Brush Tip Image Maker for Clip Studio Paint

What this tool does

Set the shape, hardness, opacity, aspect ratio, rotation, spacing, particle amount and bleed, and a transparent tip image is drawn on the spot. That identical tip is laid down along three test strokes at the same time, so you judge your settings by how the tip reads as a line rather than by how one stamp looks in isolation. The tip then goes out as a PNG and the numbers behind it as a JSON file.

When to reach for it

• You want to add grain or bleed to a brush you already use, and building the tip yourself is quicker than digging through a material library.
• You want to see how a stroke falls apart as the spacing widens, before you import anything into Clip Studio Paint.
• You need a flat, chisel-like tip made from an aspect ratio and a rotation.
• You are building a matched set of brushes and want the numbers written down in a file you can read months later.

How to use it

1. Start from the preset closest to what you have in mind: Soft round, Flat marker, Grain brush, Bleed, Dry pen, Spray, Rough watercolor or Stippling.
2. Choose a shape and a canvas size. The canvas size is the length of one side of the PNG you will export.
3. Under Stroke feel, work through hardness, opacity, aspect ratio, rotation and spacing.
4. Under Particles & bleed, dial in the particle amount and the bleed, then pick a scatter with the seed. Shuffle drops a new seed in for you.
5. Read the four previews — Tip stamp, Constant stroke, Pressure and Spacing test — and confirm the tip still holds together once it becomes a line.
6. Export the image with Tip PNG and the settings with JSON. Use Export variations when you want to compare several scatters side by side.
7. Keep the settings you like under My presets so that you are not rebuilding the same brush next session.

What each control means

Shape

Circle, Square, Particles or Bleed. Particles is a cluster of dots; Bleed is a soft circle with faint dots scattered around it, the way ink creeps into paper.

Canvas size

One side of the exported PNG, from 64 to 1024px. The tip itself is drawn at 82% of that, so a margin is always left around it.

Hardness

How far the tip stays solid before it falls off towards the rim. Near 100% the outline is crisp; lower values fade outwards gradually.

Aspect ratio

The width of the tip against its height. Anything above 1 makes it wide, and combined with rotation it gives you a flat, chisel-shaped tip.

Spacing

How far apart stamps are laid down, as a percentage of the tip diameter. The note under the field tells you how many pixels that works out to at your current settings.

Seed

The number, from 0 to 999999, behind the scatter of the grain. The same seed always draws the same scatter, and changing it rearranges the grain while leaving the shape and the density alone.

Particle amount and bleed

On the Particles shape the particle amount is the dot count directly. On the other shapes the count is the particle amount multiplied by the bleed percentage, shown as Effective particles at the top of the page.

Reading the four previews

• Tip stamp is the PNG itself, at the size you set. The checkerboard behind it marks the transparent areas.
• Constant stroke is a line drawn at unchanging pressure. If the stamps never merge and the line reads as a string of beads, bring the spacing down or soften the hardness.
• Pressure runs from nothing to full and back again. If the taper breaks off abruptly instead of thinning out, your hardness or your opacity is too strong.
• Spacing test shows your setting on the upper row and a coarser value on the lower row, which is roughly what a fast stroke amounts to. If the lower row breaks up, a quick flick of the pen will break up the same way.

Bringing the tip into Clip Studio Paint

1. Export the tip with the Tip PNG button and open the file in Clip Studio Paint.
2. Choose Edit menu > Register Material > Image, turn on Use for brush tip shape in the dialog, then give the material a name and a tag so you can find it again.
3. Duplicate a sub tool that is close to what you want, open the Sub Tool Detail palette, and under Brush tip switch Tip shape from Circle to Material. Add the material you just registered.
4. Set the brush size, then copy the spacing you settled on here into Spacing under Stroke.
5. Opacity, scattering and the other dynamics stay on the Clip Studio Paint side. The exported JSON records every value you chose here, so transcribing them is a matter of reading down the file.

To the brush engine a tip material is greyscale: black lays down ink at full strength, transparent lays down none. That is why the tip is drawn black on transparent here rather than in the colour you mean to paint with.

How the image is drawn

The tip is a shape drawn onto a canvas element, and the test strokes lay that same shape down along a path. There is no separate preview-only drawing code, so the grain in the preview is the grain in the file you export. A circular tip comes from a radial gradient that holds solid out to the hardness position and fades to transparent at the rim; a square tip is blurred by roughly (1 − hardness) × 10px. Spacing is measured against the bounding diameter, so the long side is what counts once an aspect ratio is involved: the stamp interval in pixels is the long side multiplied by the spacing percentage. The scatter of particles and bleed comes from a pseudo-random sequence built from the seed and the stamp index and nothing else, so changing the hardness or the particle count leaves the arrangement where it was and only a new seed rearranges it.

What this tool does not do

What you get here is a tip image and an honest sample of how it repeats along a line. It is not a simulation of the Clip Studio Paint brush engine, and a few things are deliberately out of scope.

• Pressure curves, stabilization and the finer taper settings belong to Clip Studio Paint. The pressure preview here is fixed to one hill: zero to full and back to zero.
• Tilt detection, following the direction of travel, random rotation and spraying are not reproduced.
• Effects that read the layers underneath — colour mixing, blending with the underlying colour, watercolour edges — cannot be expressed by a tip image at all.
• The JSON records the settings on this page. It is not a Clip Studio Paint sub tool file, and there is no import to read it back in.

Your images and settings

Every tip and every test stroke is drawn inside your browser, and nothing you make here is ever uploaded anywhere. Your current settings and the presets you save go into this browser’s local storage and come back the next time you open the page. They do not follow you to another device or another browser, so export the JSON for anything you would be annoyed to lose.

Frequently asked questions