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 always up to learning new ways to create effects in my digital art. I love colored lighting, but have never tried this particular technique for creating that look and when I tried it I realized it was so easy! So this week let’s learn this method of creating a colored lighting look.

In this article we will cover the following topics:

Creating Shadows

Adding Colored Light

Finishing Touches

Let’s do some awesome looking lighting!

Creating Shadows

First we’re going to create shadows on our image. Start with your image with flat colors that are all on one layer. The line art should be on a separate layer. Create a new raster layer above the flat color layer, then right-click on the new layer and go to Layer Settings - Clip to Layer Below. This will make anything we put on this layer only show when it lays over filled in pixels on the layer below.

Fill the new clipping layer with a purple color.

Now set your purple clipping layer to the Multiply blending mode. Use a hard eraser or the lasso tool and delete to erase the purple from the areas where the light is hitting in your image. I will be doing blue light on the right and red light on the left, so I made sure to carve out some light areas on both sides of my image, but keeping the right side’s light areas larger because that’s where the stronger light source is. I used the lasso selection tool to select the areas closer to the light source and then you can tap Delete on your keyboard or hit the “Delete” icon in the selection launcher bar beneath the lasso selection.

Now let’s do a bit of adjusting on the shadows! I want to soften the edges of some of the shadows, so let’s start with going to Filter - Blur - Motion Blur. 

I set the angle to 0, and the Direction to “Both Directions” so that both sides of the shadows would get a little blurring. Change the Mode to Smooth and then adjust the strength so that there is just a bit of blur at the edge of the shadows. We’re going to do some more work to the shadows so they don’t have to be perfect, we just want to give a little bit of blur for this step.

Click OK.

Next we’re going to take the Blend (or Blur, whichever you like better! I like the look of the Blend tool better so that’s what I’ll be using) tool and soften the edge of the shadows. I like to concentrate on doing this on areas that have a curve to them, such as the face and the fingers. Sharp corners tend to have less of a gradient on them because of the sudden change of direction. 

This is also the time to add the shadow color back in on edges if the color got blurred away from the line (see in the example below along the line of the hair where it meets the skin. Because of the Motion Blur filter the edges got blurred and now some of the skin color is showing at the edges, so I will add purple back to those areas with a pen tool), or to take the eraser tool and reshape shadows as needed. 

In the next section we’ll add the colored lighting highlights!

Adding Colored Lighting

First you’ll want to decide on what colors of light you’ll be using. I’m going to be using a combo that I find always looks great - blue and red! Blue will go on the right side of my drawing and red will be less intense on the left. I made a new layer and put a circle of each of the colors on it so that I can easily color pick them if I need to do touch ups later.

Create a new layer over top of the Multiply (shadows) layer we created earlier. Set this layer to the Overlay blending mode. Then take your first color and the soft airbrush and brush the lighting color over the highlight areas of the drawing. On the skin I found it looks great to go over the edges of the shadows as well to mix the color and add saturation to make the skin look a bit more natural. On areas such as cloth I mainly kept the color on the areas that would be highlighted, but also brushed a bit gently into the larger shadow areas to add some color variation.

Complete the same Overlay layer and airbrush process as detailed above but with the second lighting color. Because this color is less intense in my image I didn’t put as much red in the shadows as the blue color.

Finishing Touches

Now that we have the general lighting laid out, it’s time for some finishing touches! I made a new layer over the Overlay layers and used my favorite Pen tool with the red lighting color to add sharp highlights to the hair, sunglasses, and the very edge of the clothes on the left.

Then, on the same layer I used the blue color from before to add highlights to the right side of my image. Then I used the Blend tool to soften out the highlights a bit at the edges.

Conclusion

I’m really glad I stumbled across this method because I think the results look amazing and that the process is quite simple! I think you could do this with all sorts of lighting scenarios just by changing the colors a bit. I hope you give it a try!

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