What you'll learn: How to capture, transform, recolor and stamp custom brushes; the 30-slot Drawer panel for brush / pattern / gradient libraries; and DRAW's six dithering algorithms.

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🎯 Goal: Create and use custom brushes.

A custom brush is any selection captured into the brush slot — DRAW remembers the pixels and treats them as the active stamp for every drawing tool that supports stamping.

Make a selection, then capture it as a brush via the Brush menu, the Organizer button, or the Command Palette. There are two capture modes:

• From Current Layer — only non-transparent pixels.
• From Selected Layers — union mask across the multi-selection.

Non-rectangular shapes are preserved via the alpha channel.

Action	Key
Flip Horizontal	Home
Flip Vertical	End
Scale Up	PgUp
Scale Down	PgDn
Reset Scale	/

Tool	Effect
Brush / Spray	Stamp the brush at every step.
Line / Rect / Ellipse / Polygon	Stamp along the geometry.
Fill	Tiled fill of the brush as a seamless pattern.
Eraser	Stamp transparency in the brush shape.

• Recolor (F9) — paints the brush in the current FG color, preserving its alpha.
• Outline (Shift+O) — adds a BG-colored outline around the brush silhouette.

F12 exports the current brush as a standalone PNG (alpha preserved) — perfect for sharing brushes between projects.

🎨 Try it — leaf scatter

1. Draw a small 8×8 leaf on a transparent layer.
2. Marquee around it; capture as custom brush.
3. Switch to Spray, increase brush size, set FG to a green family.
4. Spray a tree's foliage onto a new layer in seconds.

🎯 Goal: Organize and reuse brushes and patterns.

The Drawer panel is a docked grid of 30 slots that hold reusable brushes, patterns, or gradients. Each slot is one click away from being the active stamp.

Mode	Shortcut	Use for
Brush	F1	Stamping and painting.
Gradient	F2	Color transitions for fills.
Pattern	F3	Seamless tiled fills.

Action	Result
Shift+Left-click an empty slot	Store the current brush there.
Right-click any slot	Context menu — load, save, clear, replace, export, etc.
Drag-and-drop slots	Reorder.
Drop image files onto the panel	Batch import as slot brushes.

The drawer state can be saved as a .dset file and reloaded later — a clean way to share brush packs and pattern libraries between projects or with other artists. There's a sample set in DEV/brush-set.dset.

The Drawer also hosts a mini palette for quick FG / BG selection without hopping back to the main palette strip.

The drawer fits the toolbox column's width (drag the toolbox's inner edge, or set its columns in a workspace):

• Wider than the default 4 columns: up to 6 bin columns, so fewer rows.
• Narrow: fewer bin columns. When even one bin can't sit beside the mini palette, the palette moves under the bins.
• Not every row fits: Shift+wheel over the bins scrolls them. The plain wheel still switches .dset sets.

Patterns can be stored with opaque backgrounds (1-bit black/white) so that flooding with a 1-bit pattern under a colored FG produces classic Aldus PageMaker / DPaint dither patterns.

The drawer ties into three paint modes that affect Fill and Brush behaviour:

• Normal — solid current FG color.
• Pattern — tile the active drawer slot.
• Gradient — interpolate between palette stops via the active gradient slot.

When painting gradients (or applying Posterize) you can pick from:

• Ordered — Bayer 2×2, 4×4, 8×8.
• Floyd-Steinberg — error diffusion.
• Atkinson — classic Mac dither.
• Stucki — heavier diffusion.
• Blue Noise — perceptually uniform.

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➡️ Next: Chapter 10 — File I/O & Export