Clip Studio Paint Tutorial: How To Paint a Portrait Using Oil Paint And Custom Brushes

In this article we will go through the step by step process to paint a realistic portrait in Clip Studio Paint, using matte painting, oil painting techniques and custom brushes.

You will also learn how to create your own custom brushes in Clip Studio Paint in order to create colour vibrations and create a textured and impressionistic effect.

By the end of this tutorial you will learn useful painting techniques to paint digital portraits with Clip Studio Paint creating an attractive artistic impression using traditional media brushes that come with Clip Studio Paint as well as custom brushes.


Introduction: Clip Studio Paint is a powerful tool for digital painting with realistic brushes

In this tutorial we are going to explore Clip Studio Paint's capabilities for creating digital portraits with brushes that resemble oil paint and other traditional media. You will also learn to create your own custom brushes in order to create more color variation and to produce a more impressionistic style.

Let's get started!

Portrait process step 1 line drawing
2nd stage of the 4 stage portrait process
Portrait process step 3 detailing
Portrait process step 4 finishing

Index:

  • First steps: Page and background setup
  • Line drawing
  • Familiarize Yourself with Default Oil Paint Brushes in Clip Studio Paint
  • Creating Custom Brushes in Clip Studio Paint
  • Choosing your colour palette
  • Blocking in the big masses of light and shadow
  • Adding details/refining your portrait
  • Putting it all together: Full Portrait Process (speedpaint video)

First Steps: Page and Background Setup

The first thing you need to do when starting a new piece is to set up your page size and resolution.

You do this by going to the Main menu and choosing File > New, then choose Illustration and set your page size and resolution.

In this case we have chosen an A4 size at 300 dpi resolution. 300 dpi is a high enough resolution so you can print your work with good quality if you want to do so.

It is also a good idea to choose a paper color that is different from white, like a midtone grey or beige. Using a toned canvas will help you to get your values more accurately later on while painting.

New document set up in Clip Studio Paint EX

Create a new document by going to File > New

New docment creation with a toned canvas

Once you have chosen your canvas size and resolution, you are ready to start painting

Line drawing

Now we are ready to create our line drawing. Note it is possible to start a portrait without a line drawing, just painting colour shapes straight onto the canvas, however in this instance we have gone down the line drawing route.

Here your goal is to look carefully at your reference photo and try to stablish the proportions as accurately as possible. We are not looking for much detail at this stage, just a basic placement of the main features such as the eyes, nose, mouth, face proportions, etc.

In Clip Studio Paint you can do this with pretty much any brush you like. You can use markers, pencils, pastel or oil brushes. For a line drawing, you will generally want to set the brush size quite small in order to create narrow lines. You can also vary the brush size in the Tool Properties panel in order to vary the width of your lines for different parts of your line drawing.

line drawing of portrait gif animation

Line drawing stage. Always try to freehand your line drawing to get the best training for your eye and hand every time.

Adjusting brush size

Adjust your brush size to a small size for your line drawing. You can also vary the brush size to create line width variation.

I would strongly encourage you to always try to freehand your line drawings. Forcing yourself to freehand your drawing every single time is the best way to get lots of practice to quickly improve your observation skills and your appreciation of proportions.

Portrait process step 1, Line drawing

[ Finished line drawing stage ]

Familiarize Yourself with Default Oil Paint Brushes in Clip Studio Paint

Once you have your line drawing ready, you can start the actual painting process.

However, before you start painting, it is a good idea to play around with the brushes a little bit, just to familiarize yourself with how the brushes you are going to use respond.

Here we are going to use Clip Studio Paint default brushes for Oil paint to get a traditional media look, so the first thing we recommend you do is to play around with these brushes a little bit. Do some tests with thin lines, broad strokes and shading, varying the amount of paint  and the density of paint in the Tool Property panel.

Getting a feel for how these settings affect the paint will be of great help further down the line when we are knee deep into our portrait.

Here we have tested some oil paint brushes as well as some other gouache and even watercolor brushes. We encourage you to do your own testing beforehand.

Clip Studio Paint portrait process, testing default oil paint brushes

Play around with default brushes in Clip Studio Paint in order to get a feel for how they perform

Process of adjusting amount of paint in default oil brushes

Adjust the amount of paint in the Tool Property panel

On the Tool Property panel, on the right of each property you can see a small symbol that tells you whether that property is controlled by the pressure sensitivity of the stylus or whether it is fixed.

Click on that little symbol, which looks like a small arrow pointing downwards, and the Brush Size Dynamics sub-panel will open. Here you can change the pressure curve for that particular brush. This means you can choose how the pen pressure affects the size of your brush, or the amount of paint, or the opacity, etc. You can also enable tilt sensitivity, if you have a tilt-sensitive drawing tablet, but otherwise you can leave it disabled.

Adjusting pressure sensitivity for oil brushes in Clip Studio Paint

In the Brush Size Dynamics panel you can adjust the pressure curve for each property of your brush.

Now that you have played around with the default Oil paint brushes in Clip Studio Paint, you can go ahead and create some custom brushes which will be very useful to give your painting a sophisticated look.

Creating a Custom Brush for your Portrait in Clip Studio Paint

In order to create more color vibration in our portrait, we are going to use Clip Studio Paint's ability to create color jitter.

This is a technique that advanced artists such as Aaron Griffin use in their portraits, in order to create awesome color vibration and variety.

Here is what we are going to do.

First of all, you have to create the shape of the tip of your custom brush. In this case we want to create a brush with an abstract shape, so that it will produce random color shapes while painting which will make your portrait look more organic.

So, we go ahead and we create the brush tip shape in Clip Studio Paint, in a new file. You can define any tip shape you want, you can take this from a photo (something organic like rocks, or any other organic texture will do), or you can paint it in manually.

Process of creating colour jitter custom brush

This will be the tip of our new custom brush.

Once you have the brush tip, you have to register it as a material.

On the main menu, choose ‘Edit’ -> ‘Register Material’ -> ‘Image…’

Once the Material Property dialog pops up, tick the "Use for brush tip shape" tick box. You can choose a location to save your material, then press OK.

Process of creating colour jitter custom brush, register the material

If you now look in the Materials panel, you will see your new material has been created successfully.

Process of creating colour jitter custom brush, the new material is created

Once you have your new material ready, it's time to create your new brush. You start by creating a copy of an existing brush. Simply select a brush, then right click on the brush name and select 'Duplicate sub tool...'

Process of creating colour jitter custom brush, duplicate sub tool

Once you do that, the Duplicate sub tool dialog appears. In that dialog, type in a new name for your new custom brush, and click OK.

Process of creating colour jitter custom brush, the new brush is created

Now on the Sub Tool [Brush] panel you will be able to see your new brush. Now it's time to customize your brush.

The next step is to select the ‘Tool property’ panel, and click on the wrench on the bottom right corner of the tab. The ‘Sub Tool Detail’ palette will pop up.

Process of creating colour jitter custom brush, click on the wrench

In the Sub Tool Detail palette, go to Brush tip, then choose the Material tab, and click the 'add brush tip shape' button.

Process of creating colour jitter custom brush, assign the brush tip

This will bring you to the 'Select Brush tip shape' palette, where you can choose the new material you just created. Choose that and click OK.

Process of creating colour jitter custom brush, choose the new material you created

Now your new brush has your custom brush tip assigned to it.

Process of creating colour jitter custom brush, the brush tip is assigned

Finally, it's time to add color mixing and color jitter capabilities to your new custom brush. In the Sub Tool Detail palette, inside the 'Ink' section, enable 'Color mixing' and set 'Mixing rate of sub drawing color' to 100, then click the icon to the right of 'Mixing rate of sub drawing color', to set the dynamics for that, and choose 'Random' with a minimum value of 0.

This is what will make your brush mix colors dynamically, creating vivid color variation effects for your portrait.

Process of creating colour jitter custom brush in Clip Studio Paint, now assign colour mixing and random colour jitter

Congratulations! Your new custom brush with random color jitter in Clip Studio Paint is ready to use.

Test your new brush, and notice how this brush can mix the foreground and background colors you have selected, creating color vibrations that will make your portrait much more interesting.

Custom brush with random color jitter created in Clip Studio Paint

Custom Brush with random color jitter created in Clip Studio Paint. The brush mixes the selected foreground and background colors randomly.

Foreground and Background colors in Clip Studio Paint

This custom brush mixes the selected foreground and background colors randomly.

Choosing your color palette

An important step in the creation of a digital portrait (or any piece of digital artwork, really) is to choose a consistent color palette to use throughout your piece.

Planning ahead of time is key here, so you want to think about the color harmony in advance.

There are many tools online you can use to create beautiful color schemes that you can use for your digital paintings. Here are just a few:

  • Coolors.co - A super fast color scheme generator
  • Colormind.io - An AI powered color scheme generator 
  • Paletton.com - A tool for designing color palettes based on complementary colors, colro triads etc.
  • Canva.com - Upload a photo, and Canva will use the hues in the photo to create your palette

For this portrait, we decided to use Coolors.co to generate color scheme ideas, by inserting three warm skin tones and keeping those locked and generating color scheme suggestions around those three skin tones.

The idea is that we will create our portrait with these three warm skin tones as the base, and then we will use the additional colors in specific places throughout the portrait, keeping color harmony under control.

From these suggestions, we decided that we will be adding some blue greens on top of the warm tones in order to have a complementary colors palette.

Color palettes generated with coolors.co

Various color palettes generated with Coolors.co, fixing 3 warm skin tones and letting the generator suggest two additional harmonizing tones.

Blocking in the big masses of light and shadow

The technique you are going to learn in this tutorial is a bit different from what you would typically see in portrait painting tutorials.

This is because I would like to share new ways of painting with you, tips and techniques that you may not have tried before and that will most likely make you grow as an artist.

This portrait is done in a slightly different way. In this portrait we want to achieve a more impressionistic look, rather than a refined, smooth one. We want to explore color variation at the same time that we work our way up through our portrait.

For that reason, after our line drawing is done, we start to add in colours straight away with our newly created color jitter custom brush.

We set our line drawing layer to multiply, then create a layer underneath it, and then we start adding in opaque paint with the color jitter brush. Our goal now is to block in the big masses of light and shadow, but do it in a way that we sprinkle around a variety of colors, but always within our chosen color palette.

With the custom color jitter brush selected, we start to build up the color base, varying the foreground and background colors every few brushtrokes, so that the different hues start to appear on our canvas.

Portrait block in phase

Block-in phase: We use our custom color jitter brush to create color variations within our color palette

color jitter brush in Clip Studio demo animation

Color jitter brush in action. You just need to change your foreground and background colors and the jitter effect will be added automatically.

We do it this way because we want to create abstract shapes of color, opening up the possibility for random color variations locally that will build an interesing color base for the subsequent layers of our portrait.

Adding color variations with the color jitter brush in Clip Studio Paint

Color variations added with the custom color jitter brush.

At this stage we keep working our way up, further refining the areas of light and shadow, carving and sculpting the forms with the default oil paint brush and the custom color jitter brush.

Adding details/refining your portrait

From here onwards we continue refining the colors and values in the whole picture, carving out the volumes of the portrait.

The method is similar to what we have been using so far: using the oil brush in combination with the custom color jitter brush we build up the colors avoiding that any area appears too flat.

We are trying to achieve an impressionistic style, rather than a traditionally rendered one. On our portrait we intentionally leave broken color passages and areas of the face where greens and blue greens shine through the warmer skin tones.

The final result has an artistic flare to it, not a polished finish, since what we are looking for is broken colors that combine to create the illustion of a more finished portrait. If you look closely at the portrait, you will see that in many areas the initial line drawing is still left in, becoming part of the final piece.

2nd stage of the 4 stage portrait process
Portrait process step 3 detailing
Portrait process step 4 finishing

If we analyze the color palette in the final piece, we notice that we have managed to stay within the limits of our initial chosen color palette: There are three main warm skin tones plus a number of greens and blue greens which complement the reds and orange tones of the skin, hair and background.

Final piece color palette

Putting it all together: Full Portrait Process Speedpaint Video

So, let's recap, as I realize there is a lot of information here to take in.

We have created a portrait in Clip Studio Paint using oil paint brushes and some custom brushes that we have created especially for this piece.

Here are the main takeaways from this tutorial:

  • Clip Studio Paint traditional media brushes give you plenty of flexibility to be able to paint digital illustrations with a traditional media feel to them. You have oil paint brushes as well as gouache, watercolor and different types of ink type brushes. Feel free to experiment with the amount of paint, opacity and brush density settings.
  • You can create custom brushes in Clip Studio Paint which allows you to vastly expand your artistic possibilities.
  • Clip Studio Paint has a random color jitter generation feature which allows you to mix background and foreground colors to create awesome chromatic vibration in your paintings.
  • Always keep exploring new ways to paint. The possibilities in Clip Studio Paint are endless.
  • Have fun painting!

In this project we have used mostly opaque paint, as you would do if you were painting with actual oil paint on canvas.

The custom brushes we have created take advantage of Clip Studio Paint's ability to generate random color jitter, which is great for creating color variation that will make our portrait vibrate so much more.

In this speedpaint video you can see the whole portrait painting process condensed in a few minutes.


I hope you can take away some useful insights from this tutorial and that you enjoy creating your own pieces in Clip Studio Paint as much as I did with this one.

Now it's your turn!

I hope you have learnt some useful techniques to level up your digital portrait painting in Clip Studio Paint.

Clip Studio Paint is a powerful yet easy to use digital painting software and I can't recommend it enough for those who want to get started or improve their skills in digital painting, given its great balance of power and user-friendliness.

Now it's your turn to put these techniques into practice!


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