Clip Studio tips and resources

whyfish

Well-known member
Nov 1, 2020
222
381
63
38
drawingwithjerin.com
Pronouns
they/any
So, Clip Studio Paint has been my go-to art program since @katimus got it for me a few years ago, and I'm still finding out about new features and tools I didn't know it had. Feel free to drop your favorite assets, tutorials, questions, advice, WIPs, and other Clip Studio-related discussion in this thread!

I'll start with a few of my favorite downloads.

🖊️ hard block brush (my current favorite for lineart)
📺 glitch brushes, more glitch brushes, glitch clone tool
📦 grunge cardboard brush
🧑‍🎤 hair highlight, more hair highlights, even more hair highlights
💕 heart bokeh
✨ prism glitter
💻 circuit board pattern
🌟 clothes/skin texture highlight
🌼 dandelion brush
💧 blend/blur tools

bonus: DataErase has some groovy pixel glitch assets for Clip Studio and/or Photoshop (not for free but hella worth paying for). My signature graphic was heavily inspired by her aesthetic.
 
So, Clip Studio Paint has been my go-to art program since @katimus got it for me a few years ago, and I'm still finding out about new features and tools I didn't know it had. Feel free to drop your favorite assets, tutorials, questions, advice, WIPs, and other Clip Studio-related discussion in this thread!

I'll start with a few of my favorite downloads.

🖊️ hard block brush (my current favorite for lineart)
📺 glitch brushes, more glitch brushes, glitch clone tool
📦 grunge cardboard brush
🧑‍🎤 hair highlight, more hair highlights, even more hair highlights
💕 heart bokeh
✨ prism glitter
💻 circuit board pattern
🌟 clothes/skin texture highlight
🌼 dandelion brush
💧 blend/blur tools

bonus: DataErase has some groovy pixel glitch assets for Clip Studio and/or Photoshop (not for free but hella worth paying for). My signature graphic was heavily inspired by her aesthetic.
So I'm not an artist, but I nabbed a tablet on Black Friday I'm hoping to give it a whirl so this thread is probably going to be pretty helpful.
 
  • Love
Reactions: katimus and whyfish
So I'm not an artist, but I nabbed a tablet on Black Friday I'm hoping to give it a whirl so this thread is probably going to be pretty helpful.
Ohh, that's awesome!! I pretty much started learning digital art by the seat of my pants when I got my first tablet, with a looottt of help from my art friends, so definitely let us know if you have any questions or if there's anything you want advice on! <3 (BTW, if you're not sure about Clip Studio yet and just want to play around with a basic digital art app to get a feel for it, I also recommend MyPaint, which is free and has a relatively minimalistic interface that might feel more intuitive if you're primarily familiar with traditional/physical media.)

Today I bring you a user-created improvement on the default close and fill tool, because I was so focused on brushes I forgot to link it in my last post. :B Also some very expressive ink brushes and a mini-tutorial on the freeflow gradient tool (witchcraft!).

ClipStudioTips on Twitter is another (unofficial) account with some interesting lifehax. :3
 
  • Love
Reactions: Radiotanuki
BTW, if you're not sure about Clip Studio yet and just want to play around with a basic digital art app to get a feel for it, I also recommend MyPaint, which is free
Well, I'll be honest being a "not artist" I was actually buying the tablet for "not artist" reasons, but it's a pretty fancy tablet and supposedly Clip Studio is supposed to come pre-installed on it.
 
  • Like
Reactions: whyfish
Oh word! (Sorry, I am a doofus and thought you meant like a Wacom-type drawing tablet for a desktop PC at first.) I think Kat uses the tablet (iPad?) version of Clip Studio if you have any tablet-specific inquiries. :3
 
This thread is clutch and I'm definitely gonna have to download some of the stuff you've posted and check it out. Like that glitter *_*!

Thank you for sharing!
 
  • Love
Reactions: whyfish
This thread is clutch and I'm definitely gonna have to download some of the stuff you've posted and check it out. Like that glitter *_*!

Thank you for sharing!
You're very welcome, and thank you! Oh man, I downloaded so many glitter brushes I cannot keep track of them (compounded by the fact that a lot of the tool names are not in English by default, though I think you can rename them to whatever you want), but my design philosophy is that you can never have too many kinds of glitter. I kinda wish there was a way to just link my entire downloads page from my Clip Studio account so other people could browse through it, but here's a few more anyway:

🌸 flowers and various shapes 1 2 3 4 5
✨ assorted sparkles 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21
🌊 water texture for all your vaporwave needs
📷 bokeh/lensflare orb thingies 1 2 3 4 5
📸 LENSFLAAAAARE
🎮 pixel glitter
💎 crystals and stuff 1 2 3 4 5 6
💡 lighting effects 1 2 3
🔸 assorted geometry 1 2 3 4 5 6
🌌 SPAAAAACE 1 2
🔵 bubbles

I've been using Clip Studio for 2 years now and I feel like I've barely scraped what it can do. So here's hoping I learn stuff
Haha, same here! I'm still only familiar with a few features and they add new stuff all the time. (Queenie just mentioned on the XenoChat discord that they're going to be adding support for Photoshop ABR brushes in their next update.) Feel free to ask questions on here if there's anything you want to know about!
 
Unhelpful Eraser is amazing. (And a good example of how versatile Clip Studio's tool settings are, I think! I never played around much with custom brushes in Photoshop because I had a prehistoric copy of CS2 [literally right up until Adobe yanked their registration servers a few months back so I couldn't reinstall it after resetting Windows, the absolute bastards] and it seemed kind of daunting to go in and futz with stuff, but CSP is the first program I've used where I've actually felt like it was worth my while to experiment.)

I also found out recently that there's an Android version of Clip Studio, which I've installed on my phone but haven't tried yet so I'm not sure how it compares to the desktop (or iPad) version(s).
 
Android version of Clip Studio,
I'm kinda miffed by it. Apparently for a while it was exclusive to the Galaxy Tab S7/S7+, which I have the S7+ and I don't know if it's still exclusive or not. The real killer is that you have to pay a subscription rather than a one time fee to use the software which is bogus.
 
I'm kinda miffed by it. Apparently for a while it was exclusive to the Galaxy Tab S7/S7+, which I have the S7+ and I don't know if it's still exclusive or not. The real killer is that you have to pay a subscription rather than a one time fee to use the software which is bogus.

Blegh, that's annoying. I have an LG phone and was able to download it at least, but it wouldn't let me use my login to register (something about it not being allowed on that device, idk). I thought maybe it was because I technically have my desktop version of Clip Studio Paint registered on two different operating systems (I had it running on Linux for a while, but my Linux install magically bricked itself over the summer and I am too dumb and short of attention span to remember how I got it to run on there in the first place). I haven't figured out yet if there's a way to un-register it remotely or if that would even make it possible for me to use the mobile version. On the other hand, I only really use mobile art apps when I'm away from my desktop, and I'm pretty much at home all the time now. :S Oh well. If anyone does get it to work I'd love to hear your thoughts!
 
Blegh, that's annoying. I have an LG phone and was able to download it at least, but it wouldn't let me use my login to register (something about it not being allowed on that device, idk). I thought maybe it was because I technically have my desktop version of Clip Studio Paint registered on two different operating systems (I had it running on Linux for a while, but my Linux install magically bricked itself over the summer and I am too dumb and short of attention span to remember how I got it to run on there in the first place). I haven't figured out yet if there's a way to un-register it remotely or if that would even make it possible for me to use the mobile version. On the other hand, I only really use mobile art apps when I'm away from my desktop, and I'm pretty much at home all the time now. :S Oh well. If anyone does get it to work I'd love to hear your thoughts!
I'm pretty sure they are billing the mobile and desktop versions separately with the mobile version requiring a subscription to use which is downright Adobe levels of evil.
 
As much as I like the pay once model on PC, the mobile ports costing anything seem like a huge faux pas. I don't think my phone would be able to run it since I only have a Galaxy S6 that I really should just give in and upgrade but I can't imagine trying to do art on it outside of frying the pictures I take on my phone in Pixlr filters or DotPict doodles. It is very cool to have almost the same functionality from iPad to desktop, and I have enough money that I can afford it, but I understand that not everyone can and it sucks to see the paywall.
 
  • Like
Reactions: whyfish
I am a very lazy artist and am very bad at clean line art so a lot of my stuff comes out kinda sketchy. Clip has been like a life saver for that because luckily for me, I like really sketchy looking shit. I am just bad about jumping into a project on a whim and not looking at options or brushes a whole lot.... so this thread will probably help me with reccs. If anyone has any good graffiti brushes I would loves something like that! I do like to experiment here and there!
 
  • Love
Reactions: whyfish
I made some brushes out of the city textures that are visible through Helmer's office window on Second Miltia in XSII, so I thought I'd share them here in case anyone else can make use of them.

Basically, I was doing a fanfart (which I guess I'll post in my actual fanart thread later, whenever I get my crap together to do a Xenotober summary) and I wanted to recreate this view of the skyline:
A screen capture from Xenosaga Episode II, showing the interior of Representative Helmer's office on Second Miltia. Helmer stands facing a large window overlooking the city, to the left of his desk. Ziggy is also visible as the on-screen player character, standing in front of the desk.


So I used the texture maps from that scene, which look like this:
A series of flat image textures depicting city buildings at various sizes and distances, as well as a faraway view of a cityscape and some textures representing clouds and a windowpane.

Each building (or group of buildings for the smaller ones) was a separate image texture that I set as a brush tip shape in grayscale, so that it paints at varying levels of opacity in whatever the paint color is. At some point I'd like to do something more like a stamp brush that preserves the original colors, but this worked pretty well for the effect I wanted.
The same texture map as the previous image, showing only the buildings, in grayscale.

I think this brush format (.sut) only works in Clip Studio, but it might be possible to convert it to a Photoshop-compatible format if anyone's interested. Feel free to use it for whatever!
 

Attachments

  • MitreiSkylineMonochrome.zip
    1.3 MB · Views: 99
Last edited: