Brush library
The Sub Tool panel — the 11 shipped categories, selecting and previewing a brush, and saving, forking, renaming or deleting one.
Reference
- Tool
- Draw
- Panel
- Sub Tool
The Sub Tool panel is the brush library. It is not a fixed palette but a list of the variants of the tool currently held: pick a paint tool and it lists brushes, pick the Blend tool and it lists the three mixers. The contents follow the tool.
For Draw, Shape and Vector Pen the panel shows a category strip, the brushes in the active category, and a row of actions along the bottom.
The categories
Eleven categories ship, in this order. Every brush in the library belongs to exactly one.
| Category | Brushes | Character |
|---|---|---|
| Sketching | 4 | Pencils and graphite — grainy, pressure-sensitive, built to be worked over. |
| Inking | 4 | Clean opaque line, mostly tapered. |
| Calligraphy | 3 | Broad-edge and pointed nibs. |
| Painting | 5 | Bristle, wash, gouache and impasto. |
| Airbrushing | 3 | Soft, low-flow, built up in passes. |
| Textures | 6 | Chalk, charcoal, stipple, spray, sparkle, grunge. |
| Markers | 3 | Flat opaque ink with a chisel or round nib. |
| Nature | 7 | Multi-tip leaf, grass and petal sets. |
| Ribbon | 6 | One design swept along the stroke. |
| Texture Paint | 4 | Paint with an image instead of the colour well. |
| 3D Scatter | 6 | Instanced geometry along a stroke. |
Two more can appear. Any category you give a custom brush is appended to the strip, and a Custom tab is added once you save a brush that does not name a category of its own. The tabs render the category string exactly as written — there is no display-name mapping, so a category named in lower case appears in lower case.
The panel opens on the category of the brush currently in hand.
The rows
Each row draws the brush's mark, not an icon: a small swoosh rendered the way that brush would actually render it, followed by the brush's name. A brush you saved yourself carries a small orange dot.
The preview is drawn in the same precedence order the canvas uses — 3D scatter, then ribbon, then texture, then tip stamps, then the procedural dab — so the swatch shows the system that will actually win rather than one that is switched on but shadowed. If a brush's tip files are all missing, the preview falls back to the procedural dab, which is exactly what the canvas would do.
Weight is indicated rather than measured: a 300pt brush and a 3pt brush must both read inside a 26pt-tall row, so the drawn width is compressed. Read the row for character, not for size.
The default brush is not in the library
The application opens on a brush named Pencil. It is the default painting state rather than a library entry, and it appears in no category. Once you select any brush from the library there is no route back to it from the panel.
Selecting a brush
Tap a row. The brush becomes the active brush for all three paint tools at once.
Edits you make in Brush Settings are kept per brush for the session, so switching to another brush and back returns your modified version rather than the shipped one. Those edits are live-only until saved — see Custom brushes.
The action row
Saves the brush in hand as a new library entry named Custom Brush, then opens the rename prompt. This is how a shipped brush is forked: tune it, register it, and the original is left untouched.
Writes the current settings over the selected brush. Available only for a brush you saved yourself — a shipped brush cannot be overwritten.
Renames the selected brush. Custom brushes only. An empty name is ignored.
Picks an image and makes a new custom brush that stamps it, in the Custom category. This differs from adding a tip to the current brush's set — see Custom brushes.
Imports a brush file. See Brush files.
Writes the brush and every asset it uses to a single brush package file, named after the brush. Custom brushes only. See Brush files.
Removes the selected brush from the library. Custom brushes only. Selection falls back to Technical Pencil, the first brush in the library.
Deleting a brush never touches your artwork
Removing a brush does not delete the tips, textures, motifs or meshes it used. Strokes already drawn with it still reference those assets by identifier and re-rasterize from them on every reload; deleting the files would silently repaint finished artwork. The asset store has no delete operation at all.
Other tools in this panel
| Tool | The panel lists |
|---|---|
| Draw, Shape, Vector Pen | The brush library. |
| Eraser | The brush library — but selecting a row changes the Draw tool's brush, not the eraser's mark. See Eraser. |
| Sculpt Stroke | Five stroke-sculpt brushes. |
| Sculpt 3D | Seventeen sculpt brushes in four categories — Build, Carve, Refine and Move. |
| Blend | The three mixers. See Blend. |
| Any other tool | One line: "The … tool has no sub-tools. Its settings are in Tool Options." |