Clip Studio Paint beginner's guide to drawing lines and line drawings, so you can start drawing right away
- Comic Black Rainbow
- Apr 15
- 8 min read
Updated: Apr 16
Hello! Little cutie
I am Comic Black Rainbow.
I believe that people who have used Clip Studio Paint will think Clip Studio Paint's strength is that it allows you to draw lines very smoothly.
However, a student always felt that drawing with Clip Studio Paint was still choppy.
So I shared with him some areas that could be adjusted.
After he adjusted, drawing became much smoother when using Clip Studio Paint!
Later I found that many beginners encountered the same problem.
Just because they don't know how to solve it.
This leads them to think that it is very difficult to draw digital drawings using Clip Studio Paint!?
So to solve the problems many people encounter when drawing lines with Clip Studio Paint, this time I will organize a comprehensive set of tips from software and hardware pressure sensing, brushes, and other tools to the secret of pen power and drawing beautiful lines, one-stop service for you!
Clip Studio Paint is a great tool for drawing lines, line drawings, and comics.
Everything is silky smooth!
Further reading you might find interesting:
Detection pressure
Some people feel that digital painting is difficult not because of the equipment or software, but because the pressure sensitivity of the software and hardware is not adjusted correctly. There is more than one factor that affects the pressure sensitivity of digital painting and your painting experience. So if you still feel that it is not easy to draw after adjusting one of the parts, you can try to adjust from the following three places:
Hardware: Whether you are using a drawing tablet, drawing screen, drawing laptop or tablet, there will generally be a setting for you to adjust the pen pressure. You can make adjustments based on the hardware device you are using! However, since there are so many types of equipment and brands, I will not demonstrate them here.
Clip Studio Paintadjusts pen pressure detection: Since the main software we use today is Clip Studio Paint, we can use the built-in pen pressure adjustment detection in Clip Studio Paint to adjust the pen pressure feeling when drawing.
In File → Adjust Pen Pressure Detection Level, click here and then
A window will pop up asking you to draw lines directly on the canvas using your usual drawing habits. After drawing a few strokes, Clip Studio Paint will automatically adjust the pen pressure to suit you.
Brush settings: The software and hardware settings of pen pressure have the greatest impact on our drawing experience, but for people with a keen drawing sense, this may not be enough. At this time, we can make more subtle adjustments, that is, make adjustments to the brush settings!
In Clip Studio Paint, I usually choose Dip Pen → G Pen to make adjustments first, because this pen is very smooth and practical for drawing line drafts and comics. After adjusting this brush, I can adjust other brushes according to similar parameters!
When you click on the wrench in the lower right corner of the pen's tool properties, you may find that the brush settings are too complicated and you don't know where to start adjusting them. That's okay! If you want to adjust the pen pressure and feel in general brush settings, you can just adjust the "correction" and "start and end strokes" parts!
The parameters in the picture are set by me. You can try drawing with my parameters first. If it still doesn't go smoothly for you, you can adjust them according to your drawing habits!
Recommended Brushes
Generally speaking, I think that the built-in brushes in Clip Studio Paint are very easy to use. If you like the hand-painted texture, you can choose the "Automatic Pencil" brush among the pencil brushes. Its line color will be fuller than the pencil brush. If you like to use solid lines to draw line drafts, you can use the "G Pen" brush among the water brushes. But if you want to try some brushes with different painting feel, I can recommend a few free brushes for you, you can download them and try painting.
The first set of brushes is a set of five-line painting brushes shared by a Korean artist named 대. Each brush has a unique line performance. You can choose according to your preferences and even adjust the brush setting parameters to your preferences!
The second set of brushes is also shared by Korean artist 대, but this set consists of four pencil-textured brushes. Although they are pencil-textured brushes, there are one or two brushes that feel like ink pens. However, you still need to try these paintings yourself!
The third set of brushes is a line drawing brush provided by a Japanese artist Aiich. The texture of this brush has an ink feel. According to the picture drawn by the artist himself, it looks very good. But of course, having good brushes and tools does not mean that you can draw well. You still need to have a certain level of painting ability before you can make full use of the tools.
Writing gesture and force
Basically, up to this point, the first two steps are about tools. If you already have experience in drawing, you can show off your skills after detecting the pressure sensitivity and adjusting the brush tool to create your work! But for beginners who are just starting to learn drawing, I would like to add some tips so that you can draw beautiful line drawings faster! First, we can start with the hand painting techniques:
Writing gestures: For those who use digital drawing, the range they can draw is generally the size of the drawing board or screen. Compared with hand-painted oil paintings or murals, it is much smaller. Therefore, when we draw lines, we usually only use the joints of the "fingers" and "wrists" to swing. When drawing, we can hold the brush lightly and easily. When drawing small lines, we only need to move our fingers and wave the brush lightly, without moving other parts of the hand. When drawing longer lines, we only need to move our wrist and wave the brush lightly, without moving other parts of the hand.
Pen force: In addition to the pen gesture, the pen force will also affect the appearance of the lines we draw. When drawing digital painting, people who use heavier pen force tend to draw slowly and their lines are more likely to shake. So if you want to draw smooth lines, you still need to adjust your pen force. Try to relax, hold the brush lightly, and move the brush. You will find that the lines you draw will be smoother, silkier, and more layered!
Further reading you might find interesting:
3 line drawing practice
After we know how to adjust the gesture and strength of the pen, you may still not know how to start drawing beautiful lines. It doesn't matter. Here I will introduce you to three line drawing practice methods that beginners can quickly get started!
Straight line practice: Here we can first practice drawing straight lines in a grid-like manner, trying to make each straight line we draw the same length, and then master the basic stability of drawing lines.
Curve practice: In curve practice, we can draw curved lines like drawing sonar symbols. In the process of drawing, try to keep the distance between the curves consistent. This can train us to have a better grasp of the distance between lines!
One-point divergence, and one-point concentration practice: In the one-point divergence practice, we need to practice making each line drawn from a point keep the same distance; while the one-point concentration practice allows each line we draw to be accurately drawn at one point to practice the accuracy of our line drawing.
Further reading you might find interesting:
The secret to drawing beautiful lines
After we adjust the gesture and strength of the pen, and do some line drawing practice, maybe you can already draw good-looking lines. But to draw good-looking line drafts, you will need more painting knowledge and skills, which of course cannot be explained here all at once. But I can provide you with some tips for drawing line drafts so that you can use these tips to enhance the aesthetic level of your line drafts!
Before we learn about these tips, I would like to let you compare the differences between these two line drawings. I believe you will feel that the line drawing on the left is better than the one on the right, but you can't tell why, right? Because the devil is in the details, which is where we'll dive into line drawing techniques!
Line thickness
Many times we see that some illustrators' line drawings drawn casually with pencils look very good. Why is that? This is because even with a pencil, when you write with different weights, the lines will vary in thickness, and such varying thicknesses of line drafts will make people feel the liveliness and vitality of the lines! But if the lines you draw are all of the same thickness, it will feel like the line drawings in a child's coloring book. The lines are stiff and lifeless, like a cage that imprisons color. Therefore, when drawing line drafts, you can relax moderately and let the lines flow freely when wielding the brush. You don't have to force yourself to draw every line consistently and perfectly.
The reality of lines
In addition to the thickness of the lines, you will find that some illustrators may not connect the lines when drawing line drafts. Even so, you will not think that there is anything ugly about the interweaving of virtual and real lines, right? The reason is very simple. Under reasonable circumstances, people will automatically fill in the unconnected parts in their minds, and then complete the entire picture in their minds. In such a process, the viewer will have a new visual experience. People may even feel that the disappearing lines have a hazy beauty! Therefore, when drawing line drafts, we don't have to connect all the lines. It can also look good if some lines appear to be a mixture of real and virtual under reasonable circumstances!
The circle and square of lines
Controlling the thickness and reality of lines depends on our control of the strength of the pen, but the squareness and roundness of lines is a choice we make with lines, and this choice can help your lines switch between rigidity and roundness, thereby giving your line draft a sense of fluidity and making your work appear more lively! So when you are drawing a line draft, if you feel that the picture is always boring, you can try to add some square and round lines to the line draft.
Now that we know these tips for drawing line drafts, I will give you a simple demonstration to let you feel how we can actually apply these tips to our line drafts!
If you want to see the demonstration process, you can directly watch the video shared above this article~
Further reading you might find interesting:
After learning how to draw ideal lines with Clip Studio Paint, now you can directly open Clip Studio Paint to adjust the pressure sensitivity and brush, and try drawing!
If you are new to digital painting, you will not be used to it at first! It doesn't matter!
Because when we were little when we first started writing and drawing with a pen, we were not used to it from the beginning, right?
So now start from scratch, you will get better and better at drawing in the future!
I am very happy to share with you today a series of operations on how to draw beautiful lines using Clip Studio Paint. I hope the above content and teaching can help you. Of course, in the process of your painting, there must be many difficulties and challenges waiting for you to solve. If you want to know how to overcome these difficulties and let you easily draw anything you want to draw, you can come and participate in this 60-minute free painting course! I will share with you how we can overcome these difficulties one by one on the road to learning to paint! If you have any other questions, please leave a comment below, send me a private message on social media, or email me! I look forward to seeing you draw beautiful line drawings and line illustrations using Clip Studio Paint!
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