Most advice about drawing flashbacks stops at “slap a tone on it.” Which is fine, I guess. It also treats every memory as the same memory, and they're really not.
A guy calmly thinking back to last week, and a guy getting ambushed by something he's spent ten years not thinking about — those shouldn't look the same on the page.
So here's how I split it up in DURRUN. Two standard conventions, the exact tone I default to, and the one specific case where I throw a horizontal line tone at it instead.
MANGA TOOLKIT is a series about the tools I actually use to draw DURRUN — brushes, materials, auto actions, workflow habits. Written for indie manga creators drawing their own pages, with no studio and no assistants.
Two Signals Every Reader Already Knows
Long Flashback: Black Out Everything Around the Panels
When the story leaves the present for a whole scene — a childhood, a betrayal, an origin story — the standard move is to flood the gutters with solid black. Everything around the panels goes dark, and the page announces the jump before you've read a single word.
The reason it works: it's a page-level signal, not a panel-level one. You tell the reader once, up top, and then the art inside the panels can be drawn completely normally. That matters, because you can't bury a five-page scene under texture and still expect anyone to read it.
Short Flashback: Just Change the Panel's Value
When it's a beat instead of a scene — one panel, maybe three — blacking out the gutters is way too big a hammer. So you lay a tone over the panel, its overall value shifts, and the reader clocks the change without slowing down.
This is the everyday case, and it's what I use most. My default is very specific and I've never felt the need to change it:
85 lines · 20% density · circle dot
At 85 lines the dot is fine enough that it doesn't start fighting the linework at print resolution. At 20% it's light enough that your blacks still read as black instead of dissolving into the tone. It moves the panel's value and otherwise shuts up. That's the whole job — a short flashback has to be legible in the half-second the reader spends on it.
The One Those Two Don't Cover
Both of the above say the same thing: this is the past. Calm. Informational. Somewhere the story has travelled to.
But there's a third thing, and it isn't a place you travel to. It shows up uninvited. In DURRUN I use the horizontal line tone specifically for:
- Flashback in the actual clinical sense — an image forcing its way into the present. Not remembering. Being made to remember.
- A split-second recollection — one flash, one panel, gone. Too fast to be a scene.
- The bad ones. Trauma. The memory a character's been steering around for the whole story.
Dot tone is the wrong tool for all three, and it's worth knowing why. A dot screen has no direction and it's even everywhere, so it reads as a soft neutral shift — which is exactly why it's perfect for ordinary recollection. Horizontal lines do the opposite. They're directional. They cut across the panel and slice the image up. At reading speed they don't read as atmosphere, they read as interference. Something breaking in, not somewhere you've gone.
So this isn't a style alternative to the dot tone. It's a different register, and mixing them up is a genuine mistake. Put horizontal lines over a warm nostalgic memory and the page quietly tells your reader something is wrong — because that's what the texture means.
The Auto Action I Use for It
I don't build the tone by hand. There's an auto action on CLIP STUDIO ASSETS that does it in one tap, and I've been running it ever since I found it.
「回想用横線トーンオートアクション」 — Flashback horizontal line tone auto action
CLIP STUDIO ASSETS Content ID: 1967976
Auto action · CLIP STUDIO PAINT PRO/EX · 10 GOLD or 10 CLIPPY
Black version and white version both included
Quick note if you're outside Japan and haven't messed with ASSETS much. GOLD is currency you buy. CLIPPY are points you rack up just by being active in the Clip Studio ecosystem. Ten of either is basically nothing.
I bring it up because a lot of English-speaking indie artists filter ASSETS down to free-only and never see the good paid stuff — which is usually priced like this rather than priced like an actual product. You're skipping a whole library over the equivalent of pocket change.
No affiliation, no sponsorship, no affiliate link. I bought it, I use it, that's the whole relationship.
Black Version, White Version, Different Numbers
The action comes with two variants, and they deliberately don't share line count or density. The reason's stated right on the material page, and it's the kind of thing you only learn by finishing pages: on black, thick lines get hard to read. On white, thin lines are too weak to register.
Two situations, opposite corrections. So the action carries both and you pick based on what's underneath.
The payoff is consistency. A flashback can cross a dark panel, a bright panel, then another dark panel and still read as one continuous intrusion instead of three separate effects.
How I Actually Run It
- Last, not first. The tone goes on after the linework and the main tone work are done. It's a pass over a finished scene, not something I decide panel by panel while drawing.
- Select the area. Usually a whole panel.
- Run black or white depending on what's underneath.
- Keep it on its own layer. Then you can drop the opacity, mask a face back out, or delete the whole pass if the beat turns out not to need it.
Watch It Happen
Thirty seconds, no narration needed:
Watch this reel on Instagram
More short manga-production clips go up on Instagram @aitokitazaki. The ones worth explaining properly end up here.
See It in an Actual Manga
A technique is way easier to judge inside a real story than in a tutorial screenshot. The panel in that clip is from Episode 13, HEADS OR TAILS. Yu-ri's mid-fight, he's losing, and something his opponent says knocks a memory loose that he has absolutely no interest in having. That's the panel.
Read the page before it and the page after it. That's where you'll actually see what the tone is doing — not to the panel, to the pacing.
More from the Toolkit
Manga Speed Lines in One Stroke, Without Covering Your Art
Speed lines are lines, and lines hide the drawing. This free tool lays them down as tone instead.
Manga Hatching: The Brush That Buys Back Your Afternoon
Even hatching takes experience and hours by hand. One brush does it in seconds, and it is worth what it costs.
Manga Sound Effects: The Brush That Writes Like Calligraphy
Why onomatopoeia is part of the drawing and not just text, and the free Clip Studio Paint brush that writes it in one stroke.
Manga Focus Lines in Clip Studio Paint: The One Thing to Get Right
Which sub tool does the work, why there is no correct setting, and the single rule that decides whether a set of focus lines works at all.
Go Read It
Soujun is sixteen, and he lives by one rule: never take a risk. He and his little sister can't afford one.
Then, for her sake, he takes exactly one. A single delivery, off the books, no questions asked.
That one risk turns him into a monster — a Fuser — and drops him, without his ever choosing it, into a world made of nothing but risk: the TOKYO underground.
DURRUN is a neo-TOKYO underground shonen manga. Every episode is free to read in English, right here.
And hey — go read DURRUN. Por favoooor 🙏
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