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!

I’m not one of those artists that “loves the feeling of pencil on paper” or anything, but sometimes it is much easier for me to carry a paper sketchbook around than to carry a laptop and tablet or an iPad, and I end up with traditional sketches that I want to finish digitally. Some of these sketches have colored pencil layout lines that need to be removed, and it would be tedious to erase them all manually! Thankfully, it takes just a few clicks to nearly completely eliminate these colored lines, making clean up much easier.

Getting Rid of Colored Sketch Lines

For whatever reason, I sketched in red pencil for the rough layout on this piece in my sketchbook. I don’t know why I chose red, because I have blue sketching pencils, but oh well! The process for removing this red pencil is the same process you would use if you sketched with a non-photo blue pencil.

So to start getting rid of the red layout lines on this piece, go to Edit - Tonal Correction - Tone Curve.

In the Tone Curve settings, you need to set the dropdown menu to one of the two colors that are NOT the color of your sketching pencil. (For instance, if you sketched in blue pencil you will complete the following steps on the RED and GREEN options. Since my pencil was red, I will be doing this to the GREEN and BLUE options. It does not matter which one you do first, so I’m going to do green first.

Once you’ve changed the dropdown menu to one of the color channel options you will see that color in the chart below the dropdown. We will be making our adjustments to the diagonal line cutting from the lower left to top right of this chart. 

Click on the point at the lower left of the diagonal line and drag that point all the way to the top left of the graph. Your image will turn to the color you’re currently adjusting, this is normal.

Now change to the second color channel that you need to adjust. Again, if you are trying to get rid of blue lines, you will do this adjustment to the GREEN and RED channels. Since my pencil is red, I am doing it to the GREEN and BLUE channels.

Change the dropdown to the remaining color and raise the bottom left of the diagonal line to the top left.

Click OK to finish the Tone Curve adjustment. Now go to Edit - Tonal Correction - Hue/Saturation/Luminosity.

Drag the Saturation slider all the way to the left to turn your image back to grayscale. It might look a bit washed out but we’ll fix that next. Click OK.

Now let’s bring up the Level Correction options.

In Level Correction there is a graph with three “^” icons below it. Click and drag these little pointers around to make the image lighter or darker. 

After adjusting the levels, I then completed cleanup by using the Copy Stamp tool to cover up the worst remaining pencil lines and the Blend tool to smooth out other areas to make the pencil lines blend in. Then I did one more round of Level Correction and also a Brightness/Contrast adjustment to make the image a little darker, and now it’s ready to have color added digitally!

Conclusion

So just with a few steps, you can easily clean up your sketch using the amazing Clip Studio Paint tools!. For more information about the app, please visit https://www.clipstudio.net/en or https://graphixly.com