Speed lines are how manga shows movement. Parallel lines running in the direction of the motion. Take them away and a punch is just an arm stopped in mid-air.
The problem is that speed lines are lines. Add lines on top of a drawing and the drawing goes away. The face you spent an hour on starts disappearing under the marks you added to make it feel fast.
This tool solves that. It lets you lay speed lines down as a tone 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.
Tone Instead of Ink
A normal speed line brush draws black lines. Put them over your art and they fight it. Whatever was underneath is now partly gone.
This tool draws the lines as a tone, so the art keeps showing through. You get the speed without losing the drawing. Line art stays line art, with movement sitting over it instead of on top of it.
Which means you can do the thing that is normally a trade-off: an action panel where the character's face still reads clearly, and the panel still moves.
The Sub Tool I Use
（トーン）ペン型ツール集中線 by hughesuse
CLIP STUDIO ASSETS Content ID: 2005591
Free · Material set · CLIP STUDIO PAINT PRO/EX
In the clip I am using the sub tool 2色流線D.
The set is named for focus lines, but that undersells it badly. It holds nearly forty sub tools — focus lines, flashes, radial bursts, halos, and four speed line variants. The speed lines are the part I reach for.
It is free. For this much, that is a little absurd.
To use it, just draw the shape you want. Straight, curved, bent in the middle — the lines follow the stroke.
No affiliation, no sponsorship, no affiliate link. I use it, that is the whole relationship.
You Can Change It Afterwards
Length and thickness are adjustable in the tool settings, so the same tool covers a fast little panel and a full-page impact without swapping to something else.
The material page also documents a couple of edits I have not needed myself but that are worth knowing about: you can resize the whole thing with the Object tool, thin the lines out by touching near the middle of them, and add more by touching the empty space between them.
Watch It Happen
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
One thing to be straight about: the rubble panel in that clip was set up for the reel. The published page does not have speed lines there.
But the same page does use them, somewhere better. It is page 4 of Episode 25, INSTANT — the close-up of Yu-ri's eye, and the tone sitting just to the right of it.
Here is the moment. Abura has launched a stone at him, and in the instant before it lands Yu-ri notices something: a faint haze around the rubble, and the way its path bent wrong. He is starting to connect two things at once.
What the reader has to see is his eye. That is where the realisation lives. So nothing can go over his face.
But the speed of the thought still has to land. So the lines go in as tone, off to the side, clear of him. Not speed, not impact — a thought moving faster than the stone.
That is the case this tool exists for. In ink you get two options: cover the face, or drop the effect. In tone you get to keep both.
More from the Toolkit
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.
Manga Flashback Tones: Which One Goes with Which Memory
Which tone marks an ordinary recollection, and which one marks a memory a character has been avoiding.
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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