When I first got Clip Studio Paint, what stood out to me is how good the default pencil brushes are for sketching. Hatching, and the brush movement itself feels very natural. But that's only the baseline on which several assets improve greatly. In this tutorial, I will showcase some free brushes that take tradigital art to another level.

The brush sets

Here are links to the brush sets:

 

Intoxicate Pencil Set by ×ェ× : https://assets.clip-studio.com/en-us/detail?id=1740419

 

Artemus Pencil Set by artemus: https://assets.clip-studio.com/en-us/detail?id=1758182

Intoxicate Pencil Set

First, the Intoxicate Pencil Set. As you can see, it has a texture material, an eraser brush and two batches of pencil brushes. The first batch looks pretty familiar. On a small brush size it basically behaves like your normal pencil brush. Here it is with brush size 19:

With a bigger brush size it adapts some airbrush-like, blurry properties, and becomes more suitable for covering larger portions of the drawing. Here it is with brush size 100:

 

 

What really interestests me, though, is the second batch. Here is some hatching done with it, pen pressure increasing from left to right:

As you can see, the brush is very responsive, and behaves differently based on the tilt/pressure applied. This means that you can basically choose just one sub-tool, and use it for sketching, lining, hatching, shading all the same.

We will test how that goes later.

Artemus Pencil Set

For now, let's look into the second set.

 

 

This is also a test with pressure being applied slowly more and more from left to right. In this set, the differences are more evident between the sub-tools themselves, however the sub-tools' width doesn't change based on the pressure. The brush stays more or less the same size, however I must say that it was way easier to create a deep color with the “Hard” Artemus Brush, just like in real life a 6B Pencil would be darker than a 3H Pencil.

 

From what I can see, the first set would be nice for sketching a textured, shaded drawing or a croquis, and the second set has brushes that would be good for a stylized lineart as well as some dynamic, but overall thin drawings. Before we make sure of that, let's run through some useful tips.

What makes a drawing look “traditional”

If you ask that question, what comes to mind are various texture packs, textured brushes, brushes imitating traditional paints and such, but I would say that, besides all of that, what makes a drawing look "traditional" are traditional techniques.

Do you draw on paper often? When you do, are there any specific differences between drawing on paper and via tablet? For me, there are.

For example, when drawing traditionally, I tend to move my hand freely, create softer lines, hatch for shading and draw faster in general. So if I want my digital drawings to look traditional, I want to imitate the experience of drawing traditionally.

Technicalities first

Before we get to the drawing process itself, I would recommend that you take note of the following things:

1. If possible, keep your stabilization on low.

This will allow you to draw faster lines, without thinking too much, and see the software's response to your movement right away

2. Turn your pen's sensitivity up if you feel like you need to press hard

Some brushes are sensitive to pressure, so if it feels like you need to strain your hand to create deep color, it's better to just tweak the settings than to put your health at risk

3. Speaking of which, keep your hand relaxed

Make sure it's in a comfortable position, and don't forget about wrist exercises for artists.

4. Create a bigger canvas

Less than 2000pixel on the smaller side and some brushes, especially textured ones, behave very differently than they would on a bigger image. So keep in mind that when I'm showing you examples of the brushes I'm drawing on a fairly big canvas.

5. Don't be afraid to make mistakes!

The charm of traditional drawings is, in my opinion, all the mess and little mistakes you just can't erase with a CTRL+Z. And while we don't have to get rid of the digital amenities, while we're trying to imitate the traditional style we can let ourselves go a little bit and relax.

Useful exercises

As you might have noticed, some of the aforementioned steps might worsen the drawing experience for those who have hands tremor or who's generally bad with lines.

While I of course don't insist that you do all of that if that makes drawing unbearable for you, I can recommend some exercises.

The samples shown above are nothing too difficult, this is just drawing several parallel lines together. You can start with something short, and then move to the longer ones, trying to keep them straight.

There are also variations with gradations, value shifts, and hatching. Maybe you can do a couple of these when you're bored or don't know what to draw, and it'll help you in the long term.

Hatching

Lastly, hatching.

What do you even need this for? Shading, right?

While it's definitely used for shading when you're drawing with nothing but a pencil, I certainly wouldn't ask of you to use hatching like that in digital drawings (unless you'd like to!) - and yet it can still be helpful to us.

For example, you can indicate form through hatching.

And you can use it for texture!

Hatching adds that "feeling" that the drawing was done by hand, it adds personality, and makes the drawing a little bit interesting just by the fact that it has some additional details.

So while imitating traditional art, you might want to add some hatching to your digital drawings.

And this finally brings us to the drawing process!

Asset test 1

This is a test for the Intoxicate pencil set with the first batch, without width variation. This works as a regular textured brush: I would recommend using a lighter color for sketching, and then, without erasing the first layer, going through the drawing again with a darker color just to make some corners pop.

As you can see, I used light hatching for shading and indicating hair texture.

Asset test 2

This is the second batch, where I could use some broader strokes. The tool feels more free, so the lineart also became more dynamic, as you can see. I used mostly just one brush, since it could be both thin and thick, depending on how I handled it.

While shading, I didn't really try to draw every single line in hatching and instead used a bigger size sometimes, to imitate shading done with just the side of the graphite pencile. To not mess up the lines, the shading was done on a separate layer, and then I just tweaked opacity untill the tone was just right.

Asset test 3

This is a test for the Artemus Pencil test. Here, I used the hard brush for details, not really paying attention to every little detail and trying to indicate more than what is shown. This way, the lineart stays lively and there is line width variation, as I don't really press that hard with the pen.

The broader, "Big Boy" brush was used in a bigger size, for shading. It's more suitable than the harder brush, since, when chosen in a bigger size, the harder brush stops resembling a pencil.

Coloring brushes reccomendations

Since this style is really light and imitates drawing with a pencil, I think what would suit it well are also light, soft brushes that imitate medium often used with pencils. For example, watercolors or markers. Any other brushes where you can blur colors together will do too, as you might not need heavy shading or rendering in this case, and simple hints of coloring will suffice.

As for watercolor/marker brushes, here are my recommendations:

 

Watercolor marker set https://assets.clip-studio.com/en-us/detail?id=1682349

 

T-marker set https://assets.clip-studio.com/en-us/detail?id=1692034

 

If you're not sure how to impliment colors while maintaining the traditional style, you can paint everything in one hue, and then use a gradient map.

Here's a good set as an example: https://assets.clip-studio.com/en-us/detail?id=1814537

Thank you!

Thank you for reading this far!

I hope you will find at least some of these assets useful yourself :)