Experiment with Clip Studio Paint Automatic Colorization

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Clip Studio Paint EX has a colorization tool. You draw the line art, then set a color layer beneath it and paint “hints” of color. When you push the colorize button, Clip Studio Paint pushes the line art and color hints to the Cloud, processes them and sends back the colored image. Unfortunately, the AI doesn’t really do a good job if there are any details in the picture. It seems to work okay with simple geometric shapes.

I’d say that this “tool” isn’t worth using at this time, unless you like to fiddle around trying to transform a clod into a diamond.

Krita has a similar tool and it seems to work. At least David Revoy can make it work. Check out his Youtube video about the Krita colorize mask.

Adding Another Paw to the Giant Tabby

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I painted the beginning of a very nice left front paw for my volcano demon tabby cat. At the moment the colors are out of whack and the paw is a little distracting, but I’ll fix that tomorrow.

It was a great day. The vertigo that bothered me most of yesterday has disappeared. When I get stressed out my body says, “You’re dizzy. Lie down and sleep.” I did, and it worked.

An Inch a day wins the race

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Today I had 30 minutes to work on my book. I carefully selected an inch of work, something I could complete in my limited time. I decided to paint a shirt on my volcano cat and painted her in her Swansea City kit. It was a matter of creating a new layer, picking colors from the reference image, and painting. I gave her the number “7” and put her name on her shirt, and she dreams of scoring goals for Swansea City.

Page 30 with Background and Flat Colors

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Today I painted the background for page 30 and inked Betty Burro and Tuca Moai, and some coloring. I’ll improve the colors tomorrow and clean of other errors.

I’ve been using Krita more often for backgrounds because of its great oil painting brushes. Krita is also very fast with large brushes, unlike Clip Studio Paint, which gets bogged down with brushes that have a texture. Anyway, I use Krita, Clip Studio Paint EX, and Photoshop for almost every picture. Each program has killer features that I need for every page.

3D Tracing Again with Different Body Type

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3dagain.blog.png, Clip Studio Paint EX, 3d Material, Full Body 3D

Another busy day. Thursdays and Fridays are the wackiest days of the week at my part-time job. The customers always turn in there proposals at the last minute for review and critique. Doing everything online takes me much longer than meeting face to face, where I can solve problems in minutes rather than hours.

I tried Clip Studio Paints 3D material again. I dialed a more childlike silhouette for the 3D woman. It still looked too mature, so I drew baggy clothes over the womanly curves. The next step would be to make Betty’s head bigger and arms shorter to get closer to the proportions of a preteen burro. Maybe next time.

Moving on to page 18 where the kids admire a moai

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Week 2 of my part-time job is now history. Six more weeks to go. Hooray!

Today I systematically evaluated 27 proposals and gave it my all for 8 straight hours. Next week I race through the same gauntlet again.

I had a few minutes to work on my book. The idea for this picture is that the kids are staring up at a towering moai. The perspective is wonky, so I’ll work on it tomorrow before I start inking and painting.

Page 17, cleaned up

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Today was a busy day at my Real World job. I knew that today would be crazy — I have to review and critique about 80 submissions. I started yesterday and hope to be done by tomorrow night. I wish myself luck!

Even though I had a crazy day, I still had enough time to make one inch of progress on page 17. I cleaned up some of the paint, fixed some shadows, added some more moai on the volcano’s slope, and added a text bubble. Besides all that, I added some comix fonts to my pc — I lost all of my comix fonts when I made a fresh install of Windows, but I may find them yet on my previous startup drive.

I’m always surprised at how much I can get done when I have little time, when I’m in the right frame of mind. We’ll see how that works out when our new 10-week old puppy becomes part of our family next week.

Pages 14 and 15...Waves and Sand

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Today was the first day of work at my part-time job. All went smoothly, but only a fraction of the expected customers checked in — there are always late comers who don’t quite understand that the program doesn’t have any slack time. Once everyone is here, it will be chaos until I can get everyone acclimated. It’s go, go, go from day one.

I was able to work on page 14, the drowning page, and also add in page 15, which means that I’m about one third of the way through the book. I hope I can maintain a good pace even though I’ll be spending six hours a day on my part-time job. If I start to feel burned out, I’ll lower my expectations for the next couple of months.

Page 12 -- Another Water/Ocean/Wave Picture

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page_12_ver1.blog.png, waves, turbulent ocean, Clip Studio Paint EX, Sinix Brush

I started work today…on my temporary job. I goes for about 8 weeks. Fortunately, I can use my previous supplies to create the material I need for the job. I expect to meet a lot of new people (I work with the public) and have many challenges.

Page 12 shows the kids struggling to withstand the relentless waves that threaten to swamp their boat. I’m going to add another character to this picture tomorrow.