. (If you missed my last blog, there’s a quick overview of tenebrism vs. chiaroscuro.)

    I knew I wanted to paint something in grayscale and overlay the color. That way I could focus on the values and get the contrast just how I wanted it. But what to paint?? I scrolled and scrolled through old projects and sketches and there it was. The Yip Yips. 

    sesame street yip yip sketch

    I don’t even remember why I drew them, but they were already shaded, ready for tenebrist drama. They just needed something to look at. At first I thought I could plunk a candle down and have my single light source and get to work, but it just didn’t feel right. The Yip Yip martians were always trying to figure out some sort of technology like a phone or a radio. The solution? Use technology to figure it out!

    Since I was streaming, I used MixItUp to help out. My prompt command pulls an adjective, noun, and verb to give my something to draw, but I also have each one of those broken out into commands of their own. I hit that noun command until it gave me something that could work. Eventually it gave me cake, which made me think of cupcakes, and who doesn’t love a cupcake?? Plus I could plunk a candle in the top and still have the original idea. Sure, it’s not technology, but baking is all chemistry and that’s pretty amazing too!

    sesame street yip yip sketch with cupcake

    A few quick adjustments to the sketch and we’re off to the races! Next, I mapped everything out with three gray tones (light, medium, dark) and blended it all together. I wanted some different textures, so the martians were blended with a hair texture brush, the cupcake and table with the regular blender, and the eyes with the blur tool. 

    yip yip digital painting grayscale tenebrism

    This is the part where I changed course. The original plan was to use the Rubens color set and make this a Baroque-style painting, buuuuut… I couldn’t bring myself not to make the Yip Yips pink and blue. So the color set went out the window, but I did use one of the browns for the background!

    yip yip digital painting tenebrism

    After overlaying the color, the shadows were a bit washed out. There are a bunch of ways to deal with this, but I took the quick and dirty option. I used the airbrush tool and (gently!) swiped black over the darkest areas and it picked up those spots that really needed to be dark shadows. 

    yip yip tenebrism sesame street

    Now that it’s all balanced out better, we can call it done! Sort of? Sorry, but for me it’s just not dark enough! It’s chiaroscuro, but not tenebrism. For the sake of this article, and my heart’s desire for blackness, I corrected the contrast on the exported file.

    yip yip digital art sesame street

    Aaaaah, that’s better! And it still doesn’t go as dark as half my other stuff! I was 100% determined to do this in one sitting – and I did. It took six hours and I could spend another six picking at all the things my brain can’t unsee. But I think it was a good exercise in contrast and I’m pretty happy with it – yip yip yip yip yip yip yip yip uuuuuh huh!

  • Digitizing a Master’s Technique

    Digitizing a Master’s Technique

    Technique is something we haven’t talked about enough for Artist of the Month. Lucky for us, Peter Paul Rubens is a *fabulous* master to study when it comes to materials and application in painting! The man was able to finish a masterpiece in a matter of hours thanks to the media and techniques he used. So how did he do it? 

    Influence of a Master

    Rubens was heavily influenced by Titian, a talented and prolific Italian painter from the 16th century (that’s really an understatement). The two artists just missed each other by a couple of decades, as Titian died in 1576, the year before Rubens was born. Still, Rubens was able to enjoy Titian’s work in travels to Italy and copied the master’s work well into his own career. In total he painted 21 Titians!

    venus urbino titian

    Venus of Urbino. Titian. 1538.

    Although Rubens studied the master in depth, they worked in different ways. Titian started with a complete composition painted in grayscale called a grisaille as an underpainting. Then he would add color and depth with transparent glazes. Rubens wanted to create the same effect, but with an all prima technique. This literally means “at first attempt” and refers to wet in wet painting. Think Bob Ross painting happy little trees and making sure every bush had a friend – that’s alla prima.

    Tools of the Trade

    There are few things Rubens did to speed up his process. First, he almost always started with a finished drawing. This meant he didn’t have to worry about the composition while he painted – he was able to focus completely on his technique. 

    The next key to his craft was the medium he used in his paint. Described as a “thick jelly”, it consisted of 10 parts each linseed oil, turpentine, and mastic tears, and one part litharge (or powdered white lead pigment or white lead paste). Talking about the properties of these materials is for another post (let me know if you want to jump down the rabbit hole!), but this medium gave Rubens the ability to apply both transparent and translucent layers while retaining the texture of the brushstroke. It gave him the flexibility to scumble in colors or blend them seamlessly. 

    The medium was also a bit of a double-edged sword. It would start to dry after a few hours, making it unworkable. So Rubens was able to work a piece quickly, but it was partly because he had to. 

    Can the Technique Be Digitized? 

    For our project this month I decided to follow the same steps Rubens did to make a painting. Since Rubens’ first step was to start with a finished drawing, I grabbed a sketch I did from some unknown length of time ago and created a color palette based on colors he actually used (more on that next post). 

    rubens color palette technique

    These are some of the colors Rubens used.

    The Base

    He would start on a light umber background, so I took the umber and lightened up about halfway for my base. Next he would sketch his composition on top of that with a wash of darker brown, using it to map out the shadows and line the lighter areas. I copy pasta’d my sketch onto my base, locked the pixels, and colored it in with Van Dyck brown. It’s a little cheatsy, but I figured it was about the same thing. 

    The problem with this is that the sketch was done with a pencil brush, so I was starting with a rough base. As I continued with the painting, I found myself constantly fighting that roughness and making sure it was all blended in. Maybe throwing a blur over it before painting would have helped, but hey – hindsight. 

    rubens technique digital

    Next he took a medium brown tone to lay in the lighter areas, typically where the skin tones would go. I lightened up the Van Dyck brown a bit and filled in the skin areas. It really did make a beautiful base there – something I’ll try again in the future. 

    rubens technique base

    Adding Color

    Color be added next. Red for lips and cheeks, blues for… blue stuff. Honestly I derped a little bit on this part. I looked at my piece and thought, there’s not that much color… For some reason my brain didn’t register that the car and the hair needed color. I added a touch of cochineal lake red to the lips and it mixed with the base into a beautiful soft pink. Then I put some indigo in the eyes and they looked totally creepy. So I tried lazurite blue, but it didn’t help much. I never was able to paint all the creep out of those eyes, but thankfully a good highlight can help. 

    rubens technique color

    Creating Depth

    Graytones came next. This is how Rubens built up light and shadow – with various tones of plain old gray that he mixed himself. I wanted the denim jacket to be gray, so I skipped the color and went right in with gray. Against the warm background it gave it a bluish appearance. Then I went in and defined the darker areas and modeled the lighter areas. 

    At this point I started to wonder if I should be using separate layers for this. The grays didn’t always mix nicely into the dark browns and it got frustrating at times. It also wasn’t always the smoothest blend, which shows in the finished piece. There are areas in the jacket where the warmth peeking through is kind of nice. I feel like there are times where doing that on purpose could be useful, but making it look intentional might require an extra layer or two. That being said, if it’s all prima, we should be going all in on one layer, right?

    rubens technique graytones

    Adding More Color!

    After the gray, Rubens would have added stronger colors to add more depth. The color forced the gray back, while the gray pushed the color forward. 

    At this point I added color to the car. I went with a mix of reds and browns. My attempt at chrome trim was a little half-hearted, but a little more time would have gotten it there. I also added color to the hair. I don’t think I did enough with the gray tones because I didn’t get the depth I really wanted. Again, using additional layers probably would have fixed this and I wondered if I should redo the whole thing. 

    rubens technique color

    With all the color and depth, Rubens would have added transparent layers of reds and grays to the shadows to create bounce highlights. I missed this step. Oops. Then it was time to add the darkest shadows with translucent darks and brightest highlights with opaque light color. I went back in and darkened up the deepest parts and popped in those highlights. Overall the piece looked instantly better. I’m not at all biased because contrast is my favorite thing ever. Nope, not at all. 

    Did I Replicate the Technique?

    Rubens’ work didn’t come together until the end and I found that to be the case with my painting too. It was those final applications of value and color that made it cohesive. Did I nail his process digitally? Definitely not. But I think I could with another try. It took a round of trying it all out to see how it really works. I’m not mad about the way my painting turned out and I have a few more tricks up my sleeve for future work. 

    Trying out the techniques of the old masters is 100% worth trying out whether you work traditionally or digitally. I got my information from the book “How to Paint Like the Old Masters” by Joseph Sheppard. He talks about many other famous painters and their materials and techniques. Check it out if you’re interested in seeing how some the most famous artistic minds worked!

    If you want to see me work on these projects in real time, I stream it on Twitch and YouTube. I’d love to share the experience with you! 

    Thanks for reading!

  • Art Deco Prompts

    Art Deco Prompts

    Art. Deco. Prompts. When the idea hit me I thought it was brilliant! Then I asked myself what kind of masochist I really am… but that’s how it is with prompts. My poor little brain rides a rollercoaster every single time. In the end it was the perfect solution to the lack of a project I had for Art Deco month. 

    What is Art Deco?

    I don’t think I touched on what Art Deco is enough when I wrote about Tamara de Lempicka earlier this month. She was an Art Deco painter, but Art Deco was mainly an architectural and decorative movement, and here we are making digital Art Deco. For the sake of making sure there’s a real definition this time, here’s a blurb from Britannica

    “Art Deco is a popular design style of the 1920s and ’30s characterized especially by sleek geometric or stylized forms and by the use of man-made materials.”

    The Britannica link there has a good overview of the style. Now let’s move on to the thing I did…

    What Are Prompts?

    If you haven’t seen one of my streams where we do prompts, I have a handy little command that grabs a random adjective, noun, and verb and posts it to chat. Whatever comes up, I have to draw. Sometimes the verb requires another prompt, like grabbing. What is the subject of the prompt grabbing? So we run the command again and things start getting weird(er). 

    Usually I don’t keep track of the prompts after they’re done. It’s fun to see what viewers think they are and to go back to the old ones and try to remember what I was supposed to draw. There are some that I really have no idea what they were supposed to be! 

    This prompt is different because it has a record. But this is the only time and place I’m going to put what it was. 

    skinny clown thinking, strong house mowing

    At least I’m pretty sure that’s what it was…

    The Project

    I knew I wanted to work with black and gold lines for the background. If you do an image search for Art Deco you’ll see gold with either black or dark blue quite a bit. So after a quick sketch I started laying down lines, starting with a diamond in the center to frame the prompts that would be put on top. From there it was all intuitive – I just kept placing gold lines where I thought they looked good. It was sooooo relaxing. Seriously, try it. It’s so zen!

    Then came the clown, house, and mowers. At first I wasn’t going to shade them, but they really needed it. If you look at vintage Art Deco advertisements, the figures generally are lightly shaded, so that’s what I did. It was very love-hate toward the end there, but looking at it now I’m really happy with how it turned out! What do you think? 

    art deco clown thinking house mowing
  • Does Op Art Need Shading?

    Does Op Art Need Shading?

    So far this month we’ve explored the work of Op Art painter Bridget Riley. She spent decades exploring perception and the viewer’s gaze. Is that something I could even begin to touch in this quick project?

    I decided to keep it simple and do a project I remember from middle school. Only this time I used Clip Studio Paint instead of a ruler and colored pencils. By the time I was done, I realized it would have been faster in pencil, but that’s probably because I’ve never tried to do anything so precise in digital.

    Check out this first one:

    black white op art

    If it looks familiar, you might have done something like this in school as well. You start with straight lines converging in the center like in a spider web. Then in each section draw the curves, alternating the direction as you go around. You end up with a wobbly, web-like pattern. Now color in every other sections and voilà – Op Art!

    I took it a step further and added shading and highlights. Then I wondered – does it need that? I looked through other Op Art images and saw that it’s the use of shape, line, and color that makes the piece. You think I’d have known that already since I just wrote about that exact thing, but I learn better by doing. 🙂

    black white op art

    What do you think? Shading or no shading? Do we have to be purists about it? Of course not – it’s art!

    Next I used my random color picker to add different color combinations. For all of them I was cringing as the second color came up. But after the fact I sort of love all of them!

    I didn’t adjust the shading for each one and it shows. For these, I think the unshaded versions are way better.

    I made one other piece, but this time I started with a single wavy line. Then I copied it and shifted it slightly over and over again until the canvas was full.

    wavy lines op art

    I liked it just black and white, but tried out a few different colors with the color picker anyway. A little shading and highlight (this time it needed it!) and here’s the result:

    red orange yellow wave op art

    This was a really fun project. You should try it too! I’d love to see what you make!

  • My February Expressionism Project!

    My February Expressionism Project!

    My Expressionism project for this month was a cute little (digital) painting of two birds. I did the birds, sky, and mountains on separate layers so I could export all of the combinations of primary colors and see how it changed the feeling of the painting. Let’s take a look!

    The piece was initially done with yellow birds, blue sky, and red mountains. According to one of the biggest Expressionism artists Franz Marc, yellow represents feminine happy qualities, blue is masculine and spiritual, and red is physical and sometimes violent. 

    With these things in mind, the yellow birds may be seen as hopeful and free in their flight together. In this moment they don’t need to worry about the dangers of the world that exist far below them.

    yellow birds blue sky red mountains expressionist expressionism digital art

    Next I switched the colors of the sky and the mountains. It immediately takes on a more ominous tone (red kind of does that anyway thought, doesn’t it?). Now the birds are more in conflict with their surroundings, if not in outright danger. Personally, I’ve always found red and yellow next to each other (and/or as the main colors) to be very uncomfortable. There is definitely more tension in this combination of colors.

    yellow birds red sky blue mountains expressionist expressionism digital art

    Swapping the color of the birds and mountains give the ominous red a different spin. There seems to be more tension between the birds. Perhaps they are no longer on the same side?

    blue birds red sky yellow mountains expressionism expressionist digital art

    Something about making the sky yellow didn’t add joy or femininity for me. I think it’s because it’s a darker yellow. That’s pretty much what happens when you change the color of a layer (especially to a lighter color) instead of repainting it. Even if the yellow were brighter, I don’t think my feelings on it would change much since I am more than a little biased against yellow hues (don’t get me started). All that aside, something about the background makes me feel like these birds are fighting for scarce resources, however perhaps not against each other.

    blue birds yellow sky red mountains expressionism expressionist digital art

    I feel like making the birds red instantly puts them in conflict with each other against that yellow sky. The blue mountains remove the element of scarcity and danger below them, but again, I don’t feel like that’s a happy yellow space around them. At this point they are in a fight over something more personal.

    red birds yellow sky blue mountains digital art expressionist expressionism

    Finally we have the red birds on a blue sky with yellow mountains. There is still tension between the birds, but not necessarily conflict. The blue sky creates a space of familiarity and peace. Following Franz’s theory of yellow as joyous and hopeful, the mountains would represent good tidings to come. But we know by now that it’s not working that way for me… it looks more like desert to me, perhaps adding urgency to the flight of the birds.

    red birds blue sky yellow mountains digital art expressionism expressionist

    This little Expressionism experiment was a fun way to play with color and be able to experience how changing it can alter the outcome of the piece. While I can objectively apply another artist’s (Marc’s) color theory to my own work, in the end it doesn’t change the way I feel about each iteration. There are mainstream interpretations of each color and my own feelings conflict with some of them.

    I think we all have our own personal color theories with our divergences from what most people see. That’s part of what makes viewing and discussing art so interesting. I’m sure you see things differently (maybe very differently) from how I interpreted all the birds. So tell me – what’s your personal color theory? How do the colors change the birds for you?

  • Impressionist Art – Did I Do It?

    Impressionist Art – Did I Do It?

    When I started my little digital Impressionist painting, I made sure to go in with no expectations. If it came out great – great! If it came out bad – also great! The whole point was to try it out and hopefully learn something along the way. 

    It was definitely a rough start at first, but by the end I found a sort of rhythm. Somehow this blobbly colorful thing I was making started to look like something and I’m really happy with the result! Could there be improvements? Absolutely. Did I approach it the way an Impressionist would? I’m still not really sure about that. 

    However! I feel like a better artist having done this. I had to work against what I normally do (Blend, blend, blend! Make it darker!) and I think I really started to see my subject. When it was done, I didn’t really care that it’s a little off. I captured not only a moment, but all the things I felt about that moment in the movement and energy of the (digital) paint. 

    So who did I pick to paint? Chewy and my son! It wasn’t my original idea, but on the day I was thinking about the picture I took of my son laying with the dog on the couch. It’s one of my favorite moments and even though it was a few years ago, they still hang out like that to this day. As my aunt said when she saw the picture, “There’s nothing like a boy and his dog.” 

    And so without further ado, here’s my little Impressionist experiment: A Boy and His Dog

    Boy and His Dog digital impressionist style painting

    My one regret with this is that I forgot to turn on the time lapse recording. It would have been such a cool playback! At least there’s still the stream. You can watch it here. 

    Thanks for reading! I’ll see you in February for the next Artist of the Month!