Clipping layers tutorial

If there’s one tool that I think every new digital artist should know, it’s how to use clipping layers. Clipping layers are what separates the savages from the civilized artists. In this tutorial I hope to teach you all about them. Usually when you start out drawing digitally you try to do everything in one…

Vector lineart tutorial

Vector layers are one of the coolest features in Clip Studio and they’re a godsend for doing lineart. They allow you to circumvent a lot of the annoyances with traditional raster lineart, and have a bunch of neat little options that improve your workflow. This article goes in depth into how it works and why…

Tip for drawing curved tubes

If you’ve ever tried to lineart a tube, a rope, or something of that sort where it’s a curved tube volume, you might’ve discovered how hard that is to do accurately by hand. As humans we just have trouble eyeballing this kind of stuff with precision. Thankfully, you don’t need to eyeball it. This is…

Line thickness tip

Have you ever struggled with line thickness and these annoying, thin lines? By default, pen pressure translates linearly to brush size. Meaning, a stroke of 1% pen pressure becomes a line of 1% brush size, 50% pen pressure becomes 50% brush size, etc. And this is where the problem comes from. Those stringy lines appear…

Chinatsu reference sheet

This was a long time coming but I finally made a reference sheet for my main girl, the tan beauty with golden eyes, Chinatsu. :p This serves both as general reference of the character and reference for anyone who might want to draw her. Importantly, it compiles a list of notes about what I find…

Kuro’s top beginner advice

Over the years streaming my drawing on the internet there’s been a number of questions I’ve gotten repeatedly from aspiring viewers in regards to advice for beginners. This is something that I actually feel very strongly about, and in this post I will talk about what I think are some of the biggest and most…

Kuro’s favorite things in 2020

Despite the hell that was the year of 2020, I’m thankful that I’ve had a lot of good things happen too. I finally moved back south after 10 years being away for college, reconnected with some old friends, got my teeth fixed, made this site, made my first piece of merch, and I collected a…

Kuro’s Favorite Games 2019

2019 was a pretty good year in games for me! I played a few really great games that pushed my standards for how good games can be. Here are my informal reviews for them.Sadly, due to some health problems I didn’t manage to play much in the final quarter of the year, and here’s hoping…