The Ultimate Guide to Making Custom Brushes in PaintTool SAI

Are you a digital artist looking to expand your creative toolset in PaintTool SAI? Making your own custom brushes is a great way to add a unique flair and personal touch to your digital paintings and illustrations. With PaintTool SAI‘s powerful yet user-friendly brush engine, the possibilities are endless!

Hi, I‘m Elianna, a professional illustrator who has been using PaintTool SAI for over a decade to create eye-catching character designs, environments, and more for clients in gaming and entertainment. SAI is my digital art software of choice due to its natural-feeling brush engine, customizable UI, and lightweight performance compared to Photoshop.

In this ultimate guide, I‘ll walk you through everything you need to know to start making your own custom brushes in PaintTool SAI. Whether you‘re a beginner just starting out with digital art or a seasoned pro looking to dive deeper into brush creation, you‘ll find helpful tips and techniques to take your art to the next level. Let‘s get started!

What Is PaintTool SAI?

First, a quick overview for those who may be new to this software. Created by Japanese developer Systemax, PaintTool SAI (often shortened to just "SAI") is a lightweight yet powerful raster graphics editor designed for drawing and painting. It has an intuitive user interface, easy-to-use tools, and a highly responsive brush engine that feels more natural than Photoshop‘s.

SAI is a popular choice among digital artists, especially those creating anime/manga style art, illustrations, and comics. While it may lack some of the advanced photo editing capabilities of Photoshop, many artists prefer SAI for its simplicity and paint-like experience.

Why Make Custom Brushes?

So why would you want to make your own custom brushes in SAI instead of just using the default ones? Here are a few key reasons:

1. Streamline your workflow. Having go-to brushes with your preferred settings will save you time and keep you in your creative flow. No more fiddling with settings for each new piece.
2. Tailor brushes to your art style. Default brushes are designed to work for everyone, but your art style is uniquely you. Custom brushes let you create the exact tools you need.
3. Achieve specific effects. From dry textures to smooth blending, custom brushes expand your range of mark-making to create realistic and stylized effects.
4. Explore new creative avenues. Experimenting with brush settings is a great way to spark new ideas and happy accidents. You never know what cool new technique you might discover!

Now that you know the why, let‘s dive into the how of making custom brushes in SAI.

How to Create a New Brush

Before we get into the nitty gritty of customizing brush settings, let‘s cover the basics of how to create a new brush in PaintTool SAI from scratch.

1. Open SAI and locate the Brush Panel on the left side of the workspace. This is where all the brush tools are housed.
2. At the bottom of the Brush Panel you‘ll see a series of squares – these represent your brush slots. Scroll down until you find an empty square.
3. Right-click on an empty square. A menu will pop up with different brush types like Marker, Watercolor, Pencil, Airbrush, etc. Select the one you want to use as a base for your custom brush.
4. A new square will appear showing your custom brush. It‘s that simple! Now you‘re ready to start customizing the settings.

Pro Tip: I recommend starting by duplicating an existing default brush that‘s similar to what you want to create. That way you‘re not starting entirely from scratch.

Brush Settings Explained

Now onto the fun part – tweaking all the settings to dial in your custom brush! At first glance, SAI‘s brush settings may seem a bit overwhelming. But once you understand what each one does, you can mix and match them like a mad brush scientist to create some really cool effects. In this section I‘ll go through the key settings and how they affect the brush behavior.

Brush Size

This one‘s pretty self-explanatory. Use the Brush Size slider to adjust the diameter of the brush tip. You can also change the brush size on the fly with the [ and ] bracket keys.

Minimum Size

The Minimum Size setting comes into play when you‘re using a pressure sensitive graphics tablet. It determines how small the brush can get when you apply the lightest pressure. Setting it to 0 means the brush will completely disappear with no pressure.

Density

Density affects the opacity and coloring at the center of the brush. At 100, the brush will be fully opaque. Lower settings create a softer, more transparent brush. Like Brush Size, the [ and ] keys let you adjust density on the fly.

Hardness

This setting determines how soft or crisp the edges of the brush are. 0 is the softest, giving a nice fluffy airbrush, while 100 creates a hard-edged circle stamp. For organic painting, I find a hardness between 50-75 works well.

Brush Texture

One of the most fun settings to play with! Brush Texture applies a pattern to the brush tip that acts as a depth map, simulating the look of real brushes and adding variation to your strokes. SAI comes with a bunch of default textures like Felt, Watercolor, Gouache, Crayon, etc.

You can also create your own textures by selecting the New button and importing a black and white pattern image. The white areas become the raised parts of the texture. Experiment with scanned textures, photos, or created patterns to achieve different effects.

Blending Modes

SAI offers several blending mode options that affect how the brush interacts with colors already on the layer:

• Normal: The default mode. Pixels are applied on top of existing pixels.
• Multiply: Darkens the existing pixels. Great for shading.
• Screen: Lightens the existing pixels. Great for highlights.
• Overlay: Multiplies dark pixels and screens light pixels.

Advanced Settings

In the Brush Size and Brush Density sub-menus, you‘ll find advanced settings to fine-tune how the brush reacts to pen pressure:

• Pressure: Adjusts the effect of pen pressure on size/density.
• Sensitivity: Adjusts the curve of size/density relative to pressure.
• Min Density: For density only. Sets the minimum density when pen pressure is 0.

Unless you want a brush that doesn‘t react to pressure, I recommend keeping these settings fairly high (I use 70 for Pressure and 50 for Sensitivity). From there you can tweak to get the feel you want.

Using the Stabilizer

One last thing that‘s technically not part of the brush settings but super helpful for inking and precision work – the Stabilizer! It‘s that little ghost icon next to the brush preview.

The Stabilizer helps smooth out wobbly lines by adding a slight delay to your strokes. The higher the setting, the slower and smoother the line. You can adjust the Stabilizer level on the fly with Ctrl + [ and ]. Personally, I keep it fairly low for general sketching and turn it way up when I need crisp, clean lines for inking and details.

Example Custom Brushes to Try

Now that you know your way around the brush settings in SAI, here are a few example custom brushes to try out and use as a starting point for your own creations:

1. Smooth Blender
   • Brush Tip: Airbrush or Dip
   • Texture: Watercolor
   • Density: 10-20%
   • Hardness: 0%
   • Blending Mode: Normal

   Perfect for softening edges, creating smooth gradients, and blurring details. Use a large size with low density to gently push color around.

2. Textured Pencil
   • Brush Tip: Pencil
   • Texture: Felt or Paper
   • Density: 50-80%
   • Hardness: 80-100%

   Simulate the look of real colored pencils with a hard tip and paper texture. Vary the density to create the illusion of pressing harder or lighter.

3. Speckled Airbrush
   • Brush Tip: Airbrush
   • Texture: Splatter
   • Density: 5-10%
   • Hardness: 0%
   • Blending Mode: Screen

   Use this large, soft brush with a splatter texture to add noise, floating particles, or abstract textures to your work.

4. Flat Inking Brush
   • Brush Tip: Binary
   • Texture: Ball Pen
   • Density: 100%
   • Hardness: 100%
   • Stabilizer: 70-90

   A small, stabilized brush with a ball pen texture that keeps a consistent line weight – ideal for crisp comic book style inks or precise line art.

Remember, these are just starting points! Don‘t be afraid to experiment and create your own unique brushes from scratch. The key is to play around, notice what settings you tend to gravitate towards, and save those brushes for later.

Importing Custom Brushes

In addition to making your own brushes, you can also import custom brush sets made by other artists. The catch is that unlike Photoshop, SAI brushes can‘t be saved into installable files. Most artists share their SAI brushes as tool preset files (.sai) or as screenshots of the brush settings for you to manually recreate.

To import an .sai brush preset file:

1. Download the file (usually in a ZIP folder).
2. Place the .sai file into your SAI folder (Program Files > SYSTEMAX > PaintTool SAI)
3. Open SAI. Go to File > Load Tool Presets.
4. Select the .sai file. The brushes will load into your Brush Panel.

Here are a few of my favorite places to find SAI brush packs:

• DeviantArt
• Studio Whitney‘s Brush Workshop
• Cubebrush Marketplace

Trying out brushes made by other artists is a great way to analyze different techniques and pick up new ideas for your own custom brushes. Just remember to read the rules set by each artist about how their brushes can be used.

Saving and Organizing Your Brushes

Once you‘ve made some custom brushes you‘re happy with, be sure to save them so you can use them in other drawings! SAI brushes are saved into the Tool preset files we covered earlier. To save your current brush setup:

1. Go to File > Save Tool Presets.
2. Choose a memorable name and save the .sai file somewhere easy to find later, like a dedicated Brushes folder.

I recommend saving multiple brush preset files for different purposes – for example, a set for sketching, inking, coloring, and effects. That way your Brush Panel doesn‘t get too cluttered and you can easily switch between brush setups based on your current task.

Conclusion

Whew, that was a lot of information! Let‘s recap the key points about making custom brushes in PaintTool SAI:

• Having custom brushes tailored to your needs will save you time and expand your artistic capabilities.
• You can easily create a new custom brush by right-clicking an empty brush slot and selecting a brush type.
• Key brush settings to play with include brush tip shape, size, density, hardness, and texture. Mix and match to create unique effects.
• You can import custom brush presets made by other artists to learn new techniques and get inspired.
• Save your custom brushes into organized tool presets so you can quickly access them later.

I hope this guide has demystified the brush engine in PaintTool SAI and inspired you to start creating your own custom brushes. The possibilities really are endless, so dive in and start experimenting! With practice, you‘ll develop an intuitive sense for how the different settings interact and be able to create the exact brush you need for any situation.

Remember, there are no mistakes, only happy accidents. So don‘t be afraid to try wacky combinations and see what happens! Your custom brush arsenal will become an extension of your artistic voice.

If you create any custom brushes you‘re especially proud of, I‘d love to see them! Feel free to share your creations and brush experiments in the comments below. Let‘s learn from each other and push our digital art to new heights!

Happy brush-making!