Draw tool

The Draw tool is the raster paint brush. It holds one brush at a time, taken from the brush library in the Sub Tool panel, and every mark it makes is produced by the system that brush carries — dabs, a swept ribbon, or instanced 3D elements.

Draw is one of the three paint tools, alongside Shape and Vector Pen. All three show the full Brush Settings panel and share the same library, so a brush tuned for Draw strokes a fitted shape or a vector path identically.

The tool opens on a brush named Pencil, which is the application's default painting state rather than a member of the shipped library; it appears in no category in the Sub Tool panel. Selecting anything from the library replaces it.

Where a stroke lands#

A stroke resolves its drawing surface once, at the first sample, and holds it for the whole stroke. The pen can then travel over anything without the ink jumping.

On a main layer the surface is the front-most content under the pen, measured across all visible layers: painting over a filled loop lands on that loop's surface rather than on the layer's grid. Over empty space there is no content to anchor to and the stroke falls back to the layer's grid. There is no proximity fallback — a stroke never snaps to something the pen was merely near.

On a paint sub-layer or a mask the anchor is resolved in order: the fill under the pen, then enclosing surfaces front-most by depth, then parent ink enclosing the pen across a fold, then the nearest projected ink.

Tool Options ▸ Brush#

Hardness, grain, spacing, the tip itself and every dynamic are in Brush Settings, not here.

Tool Options ▸ Smart Shape#

Draw a shape freehand and hold the pen still. After the hold duration elapses the freehand stroke is replaced by the fitted shape.

The full behaviour — steering the fitted shape, the alternatives chip, and returning to the raw stroke — is covered on QuickShape.

Tool Options ▸ Symmetry, Ruler and Perspective#

Below Smart Shape sit the three drawing guides, each with its own heading and its own on/off checkbox: Symmetry replicates a stroke, Ruler pulls it onto a line or a curve, and Perspective pulls it onto a construction's axes. All three are off until you switch them on, all three can be on at once, and all three are saved with the shot.

They are applied in a fixed order — ruler, then perspective, then symmetry replicates the finished stroke — so a mirrored stroke is a mirror of the line you actually drew, ruled and all.

The same three sections appear under the Shape tool, which shares this panel, but they have no effect there: a rubber-band shape is generated from its corners rather than drawn sample by sample, so no guide reaches it.

Tool Options ▸ Free 3D#

Free 3D drawing places strokes on a plane facing the camera rather than on the layer's grid. It is a 3D-shot control; a 2D shot does not show it.

How Free 3D resolves depth#

The plane is frozen per stroke, so the stroke stays coplanar even if the camera moves while the pen is down. The starting depth is taken from the nearest existing stroke the pen is over — volumetric tubes are tested against their swept segments, flat strokes by raycast — and falls back to Distance when there is nothing under the pen.

Snapping happens at the end of a stroke, never while the pen is down.

QuickStrip#

Two sliders and the colour well. Zero is at the bottom of each slider, and the whole column width is the drag target.

Size and opacity are remembered per tool and swapped when the tool changes, so raising the eraser to 60pt does not resize the pencil.

Gestures#

Two or more non-pencil touches cancel an in-progress input and hand the gesture to navigation, discarding the stroke. A Pencil stroke is never interrupted by a resting finger.

See also#