Brush Tip Image Maker for Clip Studio Paint

What this tool does

Set the shape, hardness, opacity, aspect ratio, rotation, particle amount and bleed, and a transparent tip image is drawn on the spot. Choose the polygon shape and you can drag its corners into any outline you like. That identical tip is laid down along two test strokes, so you judge your settings by how the tip reads as a line rather than by how one stamp looks alone. The tip goes out as a PNG and the numbers behind it as JSON.

• CSP official: Brush material expression color (Japanese) — Official reference; checked 2026-09-06

When to reach for it

• You want to add grain or bleed to a brush you already use, and building the tip beats searching a material library.
• You want to see whether the stamps still merge into a line, and how the edge behaves, before importing anything into Clip Studio Paint.
• You need a flat chisel tip, or an angular polygon nib you can reshape corner by corner.
• You are building a matched set of brushes and want the numbers written down.

How to use it

1. Start from the preset closest to what you have in mind.
2. Choose a shape and a canvas size. The canvas size is one side of the PNG you will export.
3. On the polygon shape, set the vertex count and drag the handles on the tip stamp until the outline suits you. Reset shape puts the regular polygon back.
4. Under Stroke feel, work through hardness, opacity, aspect ratio and rotation.
5. Under Particles & bleed, set the particle amount and the bleed, then pick a scatter with the seed. Shuffle drops a new seed in for you.
6. Read the three previews — Tip stamp, Constant stroke and Pressure — and confirm the tip holds together as a line.
7. Export the image with Tip PNG and the settings with JSON. Settings worth keeping go under My presets.

What each control means

Shape

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

Vertices and free-form editing

A polygon has 3 to 12 corners. Drag a handle on the tip stamp to move one corner on its own, so the outline need not stay regular; the arrow keys nudge a focused handle and Home returns that corner. Changing the vertex count rebuilds a regular polygon.

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.

Aspect ratio

The width of the tip against its height, applied to all five shapes. Above 1 it goes wide, and with rotation it becomes a flat, chisel-shaped tip.

Seed

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

Particle amount and bleed

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

Reading the three previews

• Tip stamp is the PNG itself; the checkerboard marks the transparent areas, and on a polygon the round handles sit on the corners. Judge the softness of the rim and the density of the grain here.
• Constant stroke lays that tip down at unchanging pressure. If the stamps never merge and the line reads as a string of beads, soften the hardness or work at a larger tip.
• Pressure runs from nothing to full and back again, so the entry and the taper sit in one line. If the taper breaks off abruptly instead of thinning out, your hardness or your opacity is too strong.
• How far apart the stamps fall is a Clip Studio Paint setting — Interval, under Stroke — so this tool does not offer it. The test strokes are drawn at an interval typical of the shape.

Step 1: register the PNG as an image material

1. Open the exported Tip PNG in CSP. Before registration, set the image layer’s Expression color to Gray in Layer Property to preserve soft transparency and allow drawing-color changes. After registration, test with two different main colors.
2. Choose Edit menu > Register Material > Image.
3. In the Material property dialog, type a Material name and turn on Use for brush tip shape under the brush settings. Miss that checkbox and the image never appears in the brush tip list.
4. Pick a folder under Location to save material, add search tags if you want to find it again later, and press OK.

Step 2: put the material on a brush

1. Select a brush close to what you want and duplicate it from the Tool Group palette menu > Duplicate tool, so your edits never overwrite the original.
2. With the duplicate selected, open the Advanced Tool Settings palette — the palette renamed from Sub Tool Detail in Ver. 5.0 — and open the Brush tip category.
3. Switch Tip shape from Circle to Material.
4. Click "Click here to add tip shape", choose the material you registered in the Select brush tip shape dialog, and press OK.
5. Once the brush draws the way you want, use Save all settings as default in the Advanced Tool Settings palette to make that state the starting point of the brush.

What is left to Clip Studio Paint

Brush tip > Thickness, Direction, Angle

Thickness squashes the tip, Direction chooses whether that happens horizontally or vertically, and Angle turns it through 0 to 360 degrees. Aspect ratio and rotation are baked into the PNG on this page, so bake in the proportion you always want and leave the per-brush variation to these three.

Brush tip > Hardness

The manual is explicit that this can be set when Tip shape is set to Circle. A material tip ignores it, so whatever softness you want has to be in the PNG before you register it.

Brush tip > Brush density

The opacity of one selected brush tip shape. It multiplies with the opacity you set here, so if you exported a faint tip, leave the Clip Studio Paint side at full until you can see what the tip does on its own.

Stroke > Interval

A choice of Fixed, Wide, Normal or Narrow, with a numeric slider only under Fixed. The manual notes that the tighter the interval the smoother the line, but the heavier the stroke — so a constant-stroke preview that reads as beads is your cue to tighten it.

Loading several tips into one brush

The seed-varied PNGs from Export variations are meant for this. Register each one as its own material, then add them all to the same brush by clicking "Click here to add tip shape" again for each; the tips line up in the Brush tip category and drag and drop reorders them. How the brush works through that line is Stroke > Repeat method, which offers Repeat, Reverse, Do not repeat, Random, One time only and One random cycle. Random is what stops a grainy tip from reading as a repeating pattern along a long stroke.

To the brush engine a tip material is greyscale: black lays ink down at full strength, transparent lays none. That is why the tip is drawn black on transparent here, and why the JSON this tool exports is a record of your settings rather than a list of numbers to type into the Advanced Tool Settings palette.

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 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; square and polygon tips are blurred by roughly (1 − hardness) × 10px instead. Polygon corners are stored as a ratio of the tip bounding box, 1 being its right edge, so an outline survives a change of canvas size or aspect ratio. Every shape spreads its aspect ratio across width and height. The test strokes step forward by a spacing held internally per shape: the long side of the bounding box multiplied by that 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.

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.

• 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, watercolour edges — cannot be expressed by a tip image at all.
• JSON stores this web tool’s editable settings, seed and polygon vertices. Import it here to resume; it is not a CSP sub tool file. Use the PNG and the registration procedure for CSP.

Your images and settings

Tips and test strokes are drawn in your browser; images are not uploaded. Settings and personal presets are saved to localStorage and restored next time. Settings links contain parameter values, and opening one sends its URL to the hosting server. To keep a file or move settings between devices, export JSON and restore it with the import control.