Hello and welcome to my tutorial on brush customization. At first glance, customization can look a little too scary and even for me, it was something I avoided for the longest time. But a little research and plenty of trial and error have thought me that it is rather easy to comprehend. Understanding the brush functions allows us to make adjustments as necessary and even choose the optimal drawing style.

Tool property is the most fundamental and often used settings panel for the brush. It's a summary of sub tool window filled with functions we might need to change the most. Sub tool window consists of every change we can make to the brush. I believe it is more beneficial to discuss when we need each feature rather than going over each one separately. You can already find brief summaries of every function by just hovering your cursor over them.

Therefore, I want to discuss key settings for several brush types, such as lineart brushes and pattern brushes.

Lineart

Let's start with lineart. There are numerous ways of drawing lineart and before we discuss each one separately, I'd like to briefly mention some of the common characteristics of all of them.

Stablization is a must when making flowing lineart. It helps correct the rigid lines into smoother ones. And by adjusting for speed, you can reduce stablization when drawing quickly or increase it when drawing slowly.

The first part was made with no stablization and Adjustment by speed and although I used 30 stabilization for the second half to demonstrate the extreme, I would recommend something around 8 because too much stability will cause the line to lag and slow down.

You can think of this as paper's surface tension in traditional art. When drawing strokes, friction allows you to take more control of your pencil, it doesn't feel like the lines will slip away.

There are 3 main ways of drawing lineart: sharp edged lines, pencils with jittery lines and pixel linearts.

G-pen is a great example of a sharp-edged pen. You can see it most commonly used in webtoons, anime, and doodles. It imitates the fountain pen with its sensitivity to pressure. We can turn this feature on by going to [Sub tool detail]➜[Brush Size] then clicking the tick icon and enabling pen pressure. You can also make adjustments using the graph below.

Dragging the right tip to the upper left corner will expand the tail while dragging the left tip to the down right corner will decrease the amount of paint change from pressure.

Pencil linearts can be the right choice for you if you find the standard sharp-edged lines to be boring. It allows the illustration to have more personality and gets rid of the standard clean look. Clip studio already offers default pencil brushes you can use but if you want to change and tinker with it, it's really easy to just create your own version.

First of let's start with constructing a brush tip for our pencil. Start with a new canvas, don't worry about the size as long as it isn't too big or too small that it becomes hard to draw you're good to go. Set the layer to gray. monochrome also works but it limits the color to black and white and nothing in between.

Now we can draw the brush tip. We'll start with a cube. For pencils, the lines are never completely perfect and smooth so the goal here is to add holes into it to imitate texture. I'll use a soft brush to blend some edges too.

Now that we have a brush tip go to [Edit]➜[Register Material] ➜[Image...] You'll end up with material property window open. From there select Use for brush tip shape, save it to any desired location, and also add a tag for easy access

Now we'll continue with duplicating a brush. I'll duplicate the g-pen since it doesn't have too many adjustments made into it and name it pencil brush. Now we can modify this into our desired brush.

Open sub tool detail from the wrench icon and start by setting anti-aliasing to none.

Go to brush tip and click material, add tip shape that we made earlier set the direction to horizontal and lower the thickness to about 50% and set brush density to 70%. Click the little icon to the right to it. enable pen pressure and random and set min value to 5 and max to 75. change pen pressure graph accordingly. click adjust brush density by gap. set angle to direction of line .

Go to stroke and set the gap to narrow. check the blend brush tips with darken.

Finally, we need to add texture. I'll pick out a texture from the web. I'll use this jeans texture I found on pixabay just by importing it into a new canvas and registering it as image material.

Later going back to sub tool detail, go to texture. Set texture mode to outline, scale ratio to 20 and texture density to 50. Then enable apply by each plot. Click the icon next to texture density to enable pen pressure and change the graphic accordingly.

Next I also want to touch upon pixel lineart. When making pixel art make sure to keep anti-aliasing and stabilization to none. Otherwise, the lines will come out blurry and laggy. After you make sure of these, you just need to keep the brush size at 1.

Pattern Brushes

It can get very monotone and tiring to draw an object repeatedly. For instances like these, Clip Studio gives us the ability to make brushes made up of recurring images. To give an example lets make a pearl brush.

 

Let's start drawing the pearl! Start with a circle and fill it in. Then place a rough idea of colors.

Blend the colors together and add a glaze on top with white. Keep on blending until you are satisfied.

And we're done. Don't forget to merge all the layers and register the material as an image check use for brush tip shape, save it to a location and tag it.

We'll duplicate a brush similar to what we want the end result to be. I chose the chain brush now all you need to do is go to brush tip click on the brush tip image and insert the pearl you made. And that's it!

Conclusion

I hope you learned something out of this tutorial and thank you for reading!