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Guide: Clip Studio Paint Vector Layers
🕑 Added 2020-02-03 17:37:53 +0000 UTCIf you do any inking in Clip Studio Paint, I highly recommend doing them using vector layers. This will save you a ton of time and make your work much cleaner!
What are vector layers?
Before I can explain what a vector layer is, I have to explain what a vector is. Normally when you draw in an art program, you're drawing in raster. This means that every line you draw is made of pixels, and when you scale that line up or down in size, the line loses quality as a result. Have you ever scaled up a drawing that you drew very tiny, only for the lines to become fuzzy? That's due to raster. A vector (or vectorized image) is an image that can be scaled to any size without losing quality, because it's made of paths rather than pixels. Basically, the program recognizes each line you draw as a little equation that it calculates over and over again whenever you make any changes to the line, so it always stays preserved no matter how it gets warped or scaled.
Vector layers are a type of layer in Clip Studio Paint that treat every line you draw like a path instead of a raster.
Note that these layers are only recognized as vectors within Clip Studio Paint itself, and will be considered rasters when exported. (So it's different than something like Adobe Illustrator or Affinity Designer, which make true vectors that can be exported and opened elsewhere).
What does that mean for my art?
Because your lines are treated like paths, Clip Studio Paint allows you to edit each line you drew after you drew it, and it knows when those lines overlap and intersect.
Editing Lines
Any lines you've drawn on a vector layer can be edited by going to the Object tool under the Operation subset. Here, you can modify your lines in a bunch of different ways, like changing the brush shape, color, size, texture, and blending mode.
These are just a few examples of ways you can edit your lines. For more ways, click the wrench at the bottom of the panel to go to the Sub Tool Detail window.
One example of ways you can edit your lines is to change the brush shape. If you drew your lineart with a brush but decided at the end that you don't like how it looks, you can go to the brush dropdown and change it to any other brush you have loaded as a preset.
This preserves the size of the brush you used so the only thing that changes in a major way is the shape of the brush tip and any attributes the brush has.
You can edit individual lines by clicking on them with the Object tool. When you click on them, they should appear with nodes all over them, which you can push and pull to change the shape of your line.
If you would rather use a Bezier Curve (a type of editing that lets you push and pull extended handles rather than individual nodes), make sure the brush you use to draw the line has Bezier Curve checked under the Correction subcategory of the Sub Tool Detail panel.
Experiment with editing your lines to get the best effect for your work!
Overlapping and Intersecting Lines
My favorite feature of Vector Layers is the ability to erase intersecting lines using a vector eraser.
Here's an example of using a regular eraser on a vector layer:
Like a raster layer, it just erases whatever it touches without much regard for the lines.
However, if you go to the settings of your eraser and make sure Vector Eraser is checked under the Erase subcategory of the Sub Tool Detail panel, your eraser will instead start recognizing when your lines overlap. There are three settings you can apply to your eraser: Erase touched areas, Erase up to intersection, and Whole line. The default setting is Erase touched areas, which makes it behave like a regular eraser on a raster layer.
When you switch the setting to "Erase up to intersection," it behaves like this:
With one click, you can erase a line that intersects with another. This is incredibly useful for drawing things with a lot of overlapping lines, like buildings, hair, or fabric. It also recognizes when multiple lines across several vector layers overlap, so you can safely erase without worrying about accidentally clearing the wrong lines.
You can quickly toggle between the settings on your eraser by turning on the visibility (the little eye button) of the settings, so it shows up in your Tool Property panel.
Scaling
Finally, one of the biggest merits of vector layers is the ability to scale your lines up and down without any loss of quality.
You can adjust the settings of the scaling under the Transformation settings subcategory of the Sub Tool Detail panel (or, during the transformation, check the Change vector width box), depending on whether you want your lines to upscale or downscale with your resizing or not.
Here is an example of scaling with "Change vector width" disabled:
As you can see, the lines keep the same width even though the shape goes down in size. This is really handy for scaling down something in a drawing where you want the line weight to stay the same.
If you enable "Change vector width", this happens instead:
This scales the same way a raster would, with the size of the lines going down as you downscale and up as you upscale, with the added bonus that you still don't lose any quality because it's a vector.
Extra Features
Converting Layers
You can convert a raster layer to a vector layer by right clicking the layer and going to Convert Layer, then clicking Vector Layer from the dropdown. Note that this may change the appearance of your lines somewhat, and Clip Studio Paint will have to guess where lines start and stop. This is a lot less accurate and clean than just drawing your lines as a vector to begin with, but it can be helpful for changing things at the last minute.
You can change the settings of how it converts to a vector by clicking the Vector Settings button. This can help you customize how it converts to make it as clean as possible.
Coloring
If you have your coloring brush set to acknowledge Reference layers, you can go a step further by turning your vector lineart into a reference layer (by clicking the lighthouse button on the Layer panel) and setting your brush to "Fill up to vector path."
This makes the brush treat any vector lines as if they're only 1px wide from the middle, preventing any empty white gaps from forming if your lineart is textured or semitransparent.
Here's an example of this in use:
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I use all of these features when doing lineart for my comics. It makes my life a lot easier and my work a lot cleaner!
Thank you for reading, and I hope this was helpful to you!
