Create your own watercolor brushes

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Hello!

I bring you a new tutorial to create your own watercolor brushes in Clip Studio Paint that will allow you to customize your digital illustrations and achieve more authentic effects.

Materials

The first thing you will need will be some materials to create different stains and textures such as:

-Brushes or brushes

-sponges

-bags

-ink or watercolor

 

If you don't have paint, you can use some blended coffee, tea, wine or whatever you have to create stains!

 

-A thick, textured watercolor sheet between 120 and 350g (avoid using very thin or satin papers because they can wrinkle with water and will not be easy to scan)

Creating stains

Create different types of stains with the materials and experiment, I recommend that your stains include variety, elongated and vertical, gradient stains towards the center and another towards the outside, textured, etc. You can also drop some drops and splashes to make decorative brushes

Scanning and editing

Scan or take a good photo of your stains.

We will open the image in Clip Studio Paint.

We will edit spot by spot, selecting one of the spots with the lasso and copying with Ctrl+C

 

 

We're going to

• File > Create new from clipboard

To make sure we are editing correctly, we turn off the base paper layer.

• Edit > gradient map > black and white

We will play with contrasts and levels to achieve the cleanest brush possible and highlight its texture.

Then we will edit the layer in:

• Layer> convert layer> expression color> Gray> Select only the black box (this is very important for our brush to turn out) and accept

 

Finally in:

• Edit>Change image resolution, we make sure that its size is no more than about 10 cm high and 72 dpi.

(If we use images that are too large for our brushes, they will be very slow)

 

 

Registrar material

Create a new folder in the “Manage Materials” section you can call it “my brushes”.

In our stain file we go to:

• Edit > Register Material > Image to register our brush tip.

Write a name that is easy for you to identify and select “Use as brush tip shape”, choose the folder we created in the beginning in the save location > OK

Create new brush

There are several ways to create new brushes, one of them is to duplicate a brush you like and edit it.

And another is to create it from scratch:

• Right click on any brush > Create custom sub tool…

 

 

Write an identifiable name to your brushes.

•Processes. output > Direct drawing

•Processam. entry > Brush

You can customize them with your own color and icon > OK.

brush tip

In the sub tool details window, go to

•Brush Tip > Material > Add New Brush Tip.

Search among the materials you registered for your new brush tip.

 

In this window you can edit the brush in many ways. I recommend that you play with the different parameters so that you can find the ones you like the most and that fit your working style.

I will give you some tips that I use to achieve more naturalness.

 

 

•At Angle I select Line Direction so that the tip of the brush rotates in the direction I am coloring.

Ink

In the ink section under opacity and Amount of paint, I also select:

• Combination mode > Multiplication

• Color mixing > Apply and spread

• Amount of paint > pencil pressure

Spray effect

The spray effect gives a fluffy and messier appearance to the brush, activate it by adjusting its size and density.

I bring

In the stroke, click Blend Brush Tips with Darken so that the edges of the stain are more evident.

Texture

•In paper texture, select some of the ones that Clip comes with by default or upload your own.

watercolor border

Activate and adjust the Opacity and Darkness of the watercolor border if you want the brush stroke to be even more evident.

Using our brushes

Finally, some usage tips for our brushes:

•Download some paper texture to place in the first layer. (In this example I am using the KRITZEL PIXEL kit, you can find it in the Assets)

 

 

• Use textured brushes to make sketches and lines.

• Start with a light layer and the rest of the layers above adjust to lower layer with multiply blend modes. (This will prevent too much paint from agglomerating and maintains the feeling of transparency)

 

 

•You can add border effects to the base, to make white spots obvious when erasing.

Play with the contrast or saturation edits, you can add another filter layer. I used the following watercolor texture in Overlay mode on top of all layers.

Final

I leave you the final illustration I made with these same brushes, I will upload its speedpaint soon!

 

I hope my advice helps you

★ See you soon and thank you very much! ★