Hello! My name is Liz Staley and I’m a long-time user of Clip Studio Paint (I started using the program back when it was known as Manga Studio 4!). I was a beta-tester on the Manga Studio 5 program and for Clip Studio Paint, and I have written three books and several video courses about the program. Many of you probably know my name from those books, in fact. I write weekly posts on Graphixly.com and on CSP Tips, so be sure to come back every week to learn more Clip Studio Tips and Tricks from me!

Here in the Northern Hemisphere, winter has come! I’ve been in a “cozy winter” mood, so this week I wanted to make a custom snowflake brush that you can use to decorate your wintery illustrations. 

In this article we will cover the following topics:

Creating the Brush Shapes

Making the Snowflake Brush

Let’s create a blizzard!

Creating The Brush Shapes

The first thing we need to do is create the snowflake shapes for our brush. I will be doing this on my iPad, but you can do this with any version of Clip Studio Paint. First, create a new canvas. I recommend a square canvas - I’m going to use the “Square 1640x1640px” canvas in the top of the New Canvas options on Mobile. 

Note that you will need to be in Studio Mode to do this method of drawing the snowflake shapes, not simple mode! 

Tap on the Ruler tool group, then select the Symmetrical ruler subtool. In the Tool Property window, change the “Number of lines” to either 6 or 8, depending on how many spokes your want your snowflakes to have. I’m going with 8!

Next, tap and drag in the middle of the canvas to create your symmetrical ruler. Now we can create our snowflakes! With the symmetrical ruler anything you draw in one part of the ruler between the ruler lines will be mirrored across the ruler to make the perfect snowflake!

I drew in white with a blue layer behind the ruler layer so I could see my snowflake shape easily.

I recommend making about 6-10 different snowflake shapes for this brush so that there’s variety when you use it. I drew each snowflake on a new layer copy of my initial layer with the ruler on it. I added a border effect in a light blue to all the snowflake shapes so that when they overlap they have a little bit of definition. 

In order to save our snowflake drawings as brush tip materials, we need to get rid of the symmetrical ruler. You can either do this by deleting the ruler from your file, or select around the snowflake shapes using the lasso tool, copy, and then paste the snowflakes one at a time into a new file, each on their own layer. 

Anything visible will be saved as a material when doing the next step, so if you have an extra Paper layer or multiple layers of snowflake drawings, hide all layers other than the one you’re currently saving. 

To save the shapes as brush tips, click on Edit - Register Material - Image. The options shown below will come up. Enter a descriptive name for your material and make sure to click the “Use for brush tip shape” checkbox. In the “Choose save location” options, choose a folder to store your material in. I’m using the Image Material - Brush folder. You can also enter some tags in the Search Tag box so you can easily find your materials later. 

Note that if you cannot check the “Use for brush tip shape” box then you likely have not gotten rid of the ruler! I had this issue while creating this article, which is why I started copying and pasting the snowflake drawings into a fresh canvas after a while so there was no way the ruler was interfering with saving the drawing as a brush tip. 

Now we can use our snowflakes to make a brush!

Making The Snowflake Brush

I find it easiest to make a custom brush by starting off with a copy of a similar existing brush. So in this instance I will be choosing the Decoration - Effect - Cherry sub tool. Tap on this subtool (or right click) and select “Duplicate sub tool” from the option menu.

Let’s name this subtool copy “Snowflake”. Now we can change the settings by clicking the wrench icon in the lower right corner of the Tool Property window. 

In the Sub Tool Detail window, tap on the Brush Tip category. Here, you will see any current brush tip shapes that are in use by the brush. Tap on one of the current brush tip materials and then tap on the trash can icon. You will be prompted whether you really want to delete this brush tip material, click OK. (This will NOT delete the brush tip material from the Material library, just from this subtool) Do this for all brush tip shapes.

Once you have deleted all the unnecessary brush tip shapes, you will see “Click here and add tip shape” in the box. Tap there to pull up the brush tip shape materials. 

Select your first snowflake shape, then tap OK. 

Continue this process to add all the snowflake shapes to your brush. 

This brush will look nice enough, but we can make it look even better by adding some more randomness! Tap on the “Spraying Effect” category on the left side of the Sub Tool Detail window. 

Click on the icon to the right of the “Particle size” option to open additional options. In this menu, check the “random” checkbox, then set a minimum size that is about 10-30 (you may need to change this depending on the size you drew your brush shapes at initially). This will make your snowflakes random sizes, but none of them will be smaller than the minimum size. 

I also set the “Direction of particle” option to Random as well. 

Next tap on the Stroke category. Make sure that the Repeat Method is set to Random. If it is not then CSP will cycle through the snowflakes in order, and we definitely want this to look more organic than that!

I absolutely love that I can test out my brush as I’m adjusting options in Clip Studio! Leave the Sub Tool Detail window open with a canvas open and test the brush out on the canvas to see your changes. 

Conclusion

I love how easy it is to make custom brushes in Clip Studio Paint! Once you give it a try you’ll be hooked! You can make just about any type of brush for any effect that you can dream up once you get a hang of the process. 

For more information on CLIP Studio Paint, please visit https://www.clipstudio.net/en or https://graphixly.com