Hey, there! I’m Sarah, and today I will show you how I make a custom color palette for colorful digital illustrations in Clip Studio Paint.

Setting Up a Custom Color Palette

You are probably already at least a little familiar with the color-picker wheel and eyedropper tools on your CSP workspace, but lemme show you a few tricks you might not know, which will help you maintain consistency and cohesiveness in your colorful illustrations — This is especially helpful if you are creating a series of artworks, a comic, or a set of some sort, in which you want to have the same color scheme across all pieces of the group.

If you click on the tab next to the Color Wheel tab, it will show the Color Sets tab.

In the color set drop-down menu, you can see there are also a few preset color sets you can use, if those fit your work better…

 

…OR you can make a new color set by hitting the little wrench icon to open the Edit Color Sets window, and selecting Create New Set.

Type the name for your new color set, then hit OK.

 

(You can also delete, duplicate, or otherwise organize and edit your color sets here.)

 

It will then pull up your clean, new color set in the Color Set tab!

(You can Import color set palettes with this button on the top right, but I’ve never personally used that feature yet.)

Now it’s time to select the colors for your new palette.

Selecting and Adding Colors to the New Set

When you have selected a color (as if you were going to use it), right click on an empty square in your new palette, and hit Add Color to add it to the new color set.

The three buttons on the bottom right are also for Replace, Add, and Delete color.

 

 

In the menu at the top left of the color window, there is a vast array of other options as well — You can even REARRANGE THE ORDER of your color palette. (That’s actually something I just found while making this tutorial, haha…I’m pretty stoked about it…)

If you pick a List view from this menu, you can see the names for the colors (if you have chosen any/they come with names, as in the presets).

Reminder: Change the color name quickly by right-clicking on the color in the palette.

Obviously, you can use the color wheel and eyedropper tools to pick colors to add to your new color set palette. If you have a specific palette in mind, like when you are working off of a design brief or a reference sheet, you can pull that up to select from, too.

 

You can pick colors from your screen as well, by using Pick Screen Color in Edit (shortcut “Shift+X”).

You can also use hexadecimal color codes for any particular colors you are trying to pick.

 

For example, the hex code for Pantone’s 2024 Color of the Year, Peach Fuzz, is FFBE98.

 

Double-click on either the primary or secondary color selectors, in the color wheel tab or where ever you have your color selection indicators on your workspace, and it will pull up the advanced color wheel window. Here you can adjust specific hues and values BEFORE you use them, if you are using super specific colors (I never have) — but the field where you can type/paste a hex code is here, too.

 

Slap that puppy in there, hit OK, and VOILA! You are able to use the hex code color! Or put it into your custom color set palette, in this case.

…It’s so beautiful… *wipes tear*

Using Colors from Your New Color Set Palette

You can use the colors in your finished Color Set Palette just like you would for any of the preset color sets. Click on them the same way you would select a color from the color wheel, and focus on your artwork without stopping to choose and adjust colors!

 

Now that you’ve seen the tools you need to rearrange, replace, delete, and name your colors, any time you want to tweak something in your custom color set palette to streamline your art workflow even more, you know where to find it.

 

Happy coloring!