More Brush Experiments with the Help of My Internet Mentors

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Yes, I’ve been working on this picture for the last four days! I’m determined to make the perfect brush for my style. With much experimentation I’ve determined that I need an ordinary pressure-sensitive brush that uses opacity and flow (called Brush Density in Clip Studio Paint), with a gentle texture to break up the computer-generated look. Just a simple paintbrush — that’s all I want. Nothing fancy, I swear. I’m working on it.

My main reference is Borodante’s Youtube post Make YOUR OWN Damn Brush. He’s awesome. :)

Fixing Buddy's Sad, Droopy Wings

When I looked at yesterday’s image showing Buddy getting some bad news, I instantly thought “I have to fix those droopy wings!” Buddy is supposed to be upset, not sad. He’s just been told that he has to go back North for the summer — but he wants to go further South to find his family. I removed the first set of droopy wings and gave him some outspread, aggressive wings. While I was drawing the wings I decided to simplify the complex lacework pattern that I’ve been using for his wings — they’re time-consuming to draw over and over.

Clip Studio Note to future self: whenever you create a custom brush, save it as a “material” object. I’ve been creating custom brushes all week. Today I realized that I had modified one of the default brushes and I wanted to restore it to the Clip Studio default. You can get to the interface for resetting defaults by holding down the “shift” key when starting “Paint” inside of Clip Studio. I chose to restore all of the default tools and brush tips. There was a warning, but I didn’t really take it seriously. I assumed that my custom brushes would be untouched. I was wrong — they were deleted when the tools were reset. If I had added my brushes to my “material”, I would have been able to recreate my custom menus with some drag & drop. That’s life! Another day, another lesson, another inch of progress toward finishing this book.

Page 1, Day 2 -- Momma Jay Ponders the Future of Her Family

I’ve been working on the image for page 1 for two days. Along the way I’ve learned about CSP’s reference layers, vector layers (very handy, indeed), and perspective rulers. I’ve even attempted to make several custom brushes that tried mimic my G-pen dip pen nibs and my Rotring Tikky liners. No luck! For now I’ll use the default Clip Studio g-pen. Creating digital brushes is an interesting challenge. Maybe someday, when I’m not on a tight deadline I’ll dig deeper.