Introduction

In this tutorial we will talk about brushes and some of the tools that we can use to modify them. If you prefer to see the video I leave you the link to youtube:

Fundamentals

Fundamentally there are only 2 types of brushes, brushes with hard edges and brushes with soft edges, when we say soft edge we refer to the gradient that the painting has from the edge to its center. And in the hard edges we can see how we go from not having "paint" to having paint (pixels).

In addition to this, the tip of the brushes can have the shape that you imagine.

What gives us in combination an infinite number of possibilities to create brushes.

Also in Clip Studio Paint we have a lot of tools to modify our brushes. These would be some examples of what we could create:

In the example we see an image with hard edges that, when we see it in the stroke, generates a texture/noise at the edge of the brushstroke. This can be arranged in many ways and provide solutions to different types of needs.

 

The following example is a soft-edged combination:

When we see these strokes on a smaller scale, we won't see these effects at all but they will always have an impact that can generate a style. Many times different textures and brushes are used simply to generate a style or to somehow imitate the analog tools.

In Clip Studio Paint we can visualize the brushes in two different ways, by Reason (The tip of the brush) And by stroke where we will see more or less the stroke that is generated when we drag the brush.

To visualize these options you have to click on the 3 horizontal lines that we see in the brushes menu, go to View > Motif or Stroke

To talk more about the modifier tools we are going to use my Watercolor brush set but here are the links to download the other packages:

In this section we will be able to see some of the tools to modify our brushes

But if we want to see all the options we have to click on the key/tool icon

This is where we will see all the options we have to modify. And here we will see that we have the option of the little eye or a small square that activates it, we can make it display in our brush panel, without having to open the complete menu, this helps us to quickly modify the brushes knowing which parameters we usually modify.

brush size

For this example we are going to use the brush called Pencil1 that tries to imitate a pencil with that slight noise that it generates on its edges and as a first option we see what we all know is the size of the brush.

If we look to one side we have an icon that allows us to open one more submenu that allows us to activate some of the options most used by me and I think by most artists.

It lets us see the Pen Pressure options, this allows us to adjust the minimum value with which we want the sensitivity to work when pressing the pen with more or less force on our tablet.

If we adjust to other values, we would see a smaller difference between the soft stroke and the strong stroke.

In addition, this change will be reflected in the upper part, here we will see as if we have the minimum stroke at 0 and it thickens little by little, but if we deactivate it we will see the same thickness throughout the brush.

About the inclination I will not exemplify, I know that there are tablets that do not have the inclination function but what it means is that the inclination of the pen with respect to the tablet matters, that will give us a different effect when having it activated.

Specify the brush size

When this option is active, depending on the "zoom" of the canvas, the brush has a different size. However, if we have it deactivated, the brush will always maintain its size as we have been using it in different zoom sizes. I recommend not having it enabled unless you want to do something very specific.

To see an example of the Random and speed tool we are going to use the Pen brush which tries to imitate a Pen of those Bic

These pens sometimes have an irregularity in terms of the ink they leave and that is what we try to imitate with this effect, we make the strokes random but with minimum values that are not so low so that there is not as much variation between the thicknesses of the ink. line.

And the speed effect will cause that when we move a line quickly, that thin line will be generated to the point of cutting off how thin it is.

Minimo 1 pixel

This means that the line is not cut regardless of the effects that we use, if we do something with low sensitivity it may not detect anything but with this option we will always mark at least one brush in our stroke.

This could help us with the pen so that we leave a small trace at the end, so that the line is not cut but kept to a minimum of one pixel.

Ink

For these examples we will use the Watercolor Flat and here we will see that we have the opacity which will give us more transparency the lower the number.

But that's not all, if we open the menu we can have the same pressure effects that we had regarding the thickness and size of the brush

And we can use this to generate this type of gradient in our stroke:

combination modes

The blend modes are the same as the ones we can use on layers, which give us different types of effects. These work practically the same but in the stroke of the brushes

a normal brushstroke

When adding shine use the "Add Shine" mode on the same stroke.

Mix of colors

In the section I think it is better to see it on video so that we can understand how the color combination works, you can see this at minute X: XX

brush shape

When we have a brush that we like, by registering the preset we can change the tip of the brush and interchange them with each other, we can choose any other tip keeping all the parameters that we have previously modified.

We only have to adopt the shape we want and we will modify its shape, for example this is the WaterBlender brush with another tip and it can thus generate this effect.

brush tip

For the brush tip, we can add multiple images or just one, depending on the amount we choose will be the images that we will see, these images can be created or taken from other materials that we have downloaded. We can also do a tutorial on how to create these tips if you like.

This would be an example of what it would look like if we used these 3 different tips when we made a stroke:

The angle can be particularly useful when we want to maintain the direction of the stroke, which can be very useful with certain nibs that need to keep their shape in a specific direction.

I bring

If we go to the Trace Menu we can adjust the frequency with which these images will appear, the higher the number, the greater the space between the images. Which can be useful when we want to keep a certain shape on the brush but if we want to create a constant stroke we have to reduce this number.

spray effect

The pulverized effect makes our particle multiply in smaller sizes and in the amount that we want. This effect can be useful to achieve certain effects as we will see later, also added to the combination modes, interesting results can be achieved.

Continuous spraying causes particles to continuously appear regardless of whether you drag the stylus or not.

Texture

Finally we will talk about the textures, these can help us to give an even greater touch to the brushes, the textures can help us achieve more realistic effects if we want to imitate a technique, just select it. The parameters in this part I think are quite simple and I will leave them to your exploration.

This is an example of a non-textured brush and a textured brush.

examples

In this piece we used the "Splatter" brush for the background, which has the Splatter effect activated, combined with the combination of layers to achieve a little more volume in the whole background.

 

We also use the Smudge brush from the Basic set, to achieve certain strokes in the hummingbird, for example at the bottom we can see how the strokes go in the downward direction because the "follow stroke direction" option is activated. However in the letters below the brush is kept in position to achieve that effect.

This example is simple using various Watercolor brushes to create effects that resemble watercolors.

In this piece we use a pure basic brush that is included in Clip Studio Paint, we only change the texture of the pencil to have a little more noise but there is no big difference with the original brush.

Here we use a lot of color mixing effects to achieve this color combination, make the colors blend subtly and design shapes to reflect what we are looking for, in addition to using the G Pen with the spray effect to create particles super small to simulate the "stars" in space.

In this we made use of other brushes, combining the same techniques, spraying on the stars, splatter to generate spots, with different textures so that the effects are seen more as if it were a canvas, and the use of the Blender brush, which is one of My favorites are also used to make the color combinations in the "skin" and hair part.

farewell

I hope that this explanation will be of some use to you, it will give free rein to your creativity and that you will create many things that clearly express what you want. These are just tools that help us solve a need and in combination they give us great possibilities. I hope you can write me some feedback comments about what you think of all this content.