Building a Custom Brush in Clip Studio Paint: From Tip Image to Registered Brush

What a brush tip image actually is

A Clip Studio Paint brush draws by taking one small transparent image — the tip image — and stamping it, over and over at a fixed interval, along the path the pen travels. A round brush is a circular tip pressed down in quick succession; a scratchy brush is a grainy tip pressed down the same way. There's no separate mechanism drawing the line itself — the shape, softness, and transparency of the tip is the texture of the stroke, so designing a tip image is the same act as designing how the brush feels to draw with.

When an existing brush can't get you there — an irregular grain, a bled-out edge, a flat chisel tip — no amount of parameter tweaking closes the gap, and rebuilding the tip image is the shortest path. Most brush materials sold or shared online come down to the same combination: a tip image plus stroke settings such as interval. Knowing that structure means you can tell, looking at a distributed brush, whether a texture comes from the tip itself or from a stroke setting on top of it.

What makes a good tip

• Transparency: the tip's background must be fully transparent. A solid background turns every stamp into a filled rectangle as they overlap, so instead of a line you get a solid band.
• Size: export the PNG at around 256px per side for line art, or 512-1024px for a texture brush meant to show off a large grain. Too large slows things down when Clip Studio Paint scales it back; too small blurs on scale-up.
• Hardness: how the edge fades decides how the stroke edge reads. Close to 100% keeps the outline crisp; lower it for a soft, bled-out edge. Lean higher for pen-style brushes, lower for watercolor or pastel ones.
• Margin: leave space around the artwork rather than filling the whole canvas. Without margin, overlapping stamps whose centers shift as you draw can visibly clip the corners.
• Aspect ratio and rotation: for a chisel-like flat brush, bake these into the tip image so several brushes can reuse the same shape. To vary the angle brush by brush instead, leave it to Clip Studio Paint's own settings rather than baking it in.

The full material-registration walkthrough

Once you have the tip image exported as a PNG, register it as a material in Clip Studio Paint and assign it to a brush.

1. Open the exported PNG in Clip Studio Paint.
2. Choose Edit menu > Register Material > Image.
3. In the Material property dialog, type a name under Material name and turn on Use for brush tip shape under the brush settings — miss that checkbox and the image never shows up in the brush tip list later. Choose a folder under Location to save material, add tags if you like, and press OK.
4. Pick the brush you want to base this on and duplicate it from the Tool Group palette menu > Duplicate tool, so you never overwrite the original brush's settings.
5. With the duplicate selected, open the Advanced Tool Settings palette — renamed from Sub Tool Detail in Clip Studio Paint Ver. 5.0, which is why older articles may still refer to it by the old name.
6. Open the Brush tip category and switch Tip shape from Circle to Material. Click "Click here to add tip shape," choose the material you just registered in the Select brush tip shape dialog, and press OK.
7. Once the brush feels right, use Save all settings as default in the Advanced Tool Settings palette to lock that state in as the brush's starting point.

Settings Clip Studio Paint itself controls

The tip image bakes in the look — shape, hardness, aspect ratio, particles, bleed — while how it behaves as a line is decided by Clip Studio Paint's own settings once the material is registered.

Stroke > Interval

Decides how tightly the tips are packed along the stroke. It isn't a free numeric field — you choose from Fixed, Wide, Normal, or Narrow, and a numeric slider only appears once you pick Fixed. Tighter spacing smooths the line, but it also makes the stroke heavier to draw.

Brush tip > Thickness, Direction, Angle

Thickness squashes the tip, Direction chooses which axis it squashes along — horizontal or vertical — and Angle rotates it from 0 to 360 degrees. Even if you've already baked an aspect ratio or a rotation into the tip image itself, these controls let you add brush-by-brush variation on top of it.

Brush tip > Hardness

This can only be set when Tip shape is Circle. A material (image) tip can't use it at all, so however soft you want the edge, it has to already be built into the tip image.

Brush tip > Brush density

The opacity of a single tip stamp. It multiplies with the transparency already baked into the tip image, so if you made a faint tip, leave this at 100 on the Clip Studio Paint side first and judge how it actually looks before adjusting further.

Prototyping with the Brush Tip Maker

Before carrying a tip image into Clip Studio Paint, prototyping it in your browser first cuts down on rework. Pick a shape — circle, square, polygon, particles, or bleed — and a canvas size, dial in the feel with hardness, opacity, aspect ratio, and rotation, then layer on grain with particle amount and bleed. The polygon shape even lets you drag its corners to knock a regular polygon out of true.

Don't just judge how a single tip looks — check the preview of that same tip repeated along a stroke, both at constant pressure and ramping from weak to strong pressure and back. If the constant stroke reads as a string of beads instead of merging into a line, lower the hardness or enlarge the tip. If the line snaps off abruptly where pressure is light, hardness or opacity is too strong. Clip Studio Paint's Interval can't be reproduced as an exact number here, but the way the stamps connect in the preview still tells you which of Fixed, Wide, Normal, or Narrow to reach for after registering it. Once the settings feel right, export the PNG and register it following the steps above. Exporting several PNGs that share every setting except the seed lets you load multiple tips on one brush and set Repeat method to Random for an even less regular texture.

The settings export as JSON too, so save it alongside the image once you land on a tip you like — no need to rebuild from scratch just to nudge the hardness or particle amount on a variant. Browser settings don't carry over between devices, so save both files for the same tip on another machine.