Discover other brushes - Clip Studio Paint Tutorial

- [Instructor] Let's talk a little bit about what I feel is Clip Studio's biggest strength, which is its smooth and powerful brush engine. Now, Clip Studio comes with a good set of quality default brushes, and there are tons of brushes you can purchase online and import from third party vendors. Now we've already used the rough pencil in our demo so far, but I'm just going to go through a few default Clip Studio brushes that I keep coming back to in my daily work, even though I've also imported a lot of other third party brushes. They're just really good brushes. Coming over here to the pen category, one I use a lot is the G pen. And I'm just going to go down here to a black color and maybe increase my size a little bit. And the G pen is just a solid, smooth inking pen, super fun to use, beautiful taper, and just smooth overall. Another one I like to use as well is the tapered pen. It's got a nice kind of thick to thin to thick feel, and it reminds me of just a, you know, kind of an architectural felt tip pen. And I also end up going to the textured pen quite often. It's basically like the G pen, but just has a little bit of that textured edge that gives it just a little more of that traditional feel. Moving over to the brush category, I'm often using the thick paint sub tool category, and the gouache brushes are really, really nice. I'm going to move over to a color here, and you'll immediately start seeing how easily and beautifully these gouache brushes blend colors with one another. And that's what I really love about Clip Studio's brush engine, is the color blending just feels controllable, but it blends enough to give us a little bit of that traditional feel. This might be a good opportunity to introduce the temporary tool switch to the eyedropper tool. Now on the keyboard, if you're on a Mac, if you press and hold Option, or if you're on Windows, it'll be the Alt key, well that temporarily switches my brush to the eyedropper tool. And it's just one more way that you can blend colors together very quickly, in addition to the normal color blending that comes with the brushes. So for example, I'll just go ahead and color pick this blue here by tapping, and you'll see down here in the color palette on the bottom left, how as I just drag my color picker around the canvas, it's picking up whatever color is directly underneath my cursor. So I'll select this blue and just keep painting. Again, we're taking advantage of this temporary tool switching that we talked about earlier. Going to just intensify that red a little bit. This is just the normal blending from the brush, but if I want to have a little more control over it, I can just grab this orange, you know, color select it, blend in, grab that red again, bring that back in, you know, grab this blue. Well, you get the idea. It's a real simple way, an intuitive way, really, of blending these colors in a really traditional format. Another one I use often is the oil paint flat brush. It's like the gouache brush. It has slightly different texture to it. I'll come here to a smaller brush size here. And even though it has less texture, once again, one thing I appreciate about these brushes is they're controllable. They don't pretend to be the most realistic brushes, but when combined with each other, you can get really beautiful results. So for example, this oil paint flat brush on its own can be quite flat, but when I combine it with some gouache brush edges, we're really starting to get some nice, traditional looks. So we have a little bit of that flatness and a little bit of this texture, and it feels a little bit like a palette knife. In the India ink category, the bit husky and the smooth brush are really fun brushes to use as well. So there's that big husky brush, which when you make a mark that's slow, it kind of feels like it's got thicker paint, but as soon as you go fast, it dries out a little bit. And the smooth version of that just stays wet a little bit longer, just adding a little bit of that texture still. Now you'll notice on this one, the color blending is turned off. So that is an option you can turn on or off for different brushes. Well, let's talk a little bit about those options. So far, the only attributes that we've been adjusting on our brushes have been the brush size, here in the brush size palette, and the color. But there are so many other attributes that you can adjust on every single brush. And that's where our tool property palette comes into play. In the case of the smooth brush, you can see that when I adjust the brush size, it's also adjusting here in the brush size palette. So really the brush size is just an attribute that's exposed here in the tool property palette as well. Now I can also change the opacity. So if I reduce this to 47, well now I'm painting at 47% opacity. Now it's worth noting that the tool property palette only exposes some of all the possible options for any of the brushes. If you want to see all the options, click on this little wrench here in the bottom right corner, and that opens the sub tool detail palette. The sub tool detail window holds all of the possible options that you can change on any given brush. So for example, you may have noticed that when I'm on the smooth sub tool, I have the option to change the opacity. But when I move over to my rough pencil, the opacity option goes away. It doesn't mean that you can't change the opacity in the rough pencil. It just means that Clip Studio has decided to not expose the opacity slider for the rough pencil for whatever reason, but the rough pencil also has an opacity property. So my sub tool detail is open, and it will update based on the brush that I have selected. So here I am on rough pencil, and now I just need to go through these categories and find where the opacity is. And sure enough, it's right here in the Ink category. Now all I have to do is turn on the eyeball in this column and you'll see that as I turn that on and off, that attribute is now exposed in the tool property palette. So you can go through and decide which attributes are important to you and which ones you want exposed, kind of as a quick access attribute right here in the tool property. I can also go to something like the smooth tool, and maybe come over here to the texture tab, and I see that no texture has been assigned to it. Well, if I click None, Clip Studio gives me the option to assign a stock texture, or I can even import my own. If I click Okay and I start painting, I may not see any of that texture yet. I'll just go ahead and increase that texture density. And now you can see that some of that canvas looking texture starting to come through. So this is a great way of just discovering what you can do with the brushes, is take Clip Studio Paint's stock brushes, and just play around with them. Now don't be afraid of messing with the brushes, cause you can always go back to the way it was. If I just close the sub tool detail window, right here next to the wrench, there's another button that says Reset selected sub tool to default settings. So I just need to click that, hit Okay, and now I'm back to where I was. If I do the same thing with the pencil, you'll see that the opacity attribute will be hidden again, because at its default state, it wasn't exposed in the first place. So that's a great way to just discover and play around with brushes. Another good way is to make a duplicate of a tool. So I'm going to come back to this smooth tool. And now I'm going to click this little icon with the plus. And what that does is it gives me the option to rename a duplicate version of that tool. I'll just leave it at the default, smooth two, and now I can just go to town on this one and have fun and play around with it, not worrying about messing up the original default brush. So either way, discover these brushes and just pull them apart. That's the best way to not only gain control of the look, but also you're on your way to building your own brushes at some point.