RYUKO WIP and walkthrough

As requested, I'd like to give a more in-depth WIP post to this month's pinup. Sorry in advance if it's still a bit vague, I've never been very good at teaching or explaining things. Feel free to comment if you have any questions about specific things. The entire piece was done in Clip Studio Paint.

• First step is the rough sketch! Quick and loose. The idea here is to get the shapes down and make sure it all fits on the canvas. Not pictured here is a lot of resizing, lasso tool, and rotating. I like sketching in blue and light red. The face has been cleaned up a little bit because I wanted to show this sketch early to announce the poll result.

• Next comes the cleanup sketch. I use a dark gray pencil brush to start getting a cleaner drawing and focus on fixing up the anatomy. This is actually a lot cleaner than it needs to be.

• Then I start adding the clothing in another color. Also the scissor blade. Not pictured here is about a hundred redraws of the blade because it's a super weird shape that's hard to draw. Thankfully I own the Figma figure for Ryuko so I was able to use it as reference to finally get the shape correct.

• Next step is the line art! I used Clip Studio's G-pen brush. I've adjusted it a lot on my own to get something that's close to how my traditional ink lines look when scanned. It's too many small adjustments to go over here, so you'll have to play with the options menu on your own to find what feels good. The underwear is drawn on it's own layer to make the alternate version easier to color.

• Next I select all the areas outside the lines, then invert that selection and fill in a solid color. In this case white.

• Then I start selecting smaller areas and drawing in the different colors.I make sure to make the color edges aliased (not blurry) so then can be selected and changed with ease. The color choices were easy in this case because I've drawn Ryuko before. I'm reusing the same color palette. I've also added in a little background detail because it came to mind.

• I duplicate the Color layer, then I begin to select each color separately and paint in the shading. In this case I used a more paint-y kind of brush. It's one of the Frenden Clip Studio brushes. Again I've customized and adjusted it a lot to my own preference. Often I use the lasso tool to select and fill in shading, but not this time. It's up to whatever you feel like doing.

• Highlights are added in. Shiny hair! Shiny skin! I think I often overdo it, so I've been trying to add highlights more sparingly.

• • Note the softer highlights and shading that I've begun to add in to emphasize the form and soften the skin. You can sometimes achieve this with small gradients as well. Also note at this step I've begun to add some reflective light by lightly going over some areas of shadow with a light blue brush.

• Next I start coloring the lines where I feel it looks good. I've also added in some more details to the eyes. An easy way to color over your lines is the lock the transparency of the layer and just paint over it. I usually leave the lines around the edge dark or black.

• Then it's a few more steps. I finished up the background and cleaned up some small details. Note the transparent white lines. I add an outline behind the base color layer to make the character stand out against the background, then I paint some more transparent white lines in a few select areas where I think it will help the depth. Here you can see some by the hair, shoulders, and scissor blade. The background was a gradient and then some extra painting using the same brush as the rest of the image.

• Now it's time for the final touches. First I added a red border. Not sure if this would be cropped in print, but that's not important this time. I thought some texture would look nice, so I made a noise layer over the whole image, lowered the opacity to about 17%, then changed the mode layer to "Soft Light". ("overlay" also works, try out different modes to see what you like.)

And finally a GIF to end things! Here you can see where small adjustments were made.