Character Art Tools & Brushes

When getting started with digital art, it can be overwhelming to choose the perfect brush to sketch with, do lineart with, or use to color your art with. You can search for digital brushes on online stores or creator blogs, as well as official asset libraries like Clip Studio Assets. In this article, we’ll introduce some of the best and most popular brushes for sketching and painting in Clip Studio Paint that you can download directly to the app for free on Clip Studio Assets, as well as tips for importing or creating your own brushes. You can try out all these brushes for free even if you’re using the free trial of the Clip Studio Paint app.

Drawing apps like Clip Studio Paint come with a variety of default brushes, from pens and pencils to oil brushes and watercolor brushes. Before downloading new brushes, test out the defaults to see if there’s a good fit for you.

When you want to try more brushes, here’s our recommendations of some of the most popular brushes created by artists for character art.

Sketching brushes

SU-Cream Pencil

SU Cream Pencil is a popular sketching pencil with over 700,000 downloads. It has a subtle texture that becomes more visible when the brush size is larger. This brush can be suitable for pen-like clean drawings or rough sketches.

Artemus Pencil

This is a set of pencils that mimic real B sketching pencils and charcoal. The brushes have a soft texture and support pen tilt for soft wide pencil hatching.

Pen brushes

Nong Pen

Nong Pen is a soft, buttery pen that can be used for both lines and painting depending on the brush size. When drawing with light pressure, the stroke becomes fainter for a gentle effect. This pen type goes well with watercolor or painterly styles, as the lines easily blend into the colors.

Pen Pen

Pen Pen is a textured pen that responds to the stylus pressure to create thinner or thicker lines. It’s perfect for sketches with a lot of dynamism. The set comes with variants that have slightly different texture and pressure curves, so try testing them out!

Comic Ink Pen

This inking pen is suitable for bold inking lines and hatching. It has a dense texture that looks great in pure black. When the pressure is light, the brush texture comes out clearly which creates an interesting effect at the end of the stroke.

Painting brushes

Thick Paints set

This Thick Paints brush set includes textured heavy painting brushes that add subtle color jitter on each stroke for natural color variation when painting. It also has effect brushes for paint splatter effects and blending brushes that mimic a palette knife.

Thick Coating Brush Set

This is a set of 30 textured brushes for dry and wet oil paint, pastels, and rough hatching. As well as brushes for painting, it also includes heavily textured brushes to add final details to your paintings. These brushes have a traditional look with visible brushwork.

ARTIST21 BRUSH PACK

If you’re not sure where to start, ARTIST21 is a comprehensive brush pack that includes sketching pencils, watercolor brushes, and markers. It also has custom blending brushes and erasers so that you can paint with a cohesive look. This is a good set for beginners who want to try out lots of different brush styles.

To search for more brushes on Clip Studio Assets, you can search by keywords to filter or brushes you want. Try searching for “watercolor,” or “ink” to see brushes with those tags.

You can import brushes in .sut or .abr format from other sites to Clip Studio Paint. Simply drag and drop your brushes to the Sub Tool palette or import from the Sub Tool palette menu’s “Import sub tool” command.

Native brushes are in the .sut format, and you can also import Photoshop brushes (.abr). Photoshop brushes may appear slightly different when imported to Clip Studio Paint, so feel free to adjust the settings.

You can try making your own brushes by editing the settings of an existing brush. Make a copy of the brush from the Sub Tool palette menu, then adjust the settings in Tool Properties and test the brush on the canvas as you customize it.
See here for an example on making custom brushes.

As well as sketching and painting brushes, one of the benefits of digital art is the access to a huge variety of pattern brushes and stamp brushes to add detail. For example, you can use ribbon brushes to draw a continuous pattern of lace in one stroke, or use stamp brushes to draw shapes like flowers, stars, and hearts.