Creating Custom Textures in Clip Studio Paint

Recently I posted one of my personal noise texture overlays for download on Patreon and the Clip Studio asset store. Since then I've had a few people ask me how I made the texture and if I had any tips, so I figured I would make a guide breaking down how you can easily create your own in Clip Studio Paint.

Using Default Assets

One of the easiest and most customizable ways to make a texture in Clip Studio Paint is to combine pre-existing assets already built into the program. 

If you go to Window > Material, you can open the material folders preinstalled into CSP. For our purposes, the materials in the Monochromatic Pattern folder will be all we need.

Here, you can find subfolders full of different patterns and textures, all of which are monochrome (black and white). Many of these premade textures would work well as an overlay on their own, but you can combine them and tweak their settings to make an ideal texture that fits your art style.

For example, here I dragged a noise pattern called 40% 40/0 Noise onto my canvas. I wanted to give it more textural variety, so I then added 5% 100/0 Noise on top of it.

I could stop here, but I can customize these two textures further by going to the Layer Property palette (go to Window > Layer Property if you don't see it). Here, under the Tone section, I can fine-tune the settings on each texture. This includes rotation, size control, and density.

After manipulating these settings for both textures, I ended up with something more like this:

As you can see from the zoom, this produced a texture very different from the one I started with. 

Once I'm happy with the texture, I rasterize both of the tone layers (right click the layer and click Rasterize). This will flatten the texture and prevent it from being edited further. Then, I merge the two layers together into one.

At this point, I could stop here if I like how it looks already. But If I want to give it an extra level of grittiness or variety, I can go back into my Materials palette and drag in one of the traditional textures from the Texture folder.

Here, I dragged in the Pencil texture. 

By default, the textures in the Texture folder are all semitransparent (meaning there is no white, only values of black at different opacities). If I applied this texture over top of our pre-existent one, it would just blend right in since they're both already monochrome. To fix this, I make a new layer between the Pencil texture and our custom texture, which I then fill in with solid white.

Then, I merged that with the Pencil texture layer and clipped it to our custom texture using a Clipping Mask.

Now my texture has variety in its opacity, which will give it more of a traditional feel when applied as an overlay over my artwork.

Preparation

Now that I have my texture exactly how I want it, it's time to prepare it for use. The first thing I do is make sure my texture has transparency by going to Edit > Convert Brightness to Opacity. This turns all white spots into fully transparent areas.

With this done, I can now register my texture as a material in CSP for future use. 

Go to Edit > Register Material > Image.

Here, you can adjust the settings of how CSP will treat the texture from now on.

Make sure you have the "use for paper texture" box checked.

Set the Paste Operation to allow scaling up and down and tiling, so you can adjust the size to fit your canvas.

Make sure you put the texture in a folder you'll remember and tag it accordingly.

Applying the Texture

Now that the texture is prepped, I can apply it to a piece of art. Simply drag it from its folder onto your piece.

It will appear with a set of handles that you can drag to adjust the size and rotate it.

Once the texture is correctly sized, you have several options for how you want to apply it.

CSP has a built-in feature called "Overlay texture" which can be selected from the Layer Properties palette as long as you remembered to check the "use for paper texture" box when registering it as a material. By clicking this, it will automatically turn the texture into an overlay with a strength setting you can increase or decrease.

If you prefer to adjust the texture on your own, you can change the blending mode, layer color, opacity, etc. through the Layers panel. I recommend cycling through a few blending modes to see which one complements your art the best.

Using Assets from Online

The default CSP assets work really well, but can be limiting if you want a very specific texture. Thankfully, we can use other textures from elsewhere online to create it.

If you want to sell your art, upload your custom textures online, or share your textures with other artists, make sure any assets you use from online are free to use and give those permissions. You can search for images on Google that are labeled for reuse by going to the search tools settings. Just make sure you also go to the source site to double check that it is fair to use!

I grabbed this texture from a royalty free site after double checking the licensing.

I could apply this texture straight away to a piece of art, but because it's in color that will also change the color of my artwork. There also isn't much value contrast in this texture, so as an overlay it may not show up well on top of art.

Some ways I like to alter textures for better use are:

- Turning it grayscale by adjusting the Expression Color, or by making a Color layer above it and filling that in black.

- Boosting the contrast by adjusting the Curves and Levels (both are under Layer > New Correction Layer).

When you're happy with how your texture looks, you can register it the same way I did before. Note that unless your texture is seamless, tiling it will look awkward at smaller sizes. You can fix this by rotating the texture and zooming it in farther so the edges are less noticeable.

Creating Textures from Scratch

Finally, you can make textures totally from scratch using a couple of methods.

Traditional Media

If you are more of a traditional artist than digital and want to replicate some of those real-world textures, you can get as close to the real thing as possible by scanning in swatches of traditional media using a scanner, or by taking a hi-res photo with your phone or camera.

A good example of this is sellyssalt's Raw Brush Tips. This artist scanned in several types of traditional media to use as brush tips in CSP. This same logic can be applied to textures; just make a large swatch of watercolor, crayon, etc. and scan it in in black and white, then go through the same process as listed above to turn it into a usable texture.

If you don't have access to a camera or scanner, there are lots of scans uploaded in the Clip Studio Asset store or from other sources online (though as mentioned before, make sure they're free to use!).

Drawing Texture

One of the more chaotic and fun ways to make texture is to download some textured brushes and go to town on a blank canvas. 

This may look a little too intense on its own, but when applied sparingly over an illustration it actually looks pretty cool.

I also recommend combining this method with the first one: overlaying a more chaotic texture over one of CSP's defaults can help make it look more organic and interesting.

For my Rainbow Noise Paper texture, I combined a few default CSP textures with a rainbow noise pattern I made in Affinity Photo. 

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I hope this guide was helpful to anybody interested in making their own CSP textures! Finding the right texture for your art can make a huge difference in the final appearance and it's a lot of fun to make them once you know how.