Making realistic textured brushes

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AloneFlaver

AloneFlaver

Greetings

Hey-hey and welcome to my newest guide! This is my third time participating in Clip Studio TIPS contest and today’s topic is “Creating and using textured brushes”.

The method I am going to share involves both traditional drawing actions and the digital ones.

Drawn using the brushes made in the guide:

Preparation

What you are going to need for it is:

 

•	Any kind of paints (it is better to use black ones for easier editing);

•	Brushes (optional – you can use practically anything to create a stroke);

•	A scanner/camera/phone with good camera;

•	Any kind of paper (if you use watercolor paints it is better to use the specific 

    kind of paper for more artistic effect);

For this guide we will create a simple texture so you could understand the process. After that, you are free to experiment with it as you desire. I will show you some of the brushes I made with slightly different actions in the end of the guide.

Create a real reference material

First, take a brush and dip it into the paint slightly. After that make several pressings of it on the paper so it would form a textured spot.

Transferring to Clip Studio Paint

Now you should scan what you have received.

For those who don’t have a scanner, you can use your smartphone’s camera and the “Notebloc” application which processes images to the state where they look like they were actually scanned.

Import the received image to Clip Studio and place on a big canvas (I used 5000x5000 resolution). Scale it up until it is big enough to nearly match the canvas. Don't forget to switch the layer color preference to Gray or Monochrome.

Processing

Remove the noise left on the background using the “Remove dust” panel which is near the “Correct line” panel. You are free to use the classic eraser as well though.

Once done, you might activate the “remove jpeg noise” tool to clean the inner parts slightly. It is located in the Filter bar.

Next you need to press the “Convert brightness to opacity”. This is an essential tool of our guide – it removes the background color we have now completely, leaving everything necessary and making some of the pixels left transparent where necessary.

Creating a custom textured brush

Now you need to save it as a material. You can simply open your materials catalog and drag the layer with the texture to any of the folders.

After that you need to open the preferences of this new material and check the “Use for brush tip shape” box. You may also change its name and add some special tag so you could easily find it in the search among your materials. Press OK.

Now we are going to create the brush itself. Duplicate the brush you want to be the basement of your new textured brush. I chose the standard oil paint.

Go to its preferences and open the “Brush tip” page. Here we will combine the properties of the oil paint and the texture we prepared.

The texture has been applied and we can draw with it now.

Customising

However, the brush doesn’t seem too different from the original oil paint, so we will edit it a bit.

For this purpose I went to the “Ink” page in the brush preferences and switched the color mixing type. It means that the way the strokes mix on the canvas has changed. And if you turn the color mixing off, the brush will be more like an inking brush rather than an oil or watercolor one.

There are many ways of how this brush can be changed, and you can create completely different brushes using one same texture. For example, you can apply the spraying effect or turn on the ribbon preference to make the brush draw with separate texture stamps, and not with the continuous textured line.

Here are the brushes I created. I even created one of them using my fingerprint as the main image, so the possibilities are unlimited. And the third one was made by simply twitching the brush there and back again multiple times.

Experiment with the forms, their transparency and what you are making them with, and you will definitely receive a set of beautiful, unique and useful brushes! By the way, you might download my set in the Assets under the following name: "Realistic Textured Brushes".

Publishing your hard work

Now, you might also be interested in how you can publish your material it really simple. Transfer your brush to the materials to register it as a material as well. Open the Clip Studio main platform and go to “Manage materials”. Find what you are going to publish and press on its private “Manage materials” button.

Sync your material with the cloud if it is ready and go to the material information. Here you can prepare the page of your material and publish it with the button in the upper right corner.

Here is how the published post looks like. This my set of brushes. They all are stroke type of brushes because I wanted to make the ink-like brushes first.

Conclusion

And this is it – a really simple method of creating almost any kind of textured brush. And if you want to make your brush look even more textured, you can open the “Texture” page in the brush preferences and choose the texture you want.

Thank you for following my guides, and also thank you for your time! Wish you all the greatest inspiration!

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