Clip Studio Brushes Deviantart
Clip Studio Brushes Deviantart

In this tutorial, learn the best brushes and techniques for a traditional painterly style in digital artwork.

Painterly Brushwork and Canvas Textures

This set includes more than 800 Clip Studio Paint brushes. These painting, penciling, inking, and special FX tools use a wide range of custom textures, daubs, and settings to emulate traditional media and beyond. Clip Studio Paint is optimized for drawing and painting, making it ideal for illustrators. The painting brushes are highly customizable and easy to use. There's a thriving community of users who constantly contribute to the online materials library. Clip Studio Paint is also ideal for illustrators who specialize in linework.

Today I’ll be showing you a small set of Clip Studio Paint brushes I like to use to achieve an oily dry brush effect, like in this painting of a Boston Terrier who desperately wants to be a Dalmatian fire-dog. It has both a lot of syrupy and dry brush edged paint strokes.

Catch up on the creation of the tarot project a Patron to get direct mentoring ↠ m. Then, click back to Clip Studio Paint. Now, drag and drop that brush or bunch of brushes to an empty spot in the tab where you want to add them. In the animated GIF below, I have the Finder window inside of Clip Studio Paint’s proscenium of tools, just behind were an image I’d be working on would be.

First, it’s essential to get into the right mindset when trying to emulate a traditional look with digital tools. We tend to look for one magic brush that does it all, but that doesn’t exist digitally or traditionally. An oil painter uses many different sized brushes, palette knives, or even a rag to achieve a loose painterly style. The goal of this style is to give the impression of detail rather than the direct execution of it.

For digital painting, we want brushes that can create two distinct edges: hard or “found” edges and soft or “lost” edges. The combination of a lost-and-found edge creates a painterly effect and helps guide our eyes to focal points.

In this image, the focal points would be the face or the tip of the paint tube. In these areas, we may have a high concentration of hard or found edges, and in the least important parts, we may have a higher concentration of lost or soft edges. One way to make sure our painting has both lost-and-found edges is to use a handful of brushes that express both well.

I have assembled a shortlist of brushes that I’ve been using recently; three that I’ve purchased and others that I’ve created. The perfect painterly digital brushstroke can easily be controlled and even sculpted into your piece.

Second, for a traditional look, I recommend getting into the habit of painting over a photographic canvas texture. This particular one is from www.fuzzimo.com. They have free high-res canvas textures in addition to a folder of seamless textures.

About Clip Studio Paint

For this tutorial, I’m using Clip Studio Paint, a versatile software for illustration, comics, and animation. It comes with a range of digital art tools and brushes so you can start drawing with it right out of the box. There is also a version available on the iPad.
https://www.clipstudio.net/en/purchase/trial

Brush Introduction

Oil Paint Flat Brush

One of the best brushes in Clip Studio is the Oil paint flat brush that comes with the program. It blends nicely right out of the box. I like to use it at around 90% opacity. At 100% it can be completely opaque, but at 90%, you get mid-tone transition colors that you can pick from to paint. You can get a nice transition between hard and soft edges. It also has a great flat chisel shape.

Cat’s Tongue Brush

Next is this Cat’s tongue brush, which is a duplicate of the Oil paint flat brush but has a tapered edge on the front and back end of the stroke. To get this, I set the Oil Paint Flat Brush’s “brush size dynamics” to pen pressure. This setting is in the sub tool details palette. I also reduced the minimum value to about 12% and adjusted this curve a bit to create that tapered look with the paint.

Ink Tapered Raw

The next brush is from a set I’ve purchased from www.daub-brushes.com. They have an excellent collection of tools for Clip Studio Paint and Manga Studio. I recommend getting the super bundle. However, it can be a little overwhelming to have so many brushes, so I’ve isolated the ones I feel are the best for this particular look. I’ll be using Ink tapered raw and Pigmento 10, which are in the “inks and pigments” folder, and Bristle broom brush, a blender in “dry media.”

Don’t let the name of a brush mislead you into only using it for that application. Ink tapered raw is in the inks and pigments folder, and yet we are using it for a traditional media brush tutorial. Instead, look at the effect that a brush has and use that to your advantage.

I like to use the Ink tapered raw brush at 100%. It is similar to the look of the Cat’s tongue, but it has this nice dry brush texture at the end. It also mixes nicely. Daub created it using scans of natural media combined with watercolor paper. You can always make your own version of this brush, but it’s such a reasonable price that I recommend just buying it.

Flat Ribbon Vertical

Flat ribbon vertical is a brush I created. It has a vertical chisel and does not follow the direction of your stroke. Instead, when you move across, it gives a nice disrupted feel, almost like a palette knife.

Flat Ribbon

Flat ribbon is pretty much the same as Flat ribbon vertical, but the direction of the brush tip is set to the direction of the line. This means that the texture wraps around and follows the brushstroke.

Flat Ribbon Horizontal

Flat ribbon horizontal is pretty much the same as Flat ribbon vertical except, it creates nice hard edges and has a flat texture upon drawing a downwards stroke. This one also has some brush size settings applied to it that I turn on and off depending on what I’m doing.

Flat Ribbon Soft

Flat ribbon soft is essentially the same as flat ribbon, except with a few more textures from the Clip Studio materials library. I often look for brushes that are going to give unplanned, spontaneous edges for a dry brush look. If I use my mouse, you can see that Clip Studio is selecting different patterns as I click. It randomly applies as many textures as it was loaded up with. It also presents these interesting terminal shapes that I would have a hard time painting.

Flat Ribbon Soft [S]

The next brush is Flat ribbon soft [S] which is the same brush as Flat ribbon soft except that the size is affected by pen pressure, so it has a little bit of a taper at the end. By experimenting with the pen pressure and the size or density of textures, you can get a controlled variation with just a handful of brushes as long as you know what they’re doing and how they’re different.

You don’t have to use these brushes. You can create your own with my free Youtube video tutorial on Clip Studio Paint basics, where I explain how to create a brush out of a black and white shape.

Pigmento 10

Pigmento 10 is an interesting brush from the Daub set. It forces a shadow into the paint color. It can be tempting to paint directly with this brush, but I find that as I’m color picking intermediate colors, I pick up the black shadow color which makes it hard to keep the color pure and clean. One of the ways I use Pigmento 10 is with a low opacity, around 20%. I pick a color over an existing stroke, paint on top of it and end up getting a shadow color that augments the existing brushstroke.

Brushwork Theory

Going to the theory, what we’re looking for in our brushstrokes is the transition between lost and found edges. When I say “lost” and “found,” we also mean soft and hard edges. This is the mindset to keep as we’re building our brushwork.

Found Edge to Lost Edge

There are different ways to get from one kind of edge to the other. One way is to start with a found edge and move to a lost edge.

Here we have gray undertones at 60% opacity, orange at 90% opacity and shadows laid with the Oil paint flat brush. It has a lot of found or hard-edged brush strokes, without a lot of dry brush lost edges. Then I can go to one of my lost edge brushes and start color picking from the image and start finding those

Clip Studio Brushes