Creating a Texture

One of the easiest and most customizable ways to make a texture in Clip Studio Paint is to combine pre-existing assets already built into the program.

 

If you go to Window > Material, you can open the material folders preinstalled into CSP. For our purposes, the materials in the Monochromatic Pattern folder will be all we need.

Here, you can find subfolders full of different patterns and textures, all of which are monochrome (black and white). Many of these premade textures would work well as an overlay on their own, but you can combine them and tweak their settings to make an ideal texture that fits your art style.

For example, here I dragged a noise pattern called 40% 40/0 Noise onto my canvas. I wanted to give it more textural variety, so I then added 5% 100/0 Noise on top of it.

I could stop here, but I can customize these two textures further by going to the Layer Property palette (go to Window > Layer Property if you don't see it). Here, under the Tone section, I can fine-tune the settings on each texture. This includes rotation, size control, and density.

After manipulating these settings for both textures, I ended up with something more like this:

As you can see from the zoom, this produced a texture very different from the one I started with.

 

Once I'm happy with the texture, I rasterize both of the tone layers (right click the layer and click Rasterize). This will flatten the texture and prevent it from being edited further. Then, I merge the two layers together into one.

 

At this point, I could stop here if I like how it looks already. But If I want to give it an extra level of grittiness or variety, I can go back into my Materials palette and drag in one of the traditional textures from the Texture folder.

Here, I dragged in the Pencil texture.

 

By default, the textures in the Texture folder are all semitransparent (meaning there is no white, only values of black at different opacities). If I applied this texture over top of our pre-existent one, it would just blend right in since they're both already monochrome. To fix this, I make a new layer between the Pencil texture and our custom texture, which I then fill in with solid white.

Then, I merged that with the Pencil texture layer and clipped it to our custom texture using a Clipping Mask.

Now my texture has variety in its opacity, which will give it more of a traditional feel when applied as a brush.

Another way to make your own texture is to draw with several brushes on your canvas and aim to make a very textured effect.

At a low opacity, this very random texture can produce some cool results as a brush!

Once your texture is how you like it, go to Edit > Register Material > Image to register it as a texture.

Adding Texture to a Brush

To make a new brush, duplicate one of your pre-existing brushes by clicking the "Create copy of currently selected sub tool" button at the bottom of the Sub Tool panel. If there's a brush with settings you like, make sure to duplicate that one.

When your brush is duplicated, go to the Sub Tool Detail panel.

In the Texture menu in the Sub Tool Detail panel:

 

• "Texture density" controls how intense the texture shows up.

 

• "Reverse density" inverts the texture's black and white values

 

• "Emphasize density" adds contrast to the texture to boost visibility. Only check this if you want your texture to be very intense.

 

• "Scale ratio" controls the size of the texture in relation to your brush. The higher the value, the larger the texture.

 

• "Rotation angle" controls the angle that the texture is applied at. If your texture is not seamless, I recommend rotating your texture so the seam is less noticeable.

 

• "Method to apply texture" functions similarly to Layer and Blending modes.

 

• "Apply each plot tip" applies the texture to every brush tip rather than to the stroke. This stacks the texture depending on how densely the tips are placed.

 

 

Click on the button beside Texture to load in the texture you made from your materials.

Creating a Brush Tip

To make a custom brush tip, draw the shape of your desired tip on your canvas in black.

For a textured tip, use several brushes and be chaotic with how you apply them.

When your tip is drawn, go to the Layer Property panel and change Expression Color to Gray in the drop down. This should turn your image grayscale, which is necessary for it to work properly as a brush tip that can use any color.

When this step is done, go to Edit > Register Material > Image to register your brush tip.

When registering your tip, make sure the "Use for brush tip shape" box is checked.

With your tip registered, now you can go back to the Sub Tool Detail panel with your new brush selected and go to the Brush Tip menu.

Click the "Material" option next to Tip Shape, then click the area below to open your list of materials. Find your new brush tip and click OK to apply it.

• The Thickness slider controls the width of your brush tip. The lower the value, the thinner the tip will be. You can also control in what direction the tip is skewed by toggling between Horizontal or Vertical.

 

• The Angle slider lets you control the angle that the tip is applied at.

 

• The Brush Density slider allows you to adjust the opacity of each individual brush tip. This has a similar effect to the Opacity slider, but there is a key difference: Clip Studio Paint brushes are made by repeating the brush tip over and over like a stamp, and this controls the opacity of each individual tip rather than of the entire brush.

 

• The "Adjust brush density by gap" setting preserves the density settings chosen above by automatically decreasing the density of the brush tips as the gaps between the tips get smaller (to prevent overlapping and thus darkening).

For a brush with even more texture, consider making multiple brush tips. If you load several brush tips into one brush, the brush will cycle through the tips as you draw. The method of repeating tips can be changed under the Stroke menu.

With that, your textured brush is complete! You can go through the other menus of the Sub Tool Detail panel to adjust it further to your liking.

 

I hope this was helpful to you!