Clip Studio Paint - Ways to Quickly Fill Your Lineart ( + tool files!)

Does coloring your art take you a long time? Even when you're as careful as possible, do you sometimes discover you accidentally left transparent gaps in your colors? Or what if you have a tiny gap in your lineart, causing your fill bucket to fill up the whole image? Flatting an image can be a pain in the neck unless you take your time with it.

Thankfully, Clip Studio Paint has tools that can make this process almost instantaneous.

Fill Bucket 

The way most people fill their lineart in is with the fill bucket tool. But doing this can leave behind some white gaps and can take a long time if your lineart is complicated. 

The Clip Studio Paint fill bucket tool has settings we can manipulate to make much faster, cleaner fills. 

If you go to the Tool Property panel, you can see the settings of your current tool. Select the fill bucket tool and take a look at the settings. If some settings don't show up, click the wrench in the bottom corner of the panel to open up the Sub Tool Detail panel, which will show you all the settings available for your tool.

Some settings that can help you make better fills:

Close gap - this setting will make your fill bucket detect small gaps in your lineart and opt to fill them in so your colors don't spill outside the lineart. The meter bar determines how strong or sensitive this detection is.

Fill narrow areas - this setting will make your fill bucket fill in little crevices of pixels that it would normally skip over.

Color margin - this setting determines the margin of error for coloring. Basically, it controls the sensitivity of how the fill bucket determines what it can and cannot color. The higher the number, the more sensitive. I recommend playing around with this slider a bit to figure out what's optimal for your workflow.

Area scaling - this setting causes the filled area to be expanded by the given number of pixels. For example, if you set the slider to 2px,  the color will go 2px beyond the inner edge of the lineart. This is good for preventing transparent gaps and making sure even the narrowest parts of the lineart are adequately filled.

The multiple referring setting controls what the fill bucket will react to. You can make it ignore certain types of layers or take preference over others. 

If you click and hold down while using the fill bucket, you can drag it over multiple areas you want to fill at once. This can make the process a lot faster!

There are many more settings you can manipulate to get the results that work best for your art style. Play around with them! I attached my own personal fill bucket tool below, if you'd like similar settings to mine.

Fill Lasso

The Fill Lasso tool is an underappreciated gem from Clip Studio Paint - it works similarly to a fill bucket, except it works like a lasso tool.

The settings are pretty identical to the ones for the fill bucket. Using the same settings across all of these tools will help to keep your work consistent.

If you change the Target Color to "all enclosed areas" and draw a circle around your lineart, it'll fill like this:

Or, if you change it to "All enclosed areas including transparency," it'll let you lasso color anywhere on the canvas! This isn't really practical for coloring lineart, but I like it for thumbnailing compositions.

I attached my Fill Lasso settings below.

Advanced Fill

Finally, the holy grail of Clip Studio Paint's fill options: the Advanced Fill tool. To literally fill your lineart in with a couple clicks, make a new layer under your lineart layer, then go to Edit > Advanced Fill. This will open up a menu like so:

Here, you can adjust the settings the same way you did with the Fill Bucket and Fill Lasso. Like before, the Target Color settings will decide how the Advanced Fill behaves when interacting with your canvas. You can set it to only fill within a certain color, or to only work a totally transparent layer.

When you click OK, your lineart will fill by itself! Although this isn't a perfect science, it usually fills it almost perfectly depending on the Target Color mode selected.

Reference Layers

To make all of these tools work to the best of their abilities, I highly recommend setting your lineart layer as your Reference Layer (the lighthouse button on the Layers panel). This basically tells CSP that all of your tools set to refer to the Reference Layer must behave within those lines. 

This becomes really useful when you have multiple sets of lineart. For example, if you have a background lineart layer and a character lineart layer, but just want to color the characters, you can just set the character layer to Reference Layer and then automatically fill in just those areas.

For my own convenience, I turned the Advanced Fill into two auto actions (one that behaves with Reference layers, and one that works with any lineart). I attached those files below!

Fill Gaps

If you find that you still have some white spots left over after adjusting your settings, you can easily fill them in using the Paint Unfilled Area tool. 

Just draw over whatever area has open gaps, and they'll automatically be filled in with your current brush color. 

I attached my own version of this tool, which I have lovingly dubbed the Gap-Filler, below!

--

I hope this is helpful to anyone looking to speed up their workflow! I use a combo of all of these tools to color my illustrations and comics. 

Thanks for reading!