Tips for Improving Your Comic Workflow

Recently I've been working on the first batch of pages for my upcoming comic project. Between the time I started my other webcomic RORY and now, I've learned a few ways to ease my workload and quicken my pace by inplementing a few changes to my workflow.

Some of these tips rely on features specific to Clip Studio Paint, but there are likely similar features or workarounds in your program of choice too.

Keep Your Tools Together

Once you've found the tools you use most often when making a comic page, it can be helpful to make duplicates of all those tools and put them all in their own comic-specific category or folder so you don't have to look through multiple categories just to find a tool you need.

An easy way to do this in Clip Studio Paint is to make a section in the Quick Menu window dedicated to your comic, and then drag your tools into it. This window acts as a set of shortcuts to the tools you need rather than literally moving them, so you don't have to take them out of their previous sets to bundle them together.

To keep consistency in your pages, it can also be helpful to label each brush based on what it's used for and what size it should be used at. For my inking brushes, I have the size in px labeled for each brush. In Clip Studio Paint, you can lock the settings on your brushes so they'll always stay at that default size by clicking on the wrench icon next to the brush stroke in the Tool Property window.

Make Actions

You can automate some of your simple and repetitive tasks by using Actions (also called Auto Actions in CSP) to record and repeat multiple steps of your process.

For example, I created an action to automatically color my lineart (which you can download here) based on a set of steps I was previously doing manually for every page. Now, I can simply click on the action and Clip Studio Paint will run through those steps by itself, saving me time while still giving me the same result.

Some other helpful uses for actions are:

- Automatic canvas/image resizing

- Auto-filling based on reference layers

- Adding commonly-used effects and overlays

Make Swatch Sets

When you're planning out colors for your pages, you can save your future self a ton of time by making a set of color swatches for each ongoing scene.  

For very short scenes or briefly-shown settings, it's easy enough to just color pick from previous pages to keep things consistent. But when you start to use a ton of multiply and overlay layers, or your scene goes on for several pages, it can get really tedious to sift through your layers to find the right colors to pick from.

Create a default set of swatches for your main characters and settings that you will repeatedly come back to. Then, you can duplicate that set and adjust it for scenes with different color palettes. Make sure to label the swatches or separate them based on character so you know what swatch goes for whom. 

If you're using a program that doesn't have swatch sets or labelled swatches, you can make your own set of swatches by drawing boxes and filling those in, then use a text tool to label them. Then just open the file whenever you're coloring a page and color pick from it like you would normally.

Other Shortcuts

- In Clip Studio Paint, you can use the Reference Layer function to cleanly and quickly fill in your lineart with no gaps. I have a Twitter thread about how to use it and its functions here. 

- Making a few head angle brushes can help to speed up your thumbnails. Check my guide here for more info on how to make them.

- You can make panels easily in Clip Studio Paint using the panel tools. Check my guide here for tips on how to use them.

I hope this was helpful!