Intro

For this tutorial, I've decided to create a completely free Brush Set and explain how to use them or what idea I had when I created them. I'm leaving you the download link, or you can search for them directly in the Asset Store as "nunFalco - Watercolor"This time, our video is quite long; I hope it's not too much for all of you and that you can enjoy and learn from it. Anyway, I tried to summarize the content in this written version.Link to the brushes:

One of the characteristics of watercolor is the randomness it offers when making strokes, those touches of opacity, and the way the inks combine.I'll briefly explain some details for adding our materials. If you already know this, please skip to the next step, which is the "About paper and textures" section.

Materials

The purpose of these brushes is to achieve realistic watercolor textures. We have a bit of variety to create different types of effects.

Once our brush set is downloaded, we will find it in the section: Materials > Downloads

If you don't have the icon, you can open it from:Window>Materials>All Materials

I recommend creating a new folder to store our SET if it hasn't been created by default. Right-click anywhere in the section where the folders are, followed by "New folder".

And we drag all our content into that folder, this is to keep everything better organized.

About paper and textures

We should know that we need a paper texture that is included in our Set to give that real paper feel. We just drag it, and it will appear as a layer; we can scale it up or down, it's already configured to cover the entire canvas. You can rasterize it too if you wish.

We will use this layer in multiply mode and use the opacity slider to adjust it to our liking.

Another detail; it is preferable not to use paper in a completely White(#FFFFFF) tone, as in watercolor (as in other styles), we could use white to highlight certain details or create a part in "negative." So we can choose a slightly gray or slightly yellowish tone. This is entirely a matter of taste; even if you want, you can use White(#FFFFFF) if your needs require it.

Using the brushes and their functions

To view the brushes the way I do, we have to go to the 3 horizontal lines in the Sub Tool [Brush] > View > Pattern or Small Pattern. I remember that at some point I couldn't find this function, but choose your preferred way.

All brushes have certain options visible in the "Tool Property" area that I usually change depending on my objective; it's important to know your brushes to get the most out out of them. So be sure that by moving these parameters, you can achieve different results and also start to better understand the "brush engine" we have in Clip Studio Paint. (The "brush engine" refers to all those functions that the software provides us to modify the functions of our brushes, which we can find by clicking on the wrench icon below "Tool Property" and which will open "Sub Tool Detail")

Starting to paint - Dragonfly

This time we will start with the line art. We can use our brush called "Pen" or "Pencil1" to achieve this task. "Pencil1" is a simple brush with some texture to imitate a pencil; however, "Pen" has a bit of randomness when making strokes, which makes it interesting and fun when drawing lines, giving it a "rollerball pen" style touch, which are the most common pens, perhaps like a BIC. (At least here in Mexico).

We'll start by drawing a small dragonfly; it's quite simple. We just need to create the 3 parts that make up its body, and its wings will be attached to the central part of its body, and we'll add some small antennae. If we also want, we can add some of the details that its wings have; you can make it as detailed as you like. I decided to make something simple for time reasons (regarding the video).

Next, we will use our "WaterColor3" brush, which is a brush with three similar tips to give it a bit of randomness in its use, and it also has watercolor border and Color Mix options to activate and deactivate depending on its use. For example, if I want to achieve those marks that watercolor leaves on the edges, I can simply activate this option, but sometimes we find that we don't want borders in certain areas, so we can remove the border and eliminate details we don't like. Additionally, we can also use the "Blender" brush to remove these borders in sections we don't want.

In this example, I will use the "Watercolor3" brush to place some light-toned spots on the wings, and I will give the central part a dark (almost black) tone. Then I will use "Blender" to drag the color from both parts and achieve a subtle blend.When the "watercolor borders" option is activated, you must do it in a single stroke, as the border will only appear at the end of the stroke. If you make 3 strokes, you will see 3 different borders, just keep this in mind.

We use the blender to drag a little color from the black part, and then a little of our light color until they meet and create a combination. Drag the black color slightly because we only need a light gray to simulate transparency.

Finishing all parts, it would look like this.

We can use the "BigSplash" Brush; this was created to place either a single splash by dragging the brush in ribbon mode and the repeat mode to "Only once" or continuous splashes by deactivating ribbon mode and changing the repeat mode to "Repeat."Ribbon mode allows us to direct the tip of our brush in certain directions, and depending on the speed at which we make the stroke, our results can also change.

Ribbon mode allows us to rotate the image of our brush if we needed something like that; the top smudge is the shape of our brush, and the other 2 are using ribbon mode and curving the stroke.

It also has a color variation; this function uses the secondary color, so make sure you have both colors according to what you will use, or you can simply deactivate the "change brush tip color" option.

You can notice how the "red" color is slightly visible in certain parts.

And by changing the secondary color, these change.

Cat Silhouette

Now we'll make the silhouette of a sitting cat with its back to us and looking to the side.Using our "Watercolor2" brush this time, we'll play with the smudges a bit, without drawing line art.If we want to cover large areas, remember to do it a bit slowly because very large brushes can slow down our computer a little. But something I've found useful is that we can cover the area by making small stippling motions (I mean quickly touching our tablet with the tip of our pen, lifting it, and repeating the same procedure). And with this "technique," we also add a bit of randomness to the marks our brushes leave. So this is what I'll do, even though we'll use a small brush size that doesn't cause any processing problems.

If you liked the result of your first brushstrokes and don't want to keep repeating the process, you can simply duplicate the layer and then group them; this way, we gain a bit more density in our ink. You can repeat this process as many times as you want.

Now, if I wanted to add color on top of this ink, you'll notice that you can't add a new color with this brush because the "Blend colors" function is active (or maybe not); this causes our new color to merge with the color we are painting over. If we move out of that area, we'll see how our brush starts to change tone, and similarly from outside in.

We deactivate "Color mix" and paint our eye.

When my intention is to work on something in the watercolor style, I prefer to work everything on a single layer, trying to imitate the traditional (analog) process.After drawing our cat, we can add some details to our pieces; either texture or those splattered ink marks we achieve. We will use the "SplatteM" brush; our Set includes S, M, and L, referring to the English abbreviations for Small, Medium, Large. This tells us the number of marks we will find on each brush tip; if we want few, we'll use S, and if we want many, we'll use L.

Something you'll notice, which is common given the nature of watercolors, is the use of opacity. In the traditional (analog) method, we use water to increase or decrease the opacity of our ink. So here, we will do the same; if we want our illustration to have coherence, we simply decrease our opacity to our liking.

We'll use it with 69% opacity this time; I like those light smudges. Remember, this is a matter of taste, and nothing I tell you is a rule; it's simply an option. If you need those little smudges very pronounced, you can even use 100% opacity.

Now we'll use the "Salt" brush, which literally imitates the salt we can use in watercolor. This is used to achieve certain textures in the traditional way, as upon contact with the ink, it can give us certain effects. Here, it's just an eraser with a long interval and randomness. You can also use the "Continuous spray" or "Spray effect" option for other interesting results; this will create smaller and more random particles from our brush tip. This way, we achieve greater variety.

Almost all brushes in the Set have these "Color mix" and "Blending mode" options visible. This is to allow for new and interesting uses with this function.We can use the "TX Brillo" brush, which is the same as "TX Color" but in a different blending mode. "TX Brillo" is in "add (glow)" mode, and "TX Color" is in multiply mode. This allows us to achieve different types of textures in our illustrations. I love "TX Brillo" because you can achieve textures that stand out very pleasantly to the eye, literally as if they were glowing.

Let's draw a small bird

"Paint" is a simple brush with some texture that you can use if you want to fill something with an exact tone, where the ink has no variation or only a slight variation. You can deactivate the Color mix option if you want a flatter tone. We will draw a simple bird with "Paint."We'll make a circle of one tone and then lower its luminosity for that tone to fill the other half.

"Pastel01" can be used to achieve line art with a nice "chalk-like" texture. Or even to fill a section if we wish.

Watercolor 4 to 6 are brushes with very random shapes that emerge from watercolor stains themselves, and I extracted them to subtly place that type of mark. What I was looking for with these is that slight randomness we achieve in their quite uniform tip. Perhaps it's not something that can be perceived too much, but do your tests with them.

Let's draw a bird feather

Finally, we'll make a bird feather using "WatercolorFlat" to define our shape, and we'll use our "E-Paint" brush. All brushes with "E-" are intended to be erasers, so you can move them to your eraser section, although you can also change their blending mode to use them in another way. We'll make a few lines as if painting in a "negative" style. (Painting in negative is like painting around a silhouette but not painting anything inside the silhouette)

Before using our eraser, we'll make a few marks with our "WatercolorWet" brush, which has that texture and wet watercolor movement. This causes that when we paint one mark over another, they overlap as if we were in "multiply" mode with transparency, adding a bit of "darkness" to our strokes. We could even imitate something like "smoke."

Now we will indeed use our E-Paint eraser, which is configured with a high percentage of stability to make more precise or "clean" strokes.

We have other brushes that I didn't talk about, but I would like you to experiment with them and see your results.

Farewell

I hope this helps you explore this beautiful world of watercolor. Remember that you should experiment a lot and also explore the properties of the brushes; don't be afraid to make mistakes, because when we explore, we can find many useful and interesting things, and we definitely have to make the tools adapt more to our needs. A hug to all, and keep expressing yourselves through your art. Don't forget to leave me your feedback in the comments, either for the video or this tutorial; your opinion helps me a lot.I'm leaving you the images of the final results I made twice.