Brushes

Brushes

The Quick options bar above the canvas carries the controls you reach for constantly. It opens with the active tool's icon, then your two colours, then the brush preset button with its ⚙, then Size and Opacity. All of those are pinned: they stay put whatever tool you switch to, and Size and Opacity grey out rather than disappear when the tool in hand makes no mark to size. Everything to their right is the tool's own quick options and folds into the bar's ▾ menu when the window gets narrow; the pinned section never folds. For the brush that is what changes every few strokes: Flow, the blend mode, the eraser switch (on puts the eraser in your hand, off the brush) and the layer's alpha lock.

Opacity and Flow look different from the other sliders, on purpose. Their track is a picture of the value: your current colour fading in from nothing, over a checkerboard for Opacity (how much shows through) and over the dark ground for Flow (how much paint each dab lays). Change colour and the tracks change with it. A ring rides the track; press anywhere along it to put the value there, or drag the ring. The brush editor's Opacity and Flow pages use the same slider. Size and the rest keep the plain line and dot.

The brush button is pinned for the same reason the colours are: which brush you are holding is something you change from any tool. Picking a preset also puts its tool in your hand — a brush preset hands you the brush, an eraser preset the eraser — so the picker is the way back to painting from the selection tool or the fill without visiting the rail.

⚙, immediately right of the brush button, opens the brush editor with a paint tool in hand: the brush itself, whole, in a popup at the button (see The brush editor below). With any other tool it opens the Tool options panel.

The Tool options panel follows the tool in your hand. With the brush or the eraser it holds how the tool behaves — smoothing, the pen, edges — and never how the brush looks; pick the fill, the selection, a shape or the gradient and it shows that tool's options instead, the depth behind the bar's quick reach. A tool whose whole vocabulary fits on the bar says so rather than going blank. It is a docker, under View → Tool options.

That three-way split is Krita's: the bar for what changes every few strokes, the panel for how the tool behaves, the editor for the brush.

Which quick options the bar carries is the workspace's choice — the ⋮ beside the workspace picker ticks them on and off (see Getting started → The quick bar is the workspace's). The pinned section — colours, the brush button, ⚙, Size, Opacity — is not on offer there and cannot be removed.

Finding a brush

The brush button opens a flyout, not a dropdown: once you have forty brushes, scrolling is the wrong verb.

Every brush is a tile with a picture of its own mark on it — one swash, drawn by the real engine with that brush's tip, edge, texture, scatter and wetness. A collection you imported arrived with names somebody else chose, and "Wet bristle 04" and "Wet bristle 07" are genuinely different brushes with nothing in the words to say how. The picture is what you choose by.

Two things the tile deliberately does not promise:

• It is not to scale. A 300 px brush at true size fills the tile with the flat middle of a mark, which is the least useful part of it, so size is mapped onto a range the tile can draw — a heavier brush always reads heavier, but the width is not the number. The number is in the corner of the tile.
• Smudge, blur and the blender are drawn over a test pattern, because they move what is already there rather than laying anything down. On clean paper their tiles would be blank.

Everything else is the brush's own, because the tile goes through the same engine your canvas does.

• Search matches names and tags.
• Tag chips across the top narrow the list. Pick several and you get all of them — "inking or roughs" — because asking for a brush that is both is almost always an empty list.
• The chips only appear once you have tagged something.

Tag a brush on the Presets page: a comma-separated list, whatever you would look for it under. There is no fixed vocabulary, because the categories worth having are the ones your work has.

The brush editor

⚙ opens it at the button; so does Edit brush… at the foot of the Tool options panel. It has four parts.

• The header names the brush, shows a picture of its mark, says whether it has changed since it was saved, and carries what to do about that: Reload, Overwrite and Save new…. The ⋮ beside them holds tags, delete and the brush library.
• The option list down the left: Tip, Size, Opacity, Flow, Spacing, Shape dynamics, Scatter, Texture, Colour dynamics, Colour mixing, Medium and Blend — and Smudge, for a smudge brush. A check says whether an option changes the mark at all. Untick Scatter and the brush stops scattering; tick it again and the values you had come back. The options every brush has (a tip, a size, an opacity) cannot be unticked. A paper you imported keeps Texture ticked until you remove the paper with its ✕. The list is ruled into three families — what every brush has, what a brush may add to its mark, and how its paint behaves — and it never scrolls: every option is on it at once.
• The chosen option's panel, with its pen-pressure curve beside the value it drives (see How the brush answers the pen). This is the one part that scrolls, downwards only, and only when an option is long — a simulated medium is. Nothing in the editor is ever off to one side.
• The scratchpad on the right, to try the brush on. It paints with the brush exactly as it is now, at its real size, and repaints what is on it whenever a setting changes. Nothing drawn there is ever part of your work, recorded or saved; Clear wipes it.

Hardness, the tip and roundness are on Tip; the size floor and size jitter on Size; flow jitter on Flow; the jitters of roundness and angle on Shape dynamics; the paper and its grain on Texture; the second colour and the hue, saturation and brightness jitters on Colour dynamics; amount, length and reach on Colour mixing.

Edit this brush and Choose a brush preset are in Configure's shortcut editor with no key: give them one there. Krita puts them on F5 and F6, and F5 is the project refresh here.

Changing a brush and keeping the change

An ● next to the brush name means the settings have drifted from the brush they came from. It compares values, so putting a setting back clears it.

A nudged brush stays nudged. Tune Pencil, switch to Airbrush for a while, come back, and Pencil is where you left it — and it still is after closing and reopening Lightbox. Every brush keeps its own changes this way, so an afternoon spent tuning three of them keeps three. The changes are kept beside the brush rather than written into it: the dot stays lit to say so, and picking the same brush again in the picker throws the changes away and gives you the saved one back.

The brush editor's header then gives you three moves:

Reload	Throws your changes away and gives you the saved brush back — the same as picking it again.
Overwrite	Writes your changes over the brush you started from.
Save new…	Keeps both — the original untouched, your version under a new name, with tags if you like.

You can overwrite the brushes that ship with Lightbox. Tweak Pencil, press Overwrite, and it stays tweaked across restarts. Nothing is lost doing it: on a shipped brush the ⋮ menu offers Back to the shipped brush in place of delete — it is not yours to delete, and "delete" on one plainly means "give me back the one that came with the app". Delete this brush, there, removes a brush you made.

Effect brushes (Smudge, Blur) swap the bar for their own controls — strength, radius, and for smudge how much of its own colour it adds. A smudge has no opacity in the usual sense, so showing you one would be a lie.

Smearing or dulling, and length, are on the brush editor's Smudge option rather than on the bar. Smearing copies what was under the last dab onto the next, so edges and texture streak — drag a smear across stripes and the stripes come with it. Dulling picks up one colour from under the dab and lays that down, so detail dissolves into a soft blend, which is what a blender is. Length is how far what the brush picked up travels before it fades. Radius belongs to dulling only — how wide an area it averages its colour over — so the row is not shown for a smearing brush. They live with the brush because they are what make a brush that brush — the three values on the bar are the ones you adjust mid-drawing.

Strength on an effect brush is flow, and flow there is not flow on a paint brush. On a paint brush flow is how much pigment a dab lays; on a smudge or a blender it is how hard each dab pulls, and because dabs overlap roughly ten deep the pulls compound along the stroke. A value that looks like a gentle nudge on one dab is a shove by the time ten have landed — which is why these ship an order of magnitude lower: Smudge 0.08, Blender 0.06. The bar steps in hundredths for exactly that reason. If you want a stronger effect, prefer a slower hand or a second pass over raising strength; that is what gives a smudge somewhere to go.

Blur is the exception, and it works the other way round. Its flow is the softening radius — sigma, in pixels, is roughly flow × size ÷ 4 — and it does not compound: a blur takes one reading of the layer before the stroke and every dab replaces its own circle with a single pass of that. So the softness you get is the softness of one dab, however long you draw and however many times you go back over it. It ships at 0.35, about two pixels at the default size. It was 0.10 for a while, which is well under a pixel, and the brush appeared to do nothing at all.

These defaults are deliberately conservative and you may well want to raise them. They were chosen while an effect brush still stacked opacity with every dab, which turned a pale wash opaque black. That is fixed: flow no longer touches opacity at all — it only decides how much colour moves — and it now responds evenly across its range rather than saturating. Measured on a wash, carried colour runs 0, 17, 34, 47, 64 as flow goes 0.08 → 0.85, with the wash's own opacity unchanged at every setting. Raise it until the tool feels right; it can no longer run away from you.

Every numeric field can be dragged sideways to scrub its value. Hold Shift for fine, Ctrl for coarse. Click without dragging and the whole value is selected, ready to type over; click a second time to place a caret between digits instead.

Every numeric field also does arithmetic: type 50+10, 128/2 or 12 * 4 — spaces or not — and commit with Enter or by clicking away. The four operators, parentheses and decimals all work, and precedence is the usual one (2+3*4 is 14). Anything the field cannot evaluate — an emptied field included — simply keeps the value it had, the same way a typo does.

Brush fractions — opacity, hardness, flow and their kin — read and write as 0–100, the scale every other painting tool uses, so half strength is 50 rather than 0.5. Only the display changed: presets, saved documents and existing strokes are untouched.

Shift + drag on the canvas resizes the brush.

Spacing

Spacing is how far the brush travels between dabs, as a fraction of its own width. It is a texture control, not a quality one: a line drawn at an ordinary spacing comes out as a line, and you do not have to wind the number down to get one.

Below about a quarter of the brush's width, the stroke is solid — Lightbox lays however many dabs it takes to make it so, and thins each one to match, so tightening the spacing does not darken the mark or cost you anything you were not already paying. Past that, the dabs come apart on purpose: that is the dotted trail, the stamped repeat, the row of leaves along a path. Wind it up when that is what you want.

The one thing spacing still changes is a brush that has scatter or jitter turned on. There the dabs are the texture, so spacing sets how dense the spray is, and Lightbox leaves the walk exactly as you set it.

Stabiliser

Smoothing is in the Tool options panel with a paint tool in hand: how the tool behaves, not how the brush looks. This brush keeps its own, under it, decides what those controls belong to. Off, they set one value for the whole application — how it has always worked. On, this brush keeps its own and takes it along in its preset.

That is what the setting is actually for: an inking brush wants heavy lazy-mouse so a long confident line comes out clean, and a pencil wants none, because the shake is the texture and smoothing it makes roughs look dead. Ticking the box copies whatever is already in effect, so it never changes how the brush draws — only what the controls are pointed at.

Blend mode

On the bar, and on the brush editor's Blend option. It decides how the finished stroke lands on the layer — Multiply to shade, Screen to glow, and every other mode the layer docker offers, because they are the same operation.

It is applied once, where the stroke meets the layer, not to each dab. So a Multiply brush that crosses itself does not go black at the crossing, which is almost never what you meant. The eraser ignores it: erasing takes paint away, and no blend mode does that.

Choosing a tip

On the brush editor's Tip option, as a grid of thumbnails rather than a list of names — nobody knows what a "Cut nib" looks like until they have seen one. Round at the top is the brush's own dab and the default. Brush tips… at the bottom opens the workshop.

Painting with a tip copies it into the drawing, so the file keeps rendering even if you later delete the tip from your library.

A tip shapes smudge, blur and the blender too, not only the brushes that deposit colour — a chisel smudges in a band and a bristle drags in strands, where before all three pushed paint around in a circle whatever tip you picked. Angle follows direction works on them as well, so a chisel turns with the stroke rather than staying at one angle.

Paper texture

On the Effects page. Pick one of the built-in surfaces, or Paper image… to use a scan or photograph of the real thing — an imported paper takes over and the surface list goes quiet.

The built-in surfaces are of two kinds. Smooth, Cold press, Rough and Canvas are constructed: clean, even, and the same at any grain size. Plain, Kraft, Fibre, Linen and Plaster are scans of real surfaces, with the irregularity real ones have:

Surface	What it is
Plain	White paper with a fine, even pebbled tooth. The Pencil's sheet.
Kraft	Brown carton paper: short, dense fibres, a little coarser.
Fibre	Paper with long visible fibres, the most open of the three.
Linen	A tight plain weave. Coarse under a pencil; made for paint on a large canvas.
Plaster	A trowelled ground with scratches and hollows, for heavy paint.

A scan is shown at its own size at a Grain size of 8; larger magnifies it and smaller makes it finer. docs/CREDITS-papers.md says where each came from.

Two things worth knowing:

• The image goes into the drawing, not a path on disk. A file pointing at your scans folder would paint differently on somebody else's machine.
• The grain is anchored to the canvas, not to the stroke. Two marks crossing the same patch sit on the same tooth, which is what makes it read as paper rather than as an effect applied per stroke.

Grain size is how many document pixels one bit of the paper covers, and Depth is how hard it bites. Depth starts at zero, so importing a paper opens it for you — a texture you cannot see looks like a broken import.

Fills at is for paint with body. It is the pressure at which the paint covers the surface completely: press that hard or harder and the mark is solid; press less, or let the brush run out of paint, and the surface shows through. At zero it is off and the tooth never quite fills, which is how graphite behaves and paint does not. It needs Tooth above zero. The shipped Oil fills at about a third of full pressure.

Settles is for thin, runny paint. The mark covers the whole surface and is denser in its valleys than on its peaks, so the paper or canvas shows as tone inside the mark, with no gaps - the way a thin ink or a wash reads on real paper. It is the opposite of what Tooth and Fills at do, where thick or dry paint catches the peaks and leaves the valleys bare, and a brush can have both: a little of each is a mid-bodied paint. It needs a surface, and nothing else.

Tooth is what makes a pencil a pencil. At zero the bite is the same however hard you press, the way a texture overlay is. Turn it up and the bite becomes something pressure fills in: a light touch catches only the peaks of the paper, a firm stroke reaches the valleys, and the edge of a mark — where the tip presses least — shows more paper than its middle. It needs a paper and a Depth above zero, like everything on this option, and it follows the pen only when Pen pressure is on for the brush. Either way the paper lands under the pen as you draw and nothing changes at pen-lift. The shipped Pencil is the scanned Plain sheet, a little finer than life, with this most of the way up. It is tuned to read as graphite rather than ink: it never reaches black, a light touch is several times lighter than a firm one, and going over a passage again builds its tone. A mouse, which always presses fully, draws it at its darkest.

How the brush answers the pen

Each thing pen pressure can drive has its own curve, and the curve sits beside the setting it drives in the brush editor: Size's curve under Diameter, Flow's under Flow, Hardness's on the Tip option, Roundness's under Shape dynamics, Scatter's under Scatter, and for a smudge, colour rate and length under Smudge. Pressure runs left to right, the effect bottom to top, and the dashed diagonal is "straight through" so you can see what you have changed.

• Drag a point to shape the response.
• Click empty space for a new point.
• Middle-click a point to remove it. The two ends stay — you can still drag them up and down.
• Straight puts it back to a straight line.

Untick Pressure above a curve and pressure stops touching that setting entirely.

A curve does what no single number can. An exponent can only make the response gentler or fiercer; it can never rise and then fall, which is what an ink brush that spreads and then floods actually does. Draw that shape and you have it.

A brush you made before curves existed opens showing the response it already had, not a straight line — so touching a curve never quietly flattens a brush you had tuned.

Pen pressure, under the editor's option list, is the master switch for the brush. Off, the tablet is ignored entirely and every curve with it.

Only pressure is offered so far. The record can hold tilt and speed curves, but the engine does not apply them yet, and a sensor that changes nothing would teach you the editor cannot be trusted. They will sit beside pressure, on the same curves, when it does.

Physical media

None of the four shipped media is simulated any more. Each is a brush built from parts that are finished under the pen, so what you see while drawing is what is kept when you lift:

Brush	What it is
Watercolor	A crisp-edged, thin wash. A wet edge gathers its pigment at the rim and thins the middle, on the scanned Fibre sheet.
Ink wash	Thin ink that covers the paper and settles into it, so the sheet shows as tone inside the mark, with a wet edge.
Gouache	Opaque body colour that goes solid at a light press (Fills at), with a little paper tone inside it, breaking into streaks as the brush empties.
Oil	Thick paint on linen. Pressure pushes it into the weave until it is solid; the canvas shows where your touch is light or the brush runs dry, as streaks, because the tip has bristles.

All four pick up colour from what they are laid over and run out of paint along the stroke. Every one of those parts is an ordinary brush option - on Texture, Tip and Colour mixing - so you can build your own from a plain round brush, or change these.

The Medium option and its simulation are still in the editor, and a brush you make can still switch a simulated medium on. The rest of this section describes it. It is slower, it finishes behind the pen, and the stroke is redrawn when you lift; it is kept for drawings made with it.

Planned: removing the simulation, with old strokes redrawn by the brushes above.

A simulated medium is not imitated with a texture: wetness, viscosity, absorbency, edge pull, pigment density, granulation, paper grain. The simulation is deterministic — the same stroke always produces the same mark, on reload, after undo, and when the inbetweener replays it.

That determinism is not a detail. An effect that varies subtly between similar strokes looks fine on one image and boils at 12 fps.

Oil and Gouache ship with a tip and a heading rather than a bare circle: Oil uses the bristle tip turned to the stroke, Gouache a chisel turned the same way. Their variation is seeded from where each dab lands, so a mark is varied and still replays identically. Watercolor is round and even on purpose — its wet edge follows the outline of the whole stroke, and a tip that varied in size would break that rim into dashes.

Bristle drag and pickup are not on the Medium option, and that is deliberate rather than missing. Both need the paint to be pushed along the stroke's own direction, which the medium pass does not yet do, so the sliders that used to be there moved and changed nothing. A control that does nothing is worse than one that is absent: it teaches you the editor cannot be trusted. For the look of a dragged bristle, use the bristle tip with Angle follows direction — which is what Oil already does.

A simulated wash is transparent, and it glazes. Pigment darkens the way pigment does rather than the way a slider does: laying the same watercolour stroke down a second time deepens it, and a third deepens it again, approaching solid without ever arriving. That is what makes Watercolour behave like watercolour rather than like ink at a low opacity — build a tone in passes and let each one dry into the last. Pigment density is the concentration in the wash: raise it and every pass bites harder, and the steps get smaller as it approaches saturation, exactly as adding more pigment to the same water does. Gouache and oil use the same model and are simply strong enough to cover in one pass.

Body and relief give thick paint its height. Body is how much the paint stands up off the paper; relief is how hard the light rakes across it. Together they are impasto — a raised edge on a gouache or oil stroke catches the light from the upper left and shadows on the other side. The light is fixed, and deliberately so: two strokes on one canvas must not disagree about where it is coming from.

Each stroke is modelled from its own paint, so crossing two of them does not yet build a ridge where they meet.

Paint load is how much paint the brush starts with. At 1 it never runs out. Below that the mark begins full and fades as you draw, and at low values it is gone within a short scrape — that is dry-brush, and it works whether or not a medium is switched on. The length scale follows the brush size, so resizing a brush does not change how far its paint goes, and it climbs steeply near the top: a half load lasts six diameters, 0.9 lasts fifty, and only 1 never runs out. The shipped Watercolor starts a little short of full, so a long wash fades and narrows toward its end the way a real one does rather than growing heavier as your hand presses on; turn it up to 1 for a wash that never runs out.

Wetness is how far the paint travels. A wet mark spreads past where the brush went, more so the longer the flow runs — a 40-pixel stroke reaches nearly 60 at full wetness. The extra room costs a little to paint, so a dry medium does not pay for it.

Edge pull is the wet edge: pigment carried out to the rim of the wash as it dries, so the mark ends up darker at its border than in the middle. At 0 the wash dries flat. Turn it up and the border darkens and the middle pales — the paint is being moved, not added, so a strong wet edge is paid for out of the centre. That is what a real one costs too. The middle pales as a whole and stays an even wash; it never opens into a pale line down the stroke, at any setting.

Flow steps decide how far the paint travels, not how much of it there is. Turn them down for a mark that stays where you put it, up for one that spreads and pools; the stroke carries the same pigment either way, and at zero it is simply the mark you drew. How strong the paint is comes from pigment density — a watercolour is meant to be transparent, so raise that rather than the flow if you want a darker wash.

Reworking what you painted: a brush's alternates

Hold Alt as you put the pen down and the brush in your hand paints with its alternate instead, for that one stroke. Hold Ctrl+Alt and it uses its second. Let go and you are painting again. Nothing is switched: the brush, its size and its colour stay as they were, and the alternate works at the size you are painting at.

	A brush that names no alternate	Watercolor and Ink wash
Alt	Erases with the brush itself - its size, shape and dynamics, unlike E, which brings the eraser's own.	Water.
Ctrl+Alt	Picks a colour, as Ctrl does.	Blot.

Water is clean water on paint that has already dried. Where it goes the paint softens and bleeds out into the wet area, thinning as it spreads; the water pools unevenly, pushing pigment out of the pools, and what it pushed gathers in a faint line where the water stopped. Paper that was bare beside the paint picks up a pale wash of it; paper far from any paint stays bare, because water lays no colour of its own. Press harder for wetter. Go over the same place again in a new stroke and it spreads further. It is also in the brush list on its own. In the editor its Water option sets how far the paint spreads, how much it thins, how unevenly it pools, and how much gathers at the edge; it is a blur brush underneath, and turning Water off leaves a plain blur.

Blot is a paper towel. Dab an edge and it lifts the paint there: more the harder you press, and never all of it in one dab - a firm press takes about four fifths and leaves a stain, a light one barely touches it. Dab the same place again and more comes away. It leaves the towel's texture in what remains. Use it to soften the hard edge a wash dries with, or to pull a gradient out of a flat one. It is also in the brush list on its own, as an eraser.

Any brush can name alternates, including ones you make or import. In the brush editor, open More (the three dots) and choose Alternates (Alt, Ctrl+Alt)..., then pick a brush for each key. The first entry in each list is what the key does with no alternate. An alternate is simply another brush: a stroke made through one is recorded as a stroke of that brush, with nothing in the drawing about how it was reached. Anti-aliasing and smoothing stay the ones you are working with. If a brush you named is later deleted, the key goes back to what it did before.

With the Eraser tool in hand the two keys do nothing new: Alt has nothing to switch to, and Ctrl+Alt picks a colour. And inside a selection Ctrl still takes hold of what is selected, so Ctrl+Alt there moves it and does not blot; Alt is unaffected.

Gouache has its own pair: Alt is the Damp brush, Ctrl+Alt the Blot. The Damp brush works dried body colour again, the way a damp bristle brush reactivates gouache: where two colours meet under it they blend into each other, laid down in the gouache brush's own tip, a short way along the stroke. It lays no colour of its own, so the colour you are painting with does not matter. It is gentle on purpose - one pass moves a little, and going over the same place does more. Where it runs out over bare paper the paint thins, because there is nothing there to blend with. It is in the brush list on its own as well, as a smudge brush you can retune.

Colour mixing

A brush with Colour mixing on picks up the colour it is laid on — what is already on the layer, and what the stroke itself laid a moment ago — and mixes its own paint into it as pigment: yellow over blue goes green, not grey. The four media brushes ship with it on; any paint brush can turn it on in the brush editor, and the picker marks it expressive, because it reads the canvas as it goes.

• Amount is how much of each dab is the brush's own paint. The rest is what it picked up. Low amounts drag the ground along and barely cover it; at 1 the brush mixes nothing. Planned: pressure driving it, so a firm press lays more of its own paint — it waits on the file format carrying a version, so an older build can tell a curve it does not know from a broken brush store.
• Length is how far what the brush picked up travels before it fades — the same word, and the same idea, as the smudge option's Length. At 0 the pickup is replaced every dab; at 1 it is dragged the length of the stroke.
• Reach is how far out from the dab's centre the brush reads the ground. Near the edge it keeps picking up fresh colour at its leading edge as it moves; near the centre it mostly reads what it just laid.

On blank paper a mixing brush is exactly the same brush with mixing off: there is nothing to pick up. Everything it does is deterministic, so a stroke replays identically on reload, after undo, and when the inbetweener draws it.

Under a simulated medium the simulation now takes the colours the dabs laid, cell by cell, rather than one colour for the whole stroke — which is what lets mixing, colour dynamics and a textured tip show through a wash.

Brush tips

Edit ▸ Brush tips… opens the tip workshop — its own window, like Configure, because making a brush is not something you do mid-stroke.

Three pages. Library is what you have: your own tips, the project's above them when a project is open, and eight built-ins below. Generate bakes a shape, with only the controls that shape actually reads. From a scan turns a photographed or scanned stamp into a tip: set the black and white points once and they apply to every image in the batch, which matters because a series that will be blended has to match exactly.

A tip is baked once and then only looked up. Nothing in this window is recomputed while you draw.

The eight that are already there

Tip	What it is
Soft round	The default. A disc with a long shoulder.
Hard round	Full to the edge, one pixel of feather. A pen.
Paintbrush	A flat brush seen head-on. Turn on angle follows direction and it reads as a loaded brush rather than a nib.
Bristle round	A round brush whose hairs have parted — fine scratches through a solid middle. Dry-brush without a simulation.
Marker nib	Squarish with rounded corners, the shape a chisel marker lays down.
Cut nib	Six flats and six corners. The only tip here with a point.
Spatter	Grains with a size, not fog: a sponge, a stipple, a rough charcoal edge.
Wet edge	Gathers the paint at the rim and thins the middle — the mark a wash leaves when it dries. Laid under the pen as you draw; the rim follows the outline of the stroke so far.

Built-ins cannot be deleted or renamed, because drawings refer to them by name under the hood. Edit a copy puts one back on the Generate page so you can change it and bake your own.

Shapes the generator can bake

Hard circle, soft circle, ring, chisel, hatch, bristle, superellipse, polygon, spatter and halo. Three controls do different jobs depending on the shape and are relabelled to say which: Count is bristles, polygon sides or grains across; Sharpness is channel depth, squareness, corner sharpness, coverage or rim strength; Flatness squashes a chisel or a superellipse across its short axis.

Two things worth knowing:

• Painting with a tip copies it into the drawing. Deleting it from the library afterwards cannot change a picture you have already made.
• A scan whose mark runs off the crop is refused, not fixed. A tip like that stamps a faint box down every stroke. Re-crop with clear paper all the way round.

Bristles

A tip can have hairs. Bristles, on the Tip option, is how unevenly they carry paint. At zero the tip is one even pad. Turn it up and each hair gets its own share of your pressure: a loaded brush pressed home is still solid, but as you lift, or as the brush runs out of paint, the thin hairs stop reaching the surface first and the mark opens into streaks along the stroke.

• The hairs are the brush's own. Hair seven is thin on every stroke that brush makes, the way it is on a real one, and a stroke replays with the same hairs.
• They need a surface to press into: a paper on the Texture option with Tooth above zero. Without one there is nothing for a hair to lift off.
• They run with the stroke, so tick Angle follows stroke direction.

Any brush can have them. The shipped Oil does.

Planned: tips whose hairs you can shape — how many, how wide, which are thin — and hairs that splay and drag as you press and pull the brush.

Fast brushes, textured ones, and expressive ones

Brushes come in three kinds, and the picker tells them apart:

• Fast — stamps dabs and stops. Predictable cost at any canvas size, and what almost every brush is. Ink, soft round, airbrush.
• Textured ◇ — stamps dabs and finishes them as it goes: a wet edge, a grain or a paper is laid on the part of the mark the pen just touched. Each moment of drawing costs a little more than a fast brush, and nothing is left to do when the pen lifts. Pencil and the paper-grain brushes live here — a pencil's tooth is a paper texture that pressure fills in.
• Expressive ◈ — reads the canvas back, simulates a medium, or blends the layers underneath. The mark behaves like a material instead of like paint being placed. Slower, particularly on a large canvas.

The glyphs mark the two paid kinds, and the list is grouped so they sit apart from the fast ones. Hover a brush and the tooltip names what it is paying for — "reads the canvas back as it goes", "darkens its own edge as you draw" — because that is the thing you can turn off if you want the speed back.

What a textured brush shows you while you draw

The finished mark. A wet edge, a grain and a paper texture are laid under the pen, on the part of the stroke each movement touched, and what you see while drawing is what is kept when you lift — to the pixel. The wet edge's dark rim follows the outline of the stroke so far, so at the very tip it moves forward with the pen; behind the tip it does not change again.

A simulated medium is the exception, for now. Its simulation still runs just behind your hand and once more at pen-lift, so on a fast stroke the newest part can trail the pen and the mark can shift a little when you lift.

Planned: the simulated media finishing under the pen as well.

It is a price tag, not a warning. These brushes exist because the coupling is what makes a mark expressive, and an artist reaching for one has decided the trade is worth it. The badge is so that decision is made knowingly rather than discovered at frame 180.

Nothing about a brush declares which kind it is — it is worked out from the brush's own settings, so turning the medium off moves it to the fast group and turning it on moves it back. Every simulated medium also has a (flat) counterpart that gets close to the look without running the simulation. The flat ones lean on the wet edge and grain to do it, so they are textured rather than fast — but they finish under the pen and cost nothing at pen-lift, which their simulated originals do not yet manage. The tooltip tells the truth per brush.

The brush library

Edit → Brush library…, or the button at the bottom of the brush picker. It is everything you have — the brushes that ship, the ones you made, and the ones you imported — and it is where you import, rename and remove them.

Select several with Ctrl or Shift and Remove takes them all in one go, which is the point: a collection you decided against is fifty-something brushes, not one. The brushes that ship with Lightbox are left alone by that button, and the window says so before you click rather than after — those are reverted from the brush options instead, not deleted.

Rename appears only with one brush selected. Renaming twelve at once has no sensible meaning, and an imported pack's names are usually the reason you want this: whoever made it called them what suited them.

Brush importers

.abr (Photoshop), .gbr / .gih (GIMP), .kpp (Krita) and .brushset / .brush (Procreate) import directly. What comes across is what those formats actually carry.

A Procreate brush brings its name, its shape, a size, a spacing and an opacity, and a set arrives in the order its author arranged it. Three things to expect:

• A brush built on one of Procreate's own shapes arrives round. Those shapes live inside Procreate, not in the file, so there is nothing to bring. Brushes whose author drew their own shape bring it.
• The size is an estimate. Procreate stores size in its own units and publishes no scale for them. Check the size the first time you pick an imported brush up, and set it to taste.
• Grain, pressure and tilt response, taper and the wet-paint behaviour do not come across. The mark's shape and density do; how Procreate's paint engine moves it does not, and is set here with this app's own brush options.

A big collection takes real time, and the bar tells you how much. The cost is the tip: decoding it and re-encoding it, per brush, and it grows with the tip's area — measured at roughly a quarter-second per brush at a 300 px tip, so a fifty-six brush pack is around fifteen seconds. That work now happens in the background with a progress bar naming the file it is on, and Stop keeps whatever it has already read. It used to happen on the drawing thread, which is why the window looked like it was about to crash.

A file it cannot read is named, not counted — a pack usually fails in a pattern, and "3 files could not be read" out of fifty-six tells you nothing you can act on.

The ring on the canvas

The outline that follows the pointer is the brush's own footprint, not a stand-in for it:

• The size is the size, taken from the same call the engine makes for each dab. With a pen it tracks live pressure while you draw and shows the maximum while you hover, so it stays useful for aiming; Configure ▸ Canvas turns the pressure tracking off if you prefer a fixed target.
• The shape is the tip's shape. A chisel is previewed as a chisel, a bristle comb keeps its gaps, and an imported .abr or .gbr tip is outlined from the same image the brush stamps — so the ring cannot disagree with the mark. A brush with no tip shows the ellipse the round dab genuinely is, flattened by Roundness and turned by Tip rotation.
• It is an outline, never a fill, so nothing is hidden at the moment you are deciding where to put a mark.
• It is one line, and it changes colour rather than doubling up. The usual way to keep a cursor visible over anything is a dark outline with a light one inside it, which costs you a band of drawing all the way round the brush — right where you are trying to see an edge. Lightbox draws a single thin line and inks it dark or light from the artwork under the pointer, so it stays readable without covering as much. Over a mid tone it keeps whichever ink it had, rather than flickering between the two.
• How much it covers is yours to set. Edit → Configure → Drawing has Contrast, how far the line stands off the artwork, and Width in screen pixels. The defaults are 65% and 1.1 px. Lower the contrast if the ring is in the way on a bright drawing; raise it if you lose the ring on a dim panel. The width does not scale with zoom — the ring is chrome, not part of the drawing. Keep the canvas in view while you change either: the ring redraws as you type.

Two things it deliberately does not show, because they belong to the mark rather than to the brush: the per-dab jitter on roundness and rotation, which would make the ring wobble as you moved; and the angle a direction-following tip takes, since a hovering pointer has no direction yet.

The ring updates the moment you change a setting — you do not have to move the pointer to see the new size.

Where the brush lives

Edit → Configure → Drawing also decides whether the brush belongs to the tool or to the work:

Follow the project	The default. Illustration, comic, game art and asset libraries keep the brush with the project; animation and storyboards keep one brush for the tool.
Global	One brush, carried between projects and sessions. What Photoshop and Krita do.
Per project	The project remembers the brush you paint with and gives it to every document in it.

The point of per project is the break between sessions. Come back to a comic or a set of game assets after a fortnight and the tool bar says whatever you last used on something else — but the work was drawn with something particular, and where the character of the stroke is part of the style that matters.

The project rather than the file, because the answer has to reach the pages that do not exist yet: page one remembering its own brush would leave page eleven starting from scratch. It is the same reasoning as the shared palette — a character's work has one set of colours and one set of marks.

It is recorded when you make a mark, not when you save, so a session that ended without saving still remembers. A project with nothing recorded — an older one, or one worked on under Global — leaves your brush alone rather than resetting it. With no project open there is nowhere to keep a brush, so the setting reads as Global whatever it says. Strokes an AI or an agent adds never change it: they are not what you were painting with.

What smudge and blur read

Smudge and blur move pixels that are already there rather than laying down colour.

A smear moves pixels; a blender moves a colour. Drag the Smudge brush across the edge of a mark and the edge itself travels, texture and all — stripes stay stripes, a hard edge stays hard until it fades. The Blender (dulling) picks up one averaged colour and lays that down, so the same drag gives a soft blend with the detail gone. That is the difference between the two, and it is why a smudge that has not moved does nothing at all: a tap with the Smudge brush changes nothing, and a tap with the Blender softens whatever edge it lands on.

How far a smudge carries is set by two things, and they multiply. Strength on the bar is how hard each dab pulls; Length on the editor's Smudge option is how much of what it picked up survives into the next dab. Length is the one that decides the trail: the shipped Smudge brush is 20 px at a length of 0.75 and carries colour about 18 px past the edge of a mark; at 0.5 it is about 8, and at 1.0 about 53 — at 1.0 what it carries never fades, so colour travels as far as you drag it. Raise strength as well and both grow. If a smear dies sooner than you want, reach for Length first.

The body of a mark is a source, not a supply: however long you smear out of it, it keeps its coverage, because copying pixels out of it takes nothing away. The Blender is the one that thins the edge it is dragged across, over roughly half a brush width — the averaged colour it picks up at an edge is part transparent — and that stops at the edge; it never hollows out the body either.

Edit → Configure → Drawing decides which pixels a smudge or blur reads:

This layer	Only the layer you are painting on. The default.
All layers (baked)	Everything you can see, frozen as it was when you made the mark.
All layers (live)	Everything you can see, and it keeps following.

The setting applies to the next mark. Every stroke remembers what it was made with, so changing this never alters something already drawn.

The difference between the two shows up later. Repaint the background under a live smudge and the smudge re-blends against the new background; a baked one keeps the colours it picked up when you made it. Baked is what you want once a mark is finished and you would rather nothing touched it again; live is what you want while a painting is still moving underneath you.

Changing brush does not reset this. It is a setting, not part of a brush.

A live smudge on the bottom layer has nothing to follow, so it reads its own layer, exactly as This layer would.