Clip Studio Paint presents a tremendous working environment for a cartoonist. Most your work is done in panels that neatly crops your lines inside the panel borders. And, overall, that’s great. Except when you want to break that border. Then, you have to plan ahead. This three-minute video tutorial walks you through an excellent strategy for taking your composition game to the next level.

Clip Studio Paint — The ‘Blocker Layer’ Method… and a couple of its uses

As the video states, it’s a good idea to set up your layers in advance to facilitate this strategy on the fly. My standard comics-page template has all of these layers pre-formatted and in position, so I’m ready to go every time I start a new page. Here’s a look at how my layers are positioned…

Please note: The first part of the video is left silent intentionally.