 Hello! Today I'll share with you everything I know about Clip Studio Paint's brushes and how to make them. I have been kindly sponsored by Clip Studio Paint for this video, and as it is my main art program, I'm more than happy to make this content for you all. First, let's get started by looking at the menu for brushes. You can find the buttons for each different kind of brush here on the toolbar. Each category has their own subcategories, and you can make a new subcategory simply by dragging any brush over to the top of the menu where the names are. You could even drag one to the toolbar if you wanted to, and to rename any category or any brush, right-click it and go to the settings. In case you happen to accidentally get rid of a default tool and you want it back, in the top-left corner of each panel is a menu button with three horizontal stripes where you can click and go to Add from Default, and from there you can find and bring back any default tool that you're missing. All these different tools may be in different categories, but that's only for organization's sake. They all use the same brush setting system that we will look into soon. To learn these brush settings for yourself most effectively, I recommend duplicating any brush to make a disposable version and treat it like a testing dummy for trying out anything you like. I'm gonna duplicate this basic solid round brush of mine. It's similar to the default pen called G-Pen as it does nothing else than change size based on pen pressure. This kind of basic brush without any special features is by far my most used brush, and it's also a good base for creating more brushes off of in my opinion. I'll put this one and these two other ones that I also use pretty often up for free download on my comboard page. These were the ones I used in the little speed paint of my previous Clip Studio Paint tutorial, and some comments were asking for them, so here you go. To import brushes from your computer files, all you have to do is drag the file from your folder into your brushes in Clip Studio Paint. And to import brushes from the Clip Studio Assets that you can go to from the launcher, just download your chosen brushes and they will appear in your Materials panel in Clip Studio Paint. From there, go to the category called Download and just drag the file over to your brushes. Now we're ready to dive into the brush settings, but a quick disclaimer first, I can't cover every single setting in detail or we'd be here for like two hours, so I'll try to go over as many things as possible and focus on the most important ones that you should know of. Open the brush settings from the little wrench icon in the bottom right. In the settings, most of them have this eye icon on the left of it and this little button on the right of it. The eye icon makes the setting to be shown in the tool properties menu back there, so you should enable it for any settings that you plan to adjust on the fly. The small button on the right is where you find the settings for dynamics, so essentially what things are going to affect that setting. Pen pressure is the classic one. This dynamics menu is used for a lot of different settings, so it's really useful to understand how it works. On this list, you can pick exactly which input methods affect your setting. In this case, what is affecting our brush size? Aside from pen pressure, there can also be pen tilt, so that brush could for instance get bigger if you're tilting the pen a lot, and there's pen velocity, so you could set it up that if you moved your pen really fast, the line would be thinner, for example. And lastly, a randomness option. Turning that on would randomize the size of the line, so you could use it for a really cheatery line effect if you wanted to. Personally, when it comes to the dynamics, I only really use the pen pressure and sometimes the randomizer option, but the other things can be useful too if that's what you were looking for. And here we have the minimum value sliders, which means in this case, what is the smallest brush size that the brush can output? If you put this slider to 50, even if you're only pressing a tiny amount on your pen, the brush will never get smaller than 50% of your selected brush size. This can be good for some art styles or some kinds of brushes, it's up to what you prefer. The graph here on the bottom is where you can fine tune how much pressure results in what kind of brush size change. When the line is straight, it means that pressing 1% more on your pen will result in the brush size increasing by 1%. If you drag the curve downwards, it will make it so that the size will stay quite small until you're pressing really hard. And the opposite, if you move the curve up in this way, it will mean you don't have to press much for the brush size to already increase significantly. The way you set up your pen pressure curve on your brushes depends on how much you like to press with your pen and what kind of look you want for your brush. This is where you should do a lot of testing to get the brush that feels the most comfortable for you personally. I would suggest tweaking and fine tuning this between each of your drawings based on how you felt about it. And here's where I want to give a tip to people that like to press really lightly on their pen. And by the way, I do recommend pressing fairly lightly on your pen because being relaxed and not tensing up is really important for avoiding injuries. The idea is to cut the amount of pen pressure you need to go from 0 to 100 by half by adjusting the graph like this. You're able to do this trick in the settings of some tablets themselves, but for those that cannot, you can just do this in the brush settings. Now you'll only have to press down half way on your pen to get the maximum output for your brush. So 50% pressure equals 100% brush size output. If you're planning to do this through Clip Studio Paint, remember to adjust each of the brushes that you more frequently use. This idea was a lifesaver for me as someone who presses quite lightly on their pen and it has spared me a bunch of tension, so I recommend trying it if you are the same. Next, in the ink menu, we have the settings for opacity, blending mode and color mixing. First, opacity means the transparency of your brush. If you want an opaque brush like this one, that's what you'll need to tweak. Don't forget that for the majority of these settings, you can adjust the pen pressure curve just like we did for the brush size. The blending mode settings work like the blending modes for your layers only that it's applied to your brush instead. And here it's important to note that if you want a brush to be an eraser, you need to pick erase from this menu. I mostly use these blending modes with the airbrush. I'll sometimes turn it to overlay or multiply when I want to use either of those effects on my drawing without actually making a new layer for it. So if you want to do the same, navigate to your airbrush or whatever brush you're planning to use this with and click the eye icon to make this drop-down menu show up there on the side. So it's easy to change when you need it. The color mixing options are a little tricky and hard to explain in words, but essentially with this, you're making your brush mixed with the existing colors on the canvas. I would encourage you to take a look at the notes and images when you hover each option and then to test them all on the canvas until you find the right combination that feels good to you. I tried a lot to understand them, but I don't think I was able to grasp them well enough to explain them properly to you, so I'm sorry about that. Note that this mixing effect won't work on an empty layer, so you'll need to put down some colors first before testing. So if you're feeling stuck, I think it's totally fine to look up other people's brushes for guidance on specific settings. But of course, don't make a total replica of anyone else's brush and give credit if you were inspired a lot by someone. Color Cheater is a somewhat new feature to Clip Studio Paint and with this, you can randomize the color of your brush. The first option is to randomize every brush tip shape that is drawn and the second is to randomize each stroke only. Now for that first part to make any sense, you should know how the program actually makes a brush stroke. It paste circles really frequently close together so frequently that what comes out in the end is just a line. So with this, you're able to change the colors of each individual super closely stacked together circle that is within your brush stroke. Go ahead and tweak the sliders and the amount of randomness to get some fun results. If you'd instead like for every separate brush stroke to be a different color, use the second section of options instead. Remember that here too, you have the dynamic settings that can greatly affect the outcome. Next, we have anti-aliasing, which changes the edges of your brush. It's hard to see the difference when zoomed out, but zoom in and you will see that you can make the edges pixel perfect or varying degrees of smooth. Let's move on to the brush shape category. Here you have some brush shape presets that you can use if you like. They can be a good starting point for some types of brushes. The default brush tip is a circle. The hardness option can blur it out so it becomes softer closer to an airbrush. The thickness setting can squish or stretch your brush tip from the top or decides 100 is the normal unstretched value for this. With the angle option, you can turn the brush tip and you can also make it flipped if you want. The angle mainly comes in useful when you're using a brush tip that is not circular. By the way, you can see your brush tip there on the bottom so you can see the changes you're making to it more clearly. And lastly, the brush density option, it makes your brush have a bit of a softer look. You can see it pretty clearly on the preview when you turn down the slider or turn on the pen pressure dynamics. This menu is also where you can change your brush shape to something else than a circle. As a simple example, let's make a square brush. You'll likely have to make a new custom brush tape for this. It's really simple once you have seen how to do it, so let me show you. First, make a new canvas and take care when choosing a canvas size because too small might make your brush appear pixelated and too big might make it lag. For this simple square brush, I'll use a canvas of 200 pixels. And next, this is really important. You must select either grayscale or monochrome here. Otherwise, the brush will not pick up colors from the color wheel. How it works is that whatever is black will become your main drawing color and whatever is white uses the sub-drawing color. Transparent stays transparent. If you forgot to pick this mode, you can also change any layer to it in the layer properties panel. Now, because we're making a square brush, just fill the whole square shaped canvas with black. Then go to edit, register material and image. Give your brush shape a name. I'll call it square test one. Check the use for brush tip shape box here and navigate to the brush folder here. And lastly, to find it easier, you can give it your own tag. I'll just tag it with test. Now let's go back to the brush tip settings and click up here to make the tip and material instead of a circle. Then click here and find your new test brush shape from the menu. Over on the side are all the tags. Here is the test tag. And here is the square that we just made. I should also mention that you can add more than one brush shape to be used at the same time and it will cycle through each one. But for a basic painting brush, you most likely want to use just one. And now our brush is a square. To make it function better though, we'll have to adjust some of these settings. In the angle dynamics menu, you can select direction of pen or direction of line. So the square gets rotated according to the direction of our pen. You can also mess around with the thickness to make it more rectangular. If it looks really rough around the corners, you can decrease the gap between each brush shape that is drawn over here in these stroke settings. That will make it look smoother, but might make it laggy if you make the value too small. This adjusts how close to each other each brush tip is repeated. And here you also have the options for what way they get repeated if you have multiple ones. Next in the spraying effect options, you can turn your brush into a scattering one. For these kind of brushes, you will have two things that you need to adjust for brush size. The usual brush size now becomes the area in which the shapes are scattered. Particle size is the actual size of the brush tip shapes. So definitely make this shown on the side for any of your scattering brushes. Particle density means how many shapes it scatters each time. So instead of the usual one circle that is drawn, you can set it to scatter five circles, for example. Deviation makes it look more random and the direction of particle tweaks which way the shapes are facing. An example of a brush I made that uses these settings would be this background leaf brush. And of course, you can make all these settings dynamic using pen pressure or any of the other options by clicking the buttons on the right. Textures are next and Clip Studio Paint has some nice textures by default that you can use to make a textured brush of your own. But since I'm here to show you how you can make things all on your own, I'll also quickly show you how to create your own custom texture. It's pretty similar to making a brush tip like we did before, but with a few extra steps. First, you need to have a texture. So either make one, take a photo or get one from the internet. For this example, I looked up a royalty free paper texture. So let me open that up. Even if your picture isn't black and white to begin with, make sure to turn on the grayscale mode in Clip Studio Paint in the layer properties. Then what you should do is edit your texture so that the lightest parts become white and the darkest parts become black. I'll use the levels adjustment layer to do that. When you're done adjusting, merge the layers by selecting each of them by control clicking them and then right click and emerge layers. Then it should be all on one layer. Then as the last thing you need to do, edit, convert brightness to transparency. Now all we have left on the canvas is black in varying transparencies. It's important to do this step or else the texture won't work on a brush. Now we're done. So go to edit, register material, image again, and then here give it a name, check use for paper texture this time, save it in image materials or wherever you prefer and give it a tag if you like. Now it's ready and if we go back to the brush settings, you'll be able to find it in the menu and pick it for your brush. To briefly explain these settings too, texture density is the strength of your texture. So how much of it is applied basically? Invert and emphasize, do what they say, try them out and scale is the size so that you can zoom your texture in or out. You can turn the texture too if you need with the rotation angle and you can fine tune the texture's brightness and contrast. So you don't have to make a whole new texture if you didn't crank up the contrast high enough before saving it. I would pay some extra attention to the scale. Test your brush and set the scale so that the texture looks best on the brush size that you typically use or that you're planning to use. If you're trying to make a pencil brush, for instance, make the brush size small. And likewise, if you're making a big paint brush for making big expressive strokes, test it on different large brush sizes. For the latter example, you might find that you need to look for a higher resolution texture. This apply by each plot decides if the texture is applied to your brush stroke as a whole or if it's applied to each brush tip. But again, this is one of those settings that doesn't make much sense until you test it for yourself. Same goes for the list of texture modes. Each gives a different look to your brush so there isn't much else to do other than test the options on your brush until you find a combination that you like. I'm personally a fan of the outline and subtract modes when the apply by each plot setting is turned on. And with that, we've gone through all the most important settings that affect the looks of your brush. The rest of them I find to be very self-explanatory so I'm not going to go through them individually. There are options for a watercolor-like edge. There's the vector eraser settings, this tabulation and other correction settings, options for making specific types of starting and ending looks for your brush strokes and even anti-overflow so your brush doesn't go outside of the line art. Next, for the second part of this video, I would like to give you some general tips for what things to consider when you are making new brushes. First off, decide what parts of your art you're going to use that brush for. Then you can consider the so-called main features of the brush. There are many things that make up a brush as we have just learned but the final look most often boils down to the softness of the edge and the amount of texture. I put together this chart to give you some ideas. So if you've decided you want to make a brush for line art, you'll probably want the edge to be hard and then some amount of texture or none depending on what you prefer. Once you've decided what edge and texture quality you need, then you can start thinking about the finer details that will get you to the precise look that you want. Those details are things like what shape the brush tip will be if the brush will have opacity or if it will be solid, how much, it will change size, and so on. Zooming in on your favorite artist's work is a good idea if you want some inspiration and note that blur isn't the only way to achieve a soft edge. You can give the impression of a medium or soft edge also by using different brush tip shapes that have interesting variations in them. Then you'll need to be patient and give yourself time to test and fine tune the settings of your brush. Try drawing some simple things with it. That's often the best for figuring out what you still might need to change. If you are a beginner to art or even just new to the digital side of things, I think the most important thing regarding brushes is to keep asking yourself while you draw. What do I wish that this brush would do? It can take a while, but I often came to realizations when I found myself thinking, oh, it would be easier if the brush didn't do this or that. That's why I personally use really basic brushes most of the time because they're easier for me to control. Sometimes if you download other people's brushes, you might even come across ones that feel super good for you to use. And in those cases, it can be really helpful to go and try to figure out what exactly makes it look or feel good for you. So then you can replicate that in your own brushes too. Then next, I want to give some advice specifically for creating brushes of plants or other special things. I know it seems really difficult and intimidating at first, but I promise it's not. The only thing it really is is time consuming. When it comes to these kind of special brushes, it's important to study and refer to both real photos and art that you like, both at the same time. For example, compare a picture of a forest and a picture of an anime background. Here is an example of a photo that I took and a background from a visual novel and how I would go about analyzing them for the brushes that were used. Study what kind of shapes and textures you see in real life and then find out how your favorite artists have conveyed those things convincingly in their art. What kind of edges, textures and shapes did their brushes make to do that? See how the basic principles from real life are all there but conveyed in a pleasing and simplified way. I really recommend studying photos and art in this way. Here is another example from my own work and photo. When I created several foliage brushes to speed up the work on this background, I studied the photo and figured out all the things I needed, how to simplify them and how much detail to draw them in. When it comes to detail in particular, remember that having everything in high detail can look overwhelming. So most of the time, as long as you have the rough shape, that's good enough. When you go further back, it's best to simplify even more, like by using a simple texture brush to indicate clumps and areas of grass instead of using a special grass brush with lots of details. Then next, I have a couple of technical tips for these kind of brushes as well, things that I run into myself. Nature is very random, so always add at least a couple of different brush tip shapes so that the result doesn't become super repetitive unless you're going for a specific simplistic look, of course. This leaf scatter brush, for example, has six different leaf shapes. This fern brush has, God knows how many different simple ferns. You can also change which way they get repeated here in the stroke settings. I usually pick the random option for brushes like this. And this leads me to another point. When you make your brush tip shapes, you need to take into account their sizes, not in pixels, but relative to each other. In this fern brush, I have ferns of different sizes and shapes. So to ensure that they all stay relative in size with the small ferns looking small in comparison to the bigger ones, I had to decide the canvas size for the brush tip based on the largest fern. Then I would save each brush tip shape so each fern on the same canvas size, even though the smaller shapes would have a lot of empty space around them because of that. But that's exactly what I needed in this scenario. If there's no empty space around the smaller shapes, they're all going to end up the same size in your brush. When the brush draws the shapes, it includes the empty space too. You also need to be mindful of the padding in other cases, like if you want each shape to connect to each other like a ribbon, you can't have any empty space on the sides of the brush tip and the height also needs to stay consistent so that the shapes connect at the right spots. I hope these examples make it clear what I'm trying to explain. So that's pretty much all the tips I can think of for making brushes. I hope that with this, you will now be able to create the kind of brush that you were hoping for. If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to ask me in the comments. Thank you so much for watching and have a wonderful day.