Hello! My name is Liz Staley and I’m a long-time user of Clip Studio Paint (I started using the program back when it was known as Manga Studio 4!). I was a beta-tester on the Manga Studio 5 program and for Clip Studio Paint, and I have written three books and several video courses about the program. Many of you probably know my name from those books, in fact. I write weekly posts on Graphixly.com and on CSP Tips, so be sure to come back every week to learn more Clip Studio Tips and Tricks from me!

Watermarks are one of the many ways you can protect your art from thieves on the internet, while also telling viewers who the artist is and where to find them on social media. You can make your watermark more interesting by creating an embossed effect, making it look like it’s been pressed into the image and is raised from it! This effect is very easy to achieve so let’s do just that in this article!

In this article we will cover the following topics:

Creating Your Watermark

Saving the Watermark as a Material

Let’s get drawing!

Creating Your Watermark

First, create your watermark. You can do whatever design you want, just make sure that it’s done in pure black and with a transparent background. If you use colors or have a background then you will not be able to get the embossed effect that we’re going to create.

Now we’re going to take our watermark and copy and paste it onto an image we want to add a watermark to. (If you want to save this watermark to the Materials library for ease of use later, we will go over that process in the next section)

Now let’s create the embossed effect. First, set the watermark layer to the “Soft Light” blending mode. Then right-click the layer and select Duplicate Layer. You will now have two layers with your watermark on it. On the top layer, click the “Lock Transparent Pixels” icon and fill the layer with white. This will turn your watermark from black to white.

Now select the bottom watermark layer and use the Move Layer tool to nudge the layer down and over to the left or right slightly. Now your watermark should look like it is raised off the image!

This watermark technique is really good over images that don’t have a lot of white space, since the watermark disappears over white due to being on the Soft Light blending mode.

Saving Your Watermark as a Material

Saving your watermark design as a Material will make it easier to quickly add it to new images I did find, however, with this technique it is best to just save the pure black version instead of, say, merging the two Soft Light layers and saving that. The emboss effect doesn’t save as a single layer because you need the black and white layers interacting with each other to achieve it. So we’ll go back to our original watermark design file and just save that.

Make sure that your watermark image is all on one layer before continuing. Also ensure that it is still only black and transparent with no fill. Click Edit - Register Material - Image.

In the Material Properties window, type in a title in the Material Name box. Double check the Material Image icon to make sure that the watermark looks correct. Then check the “Scale up/down” box and make sure “Adjust after pasting” is selected in the dropdown menu. Then check Specify order in Layer palette and make sure that the top option is selected. 

In the Choose Save Location box, select a folder to place the watermark image in. I chose the Image Material - Illustration - Decoration folder, but feel free to choose whatever folder makes sense to you. You can then add search tags by clicking on the + icon in the lower right corner of the Search Tag option and typing in the tag you wish to add.

Once you’re done filling in details, click on OK to save.

To use your watermark, open the Material Library palette. If you just completed this process then you will see the watermark image at the top of the library. Click to select the watermark and then drag it on to your canvas.

To create the embossed effect you will need to rasterize the image material layer. Right-click the layer and select Rasterize from the menu. 

Then you can change the blending mode to Soft Light, duplicate the watermark layer and change the top copy to white, and shift the bottom layer slightly to quickly create your embossed watermark!

To move the watermark, make sure that you select both the black and white layers to move together by clicking them both in the Layer palette while holding down the Ctrl key. Then use the Move Layer tool to move the watermark, or the Move/Scale/Rotate tool if you want to change the watermark size as well.

Conclusion

Watermarks are not an infallible way to protect your art, but they can protect it from many thieves - especially if you can make the watermark more complicated to remove! 

For more information on CLIP Studio Paint, please visit https://www.clipstudio.net/en or https://graphixly.com