Introduction

Hello! Thanks for taking the time to join me for today's lesson.

 

I adore the brush features we have available for use in Clip Studio Paint. In this lesson, I'll show you how you can use the brush features to break down complex shapes and elements to make this season's holiday decorating easy... at least in our illustrations.

 

I'm dividing this lesson up into parts because some of it is basic, more beginner-friendly type material and then the rest of it moves up more towards the intermediate level. If you're already comfortable with making your own brushes, please feel free to skip over the parts you already know.

 

✔ Select and customize the Basic brushes that come with Clip Studio

✔ How to use colors with the brush features

✔ Design and use your first Custom Brushes

 

✔ Design and use your very own seamless Ribbon brushes, using only the basic Clip Studio tools

✔ Stack, combine, and re-use designs to create maximum details in very little time

 

I'll also conclude this tutorial with a few time-saving tips.

 

Unfortunately, the sound did not work in this video. I'll have to work on my video and animation skills, and figure out how to add the narration back in.

 

Here's the video! If you're not sure about a step, I've written documentation below. I've tried to describe each step thoroughly, and included screenshots.

Scope

This tutorial is at a beginner to intermediate level. It's helpful if you have some knowledge of the basic CSP interface. If you've never used digital brushes before, you may want to familiarize yourself with the basic concepts first, so that you know where all the controls are.

Follow-Along Materials

I've created a Material Catalog that you can use as you follow this tutorial. You can download it here:

Of course, you don't have to use my materials! Feel free to build your own worlds. The materials are simply there to help you, in case you get stuck.

Step 1: Customize a Marker Brush

First, let's play around with brush customization a little bit. In your Tools menu, find the Flat Marker brush, and choose it.

 

Then, find the Tool Property palette.

 

Tip: If you can't find a window or a palette, you can always locate it from the top pull-down menu under "Window".

If at any time you can't find a setting for a brush in the Tool Property palette, click on the small wrench icon in the lower right hand corner of the palette. That will bring up the Sub Tool Detail palette. The Sub Tool Detail palette contains all the custom settings available for that particular brush.

 

In the settings menu, you can choose which settings appear in the palette by clicking the eye which appears next to each setting. This helps to eliminate clutter on the screen.

Using the basic Flat Marker brush, we're now going to make a new brush tip for a Custom brush. I will show you how to turn this simple brush tip into the lovely garland above.

 

But first: perhaps the most important step of all. Before I go any further, let's talk about colors.

Clip Studio Paint can only apply custom color functions, such as Color Jitter (more on this later!) to a Grayscale brush tip. If your brush tip contains color information, even if the brush tip APPEARS black-and-white, the custom color functions won't work with your brush.

 

So how do we get around this?

 

Easy: Before you draw your brush tip, if you wish to use the color changing function, make sure you draw the brush tip on a GRAYSCALE layer.

 

Change the layer to grayscale in the Layer Properties palette, shown below.

There may be times when you wish to add a color brush tip. This brush tip would not change color even if you change the active color in the palette. In this case, leave the layer color expression to Color.

 

Before you draw for this exercise, first ensure that you're working on a grayscale layer for your brush tips. This will allow your final garland brushes to be colored "on-the-fly" to match your preference for that particular drawing.

 

Now, back to the subject at hand!

 

With your Flat Marker brush selected, open the Sub Tool Detail panel by clicking the wrench icon. Here, I have changed the Brush Thickness from 30 (default) to 100, just to make it more round when I use it to draw my new custom brush tip.

 

 

Step 2: Make A Custom Brush Tip

Now, it's time to draw the custom brush tip. Make sure that you are drawing on your grayscale layer. Draw a rough circle in black. Then select white, and draw a white circle inside the black one, slightly off-center, as shown:

Before we can create a custom brush, we have to create a new brush tip, and save it as a brush tip material. First I want to select my brush tip. An easy way to do this is with the Shrink Selection tool, which will automatically select your brush tip without selecting transparent pixels around it. You can find it in your Selection Tools palette. The icon looks like Lasso Select.

 

Another way is to create a selection from the layer in the Layer palette, as shown:

Now, with your brush tip selected as you prefer, go to the Edit drop-down menu and choose the option "Register Material", and select "Image".

Now, save the image in a folder location where you can remember it. If you're not familiar with the folder system yet, just FYI- you can create a folder for your own use, to organize materials as you create them. That's the type of folder that I'm using here.

 

I'm also tagging it with a search tag in the Information, so that I can find it.

 

Most important, make sure that your click the option "Use for brush tip shape" below the image of the brush tip. If you don't do this, the brush tip will not work.

Step 3: Create a New Custom Brush

Now, it's time to make your custom brush. In the Sub Tool palette, click the hamburger menu located next to the sub tool name, as shown. Then, select the option "Create new custom sub tool".

You'll get a dialog that looks something like this. Go ahead and put in whatever settings you want for your brush. Here are the options that I chose:

Once you have created your new custom brush, navigate to it in the tool panel and choose it. Then, click on the small wrench to open up the brush options panel, just as you did at the beginning of step 1.

Now, it's time to add the custom brush tip that you created. In the sub to detail panel, navigate to the brush tip option on the left hand side. You'll see a dialog that allows you to add one or more custom brush tips to your brush.

Use the dialog to navigate to your brush tip, and add it to your brush.

You should have something that looks like what I have illustrated above. Notice how the brush tip is now painting in two colors, black and white? It's because I've changed my primary color to black, and my secondary color to white.

 

But since I saved my brush as grayscale, if I change my primary and secondary colors in my palette and then use this brush to paint on a color layer, I can make it paint in whatever combination of colors I want.

The result is a brush that will do this, which is nice. It looks like a string or a vine. I could probably use this elsewhere for a different drawing, but it's not quite what I want for evergreen tree needles.

Step 4: Edit Your Custom Brush

Let's make two adjustments:

 

I want to space the strokes out more, so that more of the white will show. And then, I want to fix it so that I get a nice taper at the end, but not too sharp of a point.

 

With Clip Studio's brush tools, you can dial in the exact taper that you want, for use in whatever species of plant you want to draw.

 

I'm taking inspiration from a juniper bush that I took photos of while in South Dakota.

The ends of the needles are not pointed. They are shorter and stubby, unlike pine needles, which are long and feathery.

Some of the shrubs had berries on them. I chose not to draw them for this example, but I fully plan on making a juniper brush with berries added to it. The berries will look nice as an accent in a rustic Christmas garland.

I didn't forget to document the overall shape and distribution of the branches. I'll keep all this in mind as I draw out the brush tip.

I noticed right away that juniper needles aren't just short and stubby. They're also kind of bumpy, if you look at them close up. So, I want to space out my brush tip to make some bumps.

Find the Stroke option in your sub tool detail menu, and select the first option with a dot. With this option, you can manually adjust the gap for the brush tip. The stroke preview will show your adjustments. Here are the settings I used.

 

You can also use the brush tip spacing to do cool things, like draw dotted lines.

Next, let's adjust the taper. Find the Brush Size option in the sub tool detail panel.

Use the Brush Size Dynamics panel to reduce the taper of the line. Here are the settings I used.

Now, my pen will respond to pressure, but it will not draw the line too small.

 

Since our brush tip is two colors, the direction of our stroke will affect the colors, and create a sort of three-dimensional effect.

 

The final result is a brush that will do this:

Step 5: Create A Custom Ribbon Brush for the First Branch

Now, it's time to draw the branches. On the grayscale layer, draw a line first, to act as a guide. Holding shift will make a straight line.

Then, add the needles to your branch, like this. Drawing up and down, as well as varying line weights, keeps the shape from becoming too monotonous.

I want to make this into a ribbon brush. In order to make this brush tip seamless, I select one end of the branch using my Rectangle Selection tool.

Next, choose the Object tool, or the Move Layer tool. Either one will work.

 

Holding Shift to keep a straight line (therefore keeping the brush tip aligned and seamless), move the bottom end of the brush tip to the top, as shown.

Use the custom brush you made to fill in the gap. Make sure not to draw past the top border of the brush tip. Now, it's time to turn this into a ribbon brush. But first, a word about selecting and saving your brush tips.

When you select your brush tip, everything you select, including empty pixels, becomes part of the brush tip. Most times, we do not want any empty space in our brush tip. This is especially true for ribbon brushes, which need to be seamless and have no empty pixels in between the brush tips.

 

You can do this in one of two ways. The first way is to create a selection from the layer, in the Layers palette. The other way is to use the shrink selection tool. Either one of these will give you a brush tip that has no empty pixels around the outside of it.

 

You can see how I have the brush tip selection made, above. But keep in mind what I've said here. Soon, we'll do the opposite.

 

Next, make a new custom brush, as before. The stroke preview looks weird, but we'll fix that next.

Go back to Stroke options and choose "Ribbon". Now you can draw branches effortlessly.

Optional: If you want to draw in the other direction, you can change the direction of the brush tip 180° in brush tip options under Angle.

The result is a brush that will do this:

We're getting closer.

Step 6: Assemble the Big Branches

Next, I will use this brush to draw a bigger branch. I ended up with this.

I think I'll make 5 seeds for the final ribbon tip. Here's what I came up with in just a few minutes.

This is where we're now going to select empty pixels when we create the brush tips.

Step 7: Assemble A Multi-Seed Stroke Brush with Angle and Color Jitter

Now we'll make the next few brush tips. Here's how I want these branches to behave:

 

• I want them to branch out at random angles from a central line.

• I want them to populate in a random order and spacing.

• I want them to be fairly random in size and shape.

 

In order for these branches to stick out from a central point, the center point of the brush tip, which is also its pivot point, must lie at the base of the stem, as shown in this diagram.

So in order to position the pivot points for these next few brush tips at the base of the stems, I'll use my Rectangle Selection tool to select past the bottom of these brush tips.

 

In anticipation, I've made the brush tips roughly the same size and I've made some guides for my Rectangle tool to snap to, so that the selected area for each brush tip will be roughly twice as tall as the brush tip being selected.

 

I selected my Rectangle tool and made sure Enable Snapping is turned on.

This makes it easy to select the area for each of the next 5 brush tips.

When you create these brush tips, you'll see that each one contains some empty space. This is intended.

Continue until you have all 5 brush tips. Next, create a new custom brush, and add the 5 custom brush tips you just created. It will look like this.

In your brush tip options, adjust the Angle of the brush tip to follow the line. You will probably have to rotate the brush tip. I rotated mine 90 degrees.

 

The desired effect is beginning to appear.

Next, adjust the Random slider in the brush tip angle Dynamics settings. A setting of 25 spreads the branches out. It's looking better.

I went with 35 on the slider, and decided that was enough.

At this point, I drew a horizontal ruler to draw along, since I'm almost ready to draw my final Ribbon brush tip. That's the little green line that you see in this screenshot.

But wait! There's more!

 

In order to maximize the realism and interest of our Christmas garland, I want to vary the colors just a little. Find the Color Jitter setting next. I won't bother with Hue or anything, but I will add some variation of the Luminosity of both the primary and secondary colors.

At this point, it's time to use this third brush to create our final ribbon brush tip. Here's a screenshot of all those lovely details.

I was able to make the brush seamless in one step, and filled in any thin spots.

Step 8: Assemble and Test the Final Ribbon Brush

Finally, it's time to create the final ribbon brush.

 

Ensure that your layer is grayscale. Create a selection from the layer, so that no empty pixels find their way into your ribbon, and save the brush tip. Then, create a ribbon brush from this brush tip, as you did before.

 

Now, it's time to test your brush. Create a color layer this time, and change your palette colors to a dark green and a light green. When you draw, you should get something that looks like this:

And the evergreen ribbon brush is finished!

I even put in the juniper berries, using a scattering brush that I created.

 

Now, your garland is ready to decorate for the upcoming holidays. Now, it's time to add decorative elements to this garland to make it look more festive. I've given you a good start on learning how to build up ribbon brushes, and it's up to you to run with it. See if you can figure out how to make a ribbon brush for things like tinsel and colorful lights!