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 was scrolling Pinterest the other day, thinking about what I wanted to write about for this week, when I saw an interesting looking “art hack” video. I watched it and it was one of the craziest art hacks I have ever seen in my life. The kind of hack where you immediately say “That can’t work!” but you want to try it out immediately. The person who made the video I saw got this tip from a Japanese social media site. Let’s try it out and see if it’s actually a good hack or not!

In this article we will cover the following topics:

Setting Up for Art Hack Success

Testing the Hack

Let’s get drawing

Setting Up For Art Hack Success

This hack specifically deals with creating some beautiful shading and detailing in eyes. To make this hack work, you will need to set up your digital art file so that the different parts of the eyes are on separate layers. Below, I’ve got the whites of the eyes on the Flat Colors layer, then there are separate layers for the iris, pupil, and highlights. I added a bit of basic soft shading on the iris layer before continuing on. 

Testing the Hack

Now that we’re set up, let’s try out this hack. We’re going to be using photos to add color variation and detail to the eyes. I’ve saved the photos to my hard drive and need to import them into my file. To do this, click File - Import - Image. 

Now I can hear you saying, “Liz, what kind of photos are we using?” And here’s why this is the craziest art hack I have ever seen. We will be using photos of FOOD. What type of food? Supposedly this works with any type of food, though I’ve only seen it done with a few types of Asian food. So I decided to try out six different types of American foods to see how they fare. I chose donuts, chicken noodle soup, chili with cheese and sour cream, fried chicken, hamburger, and popcorn.

The one that I feel the most confident about is popcorn, so we’ll try that one out first. Click on the image you want to import and click “Open”. Then use the bounding box handles to scale, rotate, and position the image over the eyes.

Make sure your image layer is directly above the layer with your iris color on it in the Layer palette. Right-click on the image layer and go to Layer Settings - Clip to Layer Below. This will make the image only show where there are pixels on the layer below. 

I love clipping layers because they save so much time erasing things by hand, and we can still move the image around to adjust the placement if needed!

Now change the image layer’s blending mode to Overlay!

If your image is too small to cover both eyes of your character, you can duplicate the image. Go to Layer - Duplicate Layer.

Move the duplicate over the second eye. (Also, take a moment to laugh at the ridiculousness of what you’re doing, because that’s what I did at this point!)

Go to Layer - Merge with Layer below to make both images on the same layer. Then repeat the above steps of clipping the images to the iris layer and setting the blending mode to overlay. Below are the results for the chicken noodle soup image, which I don’t dislike!

Next up we have the fried chicken image, which honestly I think I like the best, followed by the popcorn image.

Then I tried the hamburger, which I think is the worst one. Probably because you can see the layers of the burger so it just makes the eyes look striped.

The chili with sour cream image looks okay, though I wish the edges of the sour cream weren’t so sharp. You can see them quite prominently in the lower left of each eye, although if you didn’t know it was a photo of chili and sour cream, maybe it would just look like a big highlight?

Finally we have the donut image, and I actually kind of like this one as well. It’s probably my third favorite result to be honest! 

Conclusion

I wouldn’t say that this hack doesn’t work, but I would say that it works better with an image that is randomly textured, like a soup, popcorn, or fried chicken, instead of something regular like a stacked burger or identical donuts. Although if you just want to add some texture and interest to your character’s eyes, you could use nearly any texture image with the same steps and probably get similar results! 

This is probably a hack to try out for the entertainment value, but I think I would find some regular texture images to use rather than constantly put food in my character’s eyes! Have you tried this hack?

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