HappyPaint — User Guide

Overview

Paint on a stack of layers with a chosen tool (brush, eraser, fill, …). Each layer is a GPU texture; the engine composites them through the viewport every frame. Documents autosave to your browser (IndexedDB) and can be saved as a portable .happypaint file, exported to PNG/JPEG, or interchanged as PSD.

First drawing in 4 steps: (1) open the gallery and click New drawing; (2) pick a size (plus paper, colour depth and a background colour — or a transparent canvas) and press Create; (3) choose a brush and color in the tool options row and paint with mouse, pen, or finger; (4) it autosaves — find it again in the gallery anytime.

Managing drawings: each gallery card has quick actions — Rename (pencil), Duplicate (copy), and Delete (trash) — so you can tidy up your library without opening a document.

Guided tour & What’s new: a short guided tour spotlights the toolbar, canvas, layers and status bar. It never interrupts you — start it (and re-run it) from the ? Help dialog, with “Take the tour”. Tapping the version number in the status bar (or the gallery footer) opens What’s new — a list of recent features and fixes with a button to check for the latest build. A small dot on the version appears when there are new changes you haven’t read yet.

“Still opening — reloading…”: HappyPaint updates itself whenever a new build ships, and a tab you left open for days can end up asking for app files that no longer exist. Rather than sitting there looking frozen, it now reloads itself once to pick up the new version, and lands on the screen you were heading for. Nothing is lost — your drawings live in this browser and are saved as you work. If the message comes back a second time, reloading the tab by hand is the fix.

About HappyPaint: the About HappyPaint link in the gallery footer — or Help ▸ About HappyPaint in the editor, or the About button in the ? Help dialog — opens a small panel with the running version (tap it to jump to What’s new), who built HappyPaint and who supports it, and credits for the artists whose paintings field-test the app. It also restates the privacy position: your paintings live in this browser and are never uploaded.

Coordinate spaces are explicit: screen pixels (what you touch) convert to document pixels (the canvas) through the viewport transform — so painting stays accurate at any zoom/rotation.

Workspace

• Menu bar (top row) — the logo (back to the gallery), then the menus: File (gallery, save, Google Drive, export, insert image, paste image, camera), Edit (undo/redo, cut/copy/paste, copy or cut to a new layer, fill, clear, Settings), View (zoom and rotate, grayscale, print preview, fill mode, guides, rulers, symmetry, scrollbars, every panel, recording and replays, Zen mode, toolbar orientation, panel layout reset, theme), Image (canvas size, merge visible, flatten), Layer (new, duplicate, delete, group, merge down, clipping mask, alpha lock, lock, layer style, masks, fill layers, convert to paint), Select (all, deselect, invert, expand, contract, smooth), Adjust (every filter by category) and Help (shortcuts, tour, this manual, what's new, about). Each item shows its shortcut. Click a title to open it; while one is open, pointing at another title switches to it, and ← / → move between menus. The drawing’s name sits in the middle of the row; click it to rename. At the right: a red ● REC chip while recording (click it to stop), then the panel buttons Brushes (the brush library), Brush settings, Guides and Layers — words on a wide window, icons on a narrower one. The save state is in the status bar. On a narrow screen the menus fold into one ☰ button. In the desktop app on Linux and Windows this row is also the window’s title bar: drag any empty part of it to move the window, double-click it to maximise, and minimise / maximise / close sit at its right end. Other pages (the gallery, this manual) get a slim bar with the same buttons. On macOS the usual title bar stays.
• Tool options (second row) — the colour swatches first, then the brush (for painting tools: brush, angle, stabilizer, pressure), then whatever the active tool offers — selection mode and refine, fill tolerance and wash, transform buttons, shape kinds, pen modes, gradient type, mixer and liquify settings. Stabilizer is a switch (the slider keeps its strength), and Pressure has two: pen pressure drives Size, Opacity, both or neither for every brush. At its right end, the zoom: it shows the current zoom, and opens to Zoom in, Zoom out, Fit to screen and Actual size. It stays one line for every tool and scrolls sideways (swipe, or the mouse wheel) when it runs out of room.
• Tool dock — the drawing tools, pinned to the left edge as a rail by default (their settings are in the tool options row). Drag its top handle away from the edge to float it; double-click it (or the toggle) to flip vertical/horizontal; drag the dotted right-edge grip to change how many icon columns it shows. Drag it to the left or right screen edge to pin it as a rail (the canvas reflows around it); drag the handle away to float it again. Layout is remembered.
• Side sliders — Procreate's sidebar beside the canvas: brush Size on top (marked with a small and a big dot), the eyedropper square, Opacity below it (marked with two overlapping circles), then undo and redo. Hover a slider for its name. Drag a slider (a bubble shows the value); Size runs on a curve, so the small sizes get most of the travel. The square picks one colour and goes back to your tool. It stays put when you pan, zoom or rotate the canvas. Put it where you like (View ▸ Sliders: … or Settings ▸ Placement): on the left or right edge (right suits left-handed painting), across the top or bottom edge as a horizontal bar, floating anywhere over the canvas, or with the tools, inside the tool panel so it moves with it. On an edge, drag the grip to slide it along the edge (double-click the grip to centre it); pull the grip away from the edge and it comes loose and floats. A floating strip goes wherever you drag it, and double-clicking its grip turns it between vertical and horizontal. Placement is remembered. View ▸ Size & opacity sliders (or Settings) hides it. For an exact number, use the brush panel.
• Status bar — save state, active tool/brush, color, cursor position, document size + DPI + bit-depth (+ a “P3” badge on wide-gamut docs), layer count, rotation dial, zoom, and undo/redo. Click the size/DPI area to open Document properties.
• Layers panel — the layer stack with opacity, blend mode, masks, and per-layer actions. The layer menu's Metallic paint toggle turns a layer's paint into metal: flake glints and the paint's own colour tinting the reflection (gold paint glints gold) — and the shimmer moves as you rotate the canvas, like tilting a gilded page. Pairs beautifully with the thick Impasto/Oil brushes, whose ridges catch the light. A Metallic strength slider appears in the panel footer while it's on, and the color picker's Metals row has ready-made gold, silver, copper, bronze, rose gold, emerald and gunmetal base colours.
• Dockable panels — drag the Layers, Brush, Brushes & presets, Reference, or Color panel by its title bar to tear it off into a floating window, or drop it at the left or right edge to dock it there (Photoshop/Krita style). A docked color palette stays open while you paint — no reopening the popover per pick. Panels docked to the same edge stack vertically — e.g. Layers on top with the brush library below, both visible at once. While you drag, the edge lights up and an insertion line shows the exact slot the panel will land in. The divider between sections drags to rebalance their heights, and a dock's inner edge drags to resize its width. A floating panel resizes from any edge or corner, and remembers its size the next time it floats. The Color panel resizes in width only, and its picker grows with it. A wider brush library shows more columns. Sections work like an accordion: the chevron in a docked panel's title collapses it to a slim strip (click the strip to expand), and its space flows to the other panels. A floating panel folds the same way: its chevron (or a double-click on its title bar) shrinks it to just the title, where you left it, and the same again opens it at its old size. A docked brush library stays open while you paint — pick brushes without reopening it. Layout persists across sessions; More → Reset panel layout restores the defaults. (Compact/phone layouts keep their slide-in drawers instead.)
• Tabbed panels — drag a panel and drop it on another docked panel's header (its title row, or the tab strip if that side already has one) and the two join as tabs, the way Photoshop does it: the dock outlines itself and its headers light up while you hover, and the panel you dropped is the tab left showing. The same thing without a drag: with two or more panels docked to one side, a Tabs button sits at the foot of that dock. Either way they stop stacking and share a single tab strip, Photoshop style: one panel showing, the rest one click away. That gives the whole height of the side to whichever panel you are actually using — worth it for a long layer stack on a laptop. The icon at the end of the strip puts them back into stacked sections. Each side remembers its own mode and its own open tab. Stacked is still the better choice when you want to watch two panels at once, which is why it stayed the default.
  In tab mode the strip is the title bar: the tab carries the panel's name and its ✕, and dragging a tab tears that panel off — or docks it at another edge — exactly as dragging its title bar does. The panel's own title row then drops whatever the tab already says and keeps only its real controls, so the Layers panel still has its search, ⋯ and add-layer buttons while a row that held nothing but a name disappears. Close panels down to one a side and the strip stands back down to a plain section.
• Floating panels into each other — the same tab arrangement without a dock. Drag a floating panel and drop it on another floating panel's title bar: the title bar lights up while you hover, and on release the two become one floating window with a tab each, the panel you dropped showing. Drop more panels on that window's tab strip to add them. Drag a tab out to float that panel on its own again; when only one panel is left the group dissolves and that panel stays where the group was. Drag the strip's empty space to move the whole window; its chevron (or a double-click on the strip) folds it to the strip, and its ✕ closes every panel in it. A closed tab keeps its place: open that panel again and it comes back in the group. Groups are remembered between sessions. Only real floating windows join — the colour picker once dragged off the toolbar, Brush once floated, Layers once torn off its dock; on a phone each panel keeps its usual phone form.
• Pick up where you left off — each document remembers its working state: zoom/pan/rotation, active tool and layer, the brush (with your tweaks) and color. Reopen the document and the canvas looks exactly as you left it. Open docked panels come back too. New documents start with your last-used tool, brush and color (instead of factory defaults) — new canvas, same brush in hand.
• Zen mode — Tab (or a four-finger tap) hides all chrome for a full-screen canvas; a floating button or the same gesture brings it back.

Canvas & navigation

Pan, zoom, and rotate at any time; painting always maps to document space.

Tools

A tool decides what a stroke does on the active layer. The brush, eraser, smudge and mixer tools all paint through the brush engine, but each keeps its own brush — preset, size, opacity and all — so choosing a proper eraser never disturbs the brush you were drawing with. The other tools have their own options, described below. Hover any tool or control with a mouse or pen to see its name and shortcut.

Brush engine

A stroke is drawn by stamping the brush tip repeatedly along its path; dynamics (pressure, speed, tilt) modulate each stamp’s size, flow and shape. Brushes are just data presets, so every preset is a starting point you can tune and save as your own. Open the brush panel with Brush settings in the top row to adjust the active brush; the Library button holds all presets and your saved brushes.

The top strip keeps the everyday controls in reach while a brush, eraser, smudge or shape tool is active. The library button shows a sample stroke and the name of the current brush, so you can tell which one is loaded without opening a panel. It shows the brush as saved; tweaks you make in the brush panel are not drawn into it. Next to it sit Size, Opacity, Angle and the Stabilizer, each a slider with a number you can click and type into. Angle turns the brush tip, the same setting as Angle in the brush panel; Shift+[ and Shift+] turn it 15° while you paint. It is dimmed on a Mixer-style wet brush (Wet above 0), whose mixer ignores it; Live watercolor and oil brushes use it. The Stabilizer slider is its own on/off switch: drag it above 0 to turn it on at that strength, or to 0 to turn it off. The curve button beside it toggles it and remembers the last strength.

Brush groups

The library opens with your own groups above the built-in categories. Favourites is there to start with. Use groups as a shelf for the brushes you actually reach for, such as an ink, a pencil and a texture from three different categories.

• Add a brush: drag it from any category (or from your saved brushes) onto a group. On a tablet, press and hold the brush first; a plain swipe still scrolls the list. Or tap ⋯ on the brush and pick Add to …, which puts a tick next to every group it is already in.
• Order and move: drag a brush within its group to reorder it (an accent bar marks where it will land), or onto another group to move it there. The brush's ⋯ menu offers Move earlier, Move later, Move to … and Remove from … for the same jobs without a drag.
• Manage groups: New brush group sits under the groups. The ⋯ beside a group's name renames it (or double-click the name), moves it up or down, or deletes it. Deleting a group never deletes a brush.

A group holds references, not copies. One brush can sit in several groups, and a saved brush you delete leaves every group it was in. Groups are stored in this browser.

Creating, saving & importing brushes

1. Open the Library and pick the preset closest to what you want — it loads as the live brush.
2. Tune it with the controls below. The preview shows a sample stroke; the Try scratch area lets you scribble to test the feel without touching your artwork.
3. Reopen the Library, type a name, and click Save current — it captures every setting as a new brush under My brushes (built-ins can’t be overwritten). Custom brushes persist in your browser and can be deleted from the library.
4. Capture a tip from what you drew (define a custom stamp from the active layer / selection), or Import a file — a PNG/JPEG image becomes a single brush tip, while a Photoshop .abr or Procreate .brush/.brushset imports the whole pack: every sampled tip lands under My brushes with its original name, and texture patterns / Procreate grains join your custom grain library (a Procreate brush keeps its own grain attached). Imported brushes keep their parameters, not just their tips: size, spacing, tip angle & roundness, pressure controls with their minimum floors, size/opacity jitter, scatter, rotation dynamics, wet edges, airbrush build-up and even dual-brush textures map onto the equivalent HappyPaint settings (the full source→target table lives in the project's brush-import spec).
5. Share your brushes — every custom brush has a download button (and the library has an Export button for the current brush) that saves a .happybrush file: an open, documented format (a plain zip with the settings as JSON plus the tip/grain as PNGs — inspectable with any unzip tool). Import them back on any HappyPaint install with full fidelity.

Imported and captured brushes persist in your browser (tip bitmaps are stored in IndexedDB, so even multi-hundred-brush packs survive reloads). If storage is unavailable — some private browsing modes — the import still works for the current session and the notice will say so.

Presets are organised into categories — Sketching, Ink, Manga, Marker, Paint, Watercolor, Airbrush, Charcoal & Chalk, Texture & FX, Effects — each tuned for a different natural-media feel. The Manga category is the Clip Studio nib lineup: G-pen (the workhorse — whips from hairline to bold, and opens up under a light touch), Maru Pen (the finest nib, for hair and hatching; firm, so you must press for width), Kabura Pen (an even, dependable contour), School Pen (fine and firm, for backgrounds and effect lines) and Millipen (a technical fineliner: dead uniform, no taper, stabilised for ruling long straight edges). What separates them is pressure behaviour rather than size, so try them at the same size to feel the difference. None of the pens build up on themselves — crossing your own line stays solid black, the way ink does. Tone Scraper and Tone Fade are for working screentone back out again: a scrape is all-or-nothing, a fade is felt out over several passes.Screentone is an adjustment layer (Layers panel → Add adjustment layer), because a tone is a recipe rather than pixels: it re-screens at whatever resolution you output, so it never goes mushy when you resize or export. Set it by LPI — lines per inch, the way tone sheets are sold — with Density for how dark, Angle to stop two tones interfering, and a shape of Dot, Line, Cross or Sand (random rather than a grid, so it never moirés). Density from can take the level from the art underneath instead of a fixed number, which turns a grey painting into tone. Zoomed out, tone is shown as flat grey rather than a shimmering grid — that is a preview convenience only, and exports always contain real dots. Add a mask to the tone layer and erase on it to scrape highlights back out, using the Tone Scraper and Tone Fade brushes — a new tone arrives with its mask already active, so you can scrape straight away. Successive tones are given different angles automatically so they don't interfere.
The fastest way to tone a panel is the Tone checkbox on the Fill tool: click inside a closed shape in your line art and it drops a screentone layer masked to exactly that region, in one undo step. It uses Fill's own Tolerance, and expands slightly so the tone tucks under your anti-aliased lines instead of leaving a pale halo along them.
Set Density from to Gradient to fade a tone off across the page — Density is the near end, Gradient to is the far end, and Gradient angle points the ramp.Speech balloons live in the Text panel: pick a shape from the Balloon row — Speech, Rounded, Shout (the spiky one) or Thought (the cloud) — set its fill and outline colours, and point the Tail at whoever is speaking. The balloon travels with the text: retype it, restyle it or rotate it and the balloon reflows and turns with it, because it is part of the text object rather than a shape drawn behind it.
Focus Lines and Speed Lines live at the bottom of the same menu — the manga effect lines. Focus lines burst from the middle of the page for impact; speed lines sweep across it for motion. Both are drawn with your current brush, so a burst made with the G-pen tapers like one, and both arrive as editable path layers — move, scale or rotate them into place, or adjust individual lines with the Pen tool. Run them again for a new random arrangement.
Books. A manga chapter is more than one page, so the gallery has New book beside New drawing: pick a size the way you would for a drawing and you get a multi-page project with its first page ready. A page barappears under the tabs — arrows to turn, numbered pages to jump straight to one, and + to add a page at the end. Every page you add is made from the book's own spec, so a page added in chapter three matches page one in size, resolution, depth and paper. A book keeps one tab however far you flip, so opening a chapter never pushes your other drawings out of the strip. File → Save book writes the whole thing as a .happypaint-book, and Open file takes it back — that file is an ordinary zip, so you can unzip it anywhere and find one .happypaint per page, numbered in reading order. Drag a page number sideways to reorder the book — a tap still turns to that page — and the wider gaps in the strip show where each facing pair begins, so you can see how the book will be bound. The book icon beside the strip holds the two settings that decide that pairing: whether the book reads left-to-right or right-to-left (manga), and whether page 1 stands alone as a right-hand page — the book default, so pages two and three are the first pair that actually face each other. Both look right page-by-page and wrong at every scene break if you get them backwards, which is why the gaps move as you change them. Pages are ordinary drawings, which is what makes every other feature in this manual work on them; they show up in the gallery too. One thing to know: undo does not carry across a page turn — each page is its own canvas with its own history, exactly as tabs already work. Your artwork is never at risk, because the page you are leaving is saved before the turn.
Panels. The Panel tool in the tool dock draws them: drag anywhere on the page for a new frame, and drag across an existing frame to cut it in two — where the drag starts is what decides which of the two you get, so there is no modifier to remember. While you drag, a new frame previews as a rectangle and a cut previews as a line straight across the panel. The frame's corner handles show the whole time the tool is active: drag one to reshape that corner, or grab the frame line itself to slide the whole panel. Moving a frame doesn't move the art — the panel is a window onto layers that stay where they were, so sliding it is how you re-crop something you have already drawn, and a whole drag is one undo step. A new panel arrives as a group with an empty Art layer inside, ready to draw on, and a split hands the original its artwork and one half while a fresh empty panel takes the other. Anything you paint on a panel's layers is clipped to its frame — draw straight past the edge and the overspill simply doesn't show, so you can be loose inside a panel without cleaning up afterwards. The frame lines live on one editable path layer above the page (stroked with the Millipen, so they are Pen-editable like any other path) and are redrawn whenever the panels change. If you would rather not draw them, the Grid presets in the Panel tool's own options drop a ready-made layout, 1×2 up to 4×2 — they appear in the tool options whenever the Panel tool is picked.
The Effects category includes Glow, Fire, Sparkle, Embers, plus Clouds, Fog, Smoke, Nebula, Starfield and Lightning. Watercolor washes (Watercolor Wash, Dry Brush) dry with a darker edge — as each stroke settles, pigment gathers at the rim and granulates into the paper grain, like a real wash drying on paper. The Live watercolors (Watercolor Live, Wet-on-Wet Live, Water) go further: the paint stays wet after you lift the pen — washes keep spreading, bloom into other wet strokes, and settle into the layer as they dry over a few seconds. Paint behaves like it does on real paper: on dry paper a stroke stays where you put it and dries with a crisp, slightly darker edge, while on wet paper (a wet stroke, or a water wash) colour flows and blooms softly. Tip the canvas and a very wet stroke still runs downhill. Wet paper looks a shade darker while it’s damp and lightens as it dries, so you can see what is still workable. Like a real brush, a Live brush runs out on a long stroke: the wash narrows as the water goes, then turns into a dry brush that catches only the ridges of a textured paper (press harder to reach into the valleys). Lift and start a new stroke to reload. A Live brush paints with its own tip: give one a Bristle or Chalk tip, a flattened Roundness or an Angle in the brush editor and the wet marks take that shape, turning with the stroke when the brush’s rotation follows its direction. A 💧 Dry chip appears at the bottom of the canvas while paint is wet; tap it to settle everything at once. Next to it, the round tilt pad tips the canvas: drag the dot and wet paint runs downhill in that direction (drips and gravity washes); double-click the pad to level the canvas again. Wet paint has momentum: runs ramp up as gravity takes hold, coast a little further after you level the canvas, and deep puddles spread toward their shallow edges on their own — so fresh water pushed into a drying wash blooms back into it. The Water brush lays pure water (no pigment): it pushes still-wet paint around, and it re-wets dried paint — scrub a dried wash and the pigment lifts back into the water to bloom, run and edge-darken again (firm pressure dissolves faster, like scrubbing with a wet brush). The Blow brush is a directed air stream — it carries no paint or water and simply shoves whatever is currently wet along your stroke, like blowing through a straw on wet ink (it does nothing on a dry canvas). Every Live brush also has Water and Pigment sliders in the brush panel's Fluid section (how wet a stroke leaves the paper vs paint load; pigment 0 turns any Live brush into a water brush), plus Halo: how far the stroke's water reaches past its colour. At 1× a stroke on dry paper keeps a crisp edge; higher, it wets the paper around itself and the colour feathers out into it — Wet-on-Wet Live uses 1.5×. The document's paper (chosen in the New-drawing dialog) shapes all of it: rough tooth drinks water so washes dry unevenly, slows the spreading front into ragged fingers, and granulates — pigment lodges in the paper's valleys as it settles. Wet paint dries automatically before undo, layer switches, transforms and exports. In the Paint category, Oil Paint Live is paint that stays wet on the canvas: unlike watercolor it doesn't spread or dry on its own — come back a minute later with a knife, the Fan Blender or Blow and it still moves; dry it deliberately with 💧 Dry (undo, layer switches and exports dry it automatically). Impasto and Oil Paint lay thick paint: strokes build up real height and catch the light along their ridges, like oil straight from the tube — and the relief is baked into PNG and JPEG exports along with the paper's tooth, so the file looks the way the canvas does. Erasing takes the relief with the paint, so an area you clear goes properly flat before you paint it again.

Output & coverage

Size vs Opacity vs Flow are the three that trip people up. Size is how big. Opacity caps the whole stroke — overlapping passes within one stroke never get darker than this. Flow is how much paint each stamp drops: low flow builds up gradually as stamps overlap (soft shading), high flow goes solid at once.

Tip shape & smoothing

Pressure & tilt

How a pen’s pressure and tilt drive the brush. (No pressure hardware? Speed stands in, so fast strokes still taper.)

Jitter (randomness)

Taper

Wet mixing (Mixer Brush) & pigment

Turns the brush into wet paint that smears and blends with what’s already on the canvas, like an oil/acrylic mixer.

Oil & Pigment — mixing your own paint

On a body-paint brush (one that builds impasto — Thick Paint, RGBA Oil, Impasto, Oil Paint, Oil Blender) the same two sliders are labelled Oil and Pigment, and they behave like the real thing whether or not the Blender is on. They are properties of the paint, not settings of the mixer.

The document paper’s tooth follows the paint: it only bites a surface it can still reach. Thick paint fills the weave as you lay it, so a loaded daub goes down solid while the thin, dragged edge of the same stroke still breaks up on the tooth — which is why a low-Pigment glaze shows the paper through it and a full-Pigment one does not.

A wet brush keeps your pressure dynamics — a brush pen still tapers with pressure when you wet it. But it paints through the mixer rather than stamping a tip, so Grain, Dual brush and the document paper have nothing to act on and are greyed out while Wet is above 0. Set Wet to 0 to get them back. (The tip texture is the exception: turn Blend on and the mixer shapes its dab with the brush's own tip.)

Grain (texture)

Under the hood, dynamics map sensors (pressure, speed, tilt, drawing angle, distance, fade, random) through editable curves onto size/flow/rotation/scatter — the foundation behind every slider above. The brush editor has a lot of controls, so there's a search box at the top — type “grain”, “tilt”, “velocity”… to filter the panel down to the matching sections.

Choosing a brush for the job

Color

The current color is what the brush, fill, gradient and text paint with. Open the picker from the swatch in the tool options row; it floats and can be dragged out of the way (it then stays open while you paint). Several ways to choose, all editing the same color:

Foreground & background

The tool options row shows two swatches, Photoshop-style: the foreground in front — the colour you actually paint with — and a background parked behind it. The background never paints; it is a place to keep the second colour you keep coming back to, so flipping between (say) a skin tone and its shadow is one keystroke instead of a trip to the picker.

Palettes

Swatches live in named palettes (Procreate-style): keep one palette per project or per artwork. The picker stays lightweight — a dropdown to switch palettes and the swatch grid — while the Palettes panel (the ⚙ Manage button, or dock it beside Layers) holds everything else. The + next to the hex field saves the current colour into the active palette; everything persists in the browser across sessions.

Working on several drawings

The strip above the canvas lists everything you have open. Click a tab to switch, ✕ to close, + to go back to the gallery. On a tablet the strip becomes a switcher button, because a row of tabs is the wrong shape next to a toolbar. If you would rather not have it,Settings → Documents → Open documents in tabs turns it off.

Layers

Layers stack bottom-to-top; each is composited onto the ones below via its opacity and blend mode. Keeping line art, color and shading on separate layers lets you change one without disturbing the others. Open a layer’s ⋯ menu (or right-click / long-press a row) for all its actions; swipe a row for quick actions.

Blend modes & what they do

A blend mode changes how the layer’s colors combine with the layers beneath — the heart of shading and lighting effects:

Align & distribute

Line several layers up with each other, or with the page. Open it from View ▸ Align & distribute; it docks and tears off like any other panel.

It acts on the layers you have multi-selected in the Layers panel (swipe rows right on a touch screen, or Ctrl/⌘-click or Shift-click them), and on the current layer when none are — so tapping one layer and pressing Centre horizontally with Align to: Canvas centres it on the page. That is the same set the Move tool transforms, so “selected” means one thing throughout the app. Hidden and locked layers sit it out, and selecting a group means the layers inside it. Each layer is measured by its artwork, not by the canvas: the tight bounding box of its non-transparent pixels. Layers move by whole pixels only, so nothing is resampled, and however many move, it is one undo step.

Text and vector-path layers align like any other, and stay editable — the move goes through the same transform path the Move tool uses, so text is re-rendered at its new position rather than baked.

Masks & clipping

Two non-destructive ways to control where a layer shows, without erasing its pixels:

Use a clipping mask to add shading on top of a base shape; use a layer mask to hide/reveal parts of a finished layer (e.g. fade an edge) you might want back later.

Adjustment layers

A non-destructive filter that lives in the layer stack and re-colours everything below it at composite time — so you can tune the look forever without baking pixels (Photoshop adjustment layers / Krita filter layers).

Kinds available as adjustment layers: Brightness/Contrast, Hue/ Saturation, Black & White, Color Balance, Exposure, Vibrance, Photo Filter, Channel Mixer, Selective Color, Color Lookup, Levels, Curves, Gradient Map, Posterize, Threshold, Invert, Replace Color, Selective Color+, Gaussian/Motion/Radial Blur, Tilt-Shift, Iris Blur, Field Blur, Spin Blur, Light Rays, Sharpen, Noise, Twirl, Pinch/Bulge, Ripple, Polar Coordinates, Mosaic, Crystallize, Halftone, Screentone, Emboss, Oil Paint, Wind, Chromatic Aberration, Bloom, Glitch. The generators (Lens Flare, Clouds…) and Line Art make a new layer instead, so they are in the Adjust menu only. You can’t paint on an adjustment layer (only on its mask).

Fill layers

A layer that is a picture rather than a filter, and stays editable: Photoshop’s New Fill Layer. Three kinds, all from Layers panel ⋯ → New fill layer: Solid Color (one colour), Gradient (a gradient you can re-drag, re-colour or reshape long after you made it) and Pattern (a tile repeated across the canvas).

You can’t paint on a fill layer (only on its mask). Solid Color and Pattern are edited in the Properties panel; Gradient in the Colour panel.

Properties panel

The selected adjustment layer’s settings, in a panel of their own (Photoshop’s Properties panel). They used to sit at the bottom of the Layers panel, where a curve or a column of sliders pushed the layer list into a corner.

Smart filters

A filter you can change your mind about. Instead of baking a blur, noise or distortion into a layer’s pixels, keep it as a smart filter: it stays listed under the layer, where you can hide it, re-open its settings, reorder it or delete it at any time. The layer’s own pixels are never touched — hide every filter and the layer is exactly as you painted it. Photoshop does this with Smart Objects; here any paint, text or path layer can carry them.

Layer styles (Blending Options)

Photoshop’s layer effects: an outline, shadows, glows and colour overlays drawn from a layer’s own shape. They are settings, not pixels, so they follow the art: paint, erase, move or transform the layer and its stroke and shadow move with it, and you can change or remove them at any time. Any paint, text or path layer can have them.

Selections & transform

A selection masks the canvas so painting, fills, adjustments and transforms only affect the chosen area. Marching-ants show the boundary; deselect to paint freely again.

Selections can be soft: a pixel can be partly selected, the way it is in Photoshop and Krita. Selecting a layer by its opacity or loading a layer mask gives one, and so does Feather. Everything then happens in proportion — a stroke, fill, clear, copy or adjustment over a 40%-selected pixel does 40% of its work. The marching ants trace the half-way line, so a very faint selection (nothing above 50%) can be live with no ants showing. The shape tools and the magic wand make hard selections, exactly as before.

Adjustments & filters

Adjustments re-process the active layer’s existing pixels (they don’t paint new color). Each opens a live preview — drag sliders, then Apply or Cancel. With a selection, only those pixels change. Want it non-destructive and re-editable forever? Use an adjustment layer instead, or press Smart Filter to keep it live on the layer (smart filters).

Two ways in: Adjust in the menu bar, or the Layers panel’s ⋯ → Adjustments — the same menu, put where you are already working. Its twin in that ⋯ menu, Add adjustment layer, is the non-destructive version: the first bakes into this layer, the second adds an adjustment layer above it.

The menu opens on Photoshop’s category names — Color, Blur, Sharpen & Noise, Distort, Pixelate, Stylize and Render (the menu bar's Adjust adds Effect lines) — so a filter is where you would look for it in Photoshop. Each category opens its effects in a side menu: hover with a mouse, tap with a finger or pen. The number beside a category is how many effects it holds. On a phone the list covers the menu, with a Back row at the top. The last few effects you picked sit under Recent at the top, one click away. Keyboard: ↑/↓ move, → opens a category, ← or Esc goes back. Enter applies the open filter, Esc cancels it.

Text

The Text tool (T) creates text layers— a dedicated, non-raster layer kind. Text stays editable and resolution-independent until you rasterize it. Set font, size, colour, alignment, bold/italic, outline, background, line height and letter spacing in the floating Text panel. Commit with ⌘/Ctrl+Enter or by clicking away; Esc cancels.

Fonts: built-in system/web-safe families, plus your own. The bottom of the Text panel has two ways to add a custom font — both add it to the Font dropdown, select it, and persist it in the browser (each shows in the removable list below, with a trash icon). Text stays editable across save/reload.

Load a Google Font (by URL — no download needed). On fonts.google.com pick a font and copy its embed link (e.g. https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Pacifico&display=swap). In the panel, type the exact family name in Font name (e.g. Pacifico — it must match the family= in the URL, or the text falls back to a default), paste the link into Font / Google Fonts URL, and click Add. Adding the font needs an internet connection, but once loaded it is cached by the app and keeps rendering offline.

Upload a font file (from your computer — works offline). Use the Upload font file button to pick a local .ttf/.otf/.woff/.woff2 file — for a font you bought or downloaded, or that isn’t on Google Fonts. The file is stored with the app, so it keeps working with no connection. (You can also paste a direct link to a font file in the URL field; there the name is just a friendly label — the file is downloaded and stored the same way.)

Shapes: the Shape tool & QuickShape

Two ways to get a clean shape, and they produce the same thing. The Shape tool (U) is the deliberate one: pick the shape, then drag it out. QuickShape is the gesture: draw it freehand and hold still, and the stroke snaps.

The Shape tool (U)

Pick Line, Ellipse, Rectangle or Polygon in the toolbar and drag on the canvas. The shape previews live from the first pixel and is stroked with your current brush, colour and size, so a textured nib stays textured — this is a real brush stroke, not a flat vector line.

QuickShape (draw & hold)

Draw a freehand stroke with the brush or eraser and hold still at the end (~0.6s): the stroke snaps to a clean line, ellipse, rectangle or polygon (it detects corners). Hold Shift once it has snapped to lock to 45°, a perfect circle, or a square.

It has to recognise what you drew, so it has limits the Shape tool doesn’t: anything but a line must be closed (end near where you started) and a line must be near-straight, or nothing happens at all. The polygon it gives you traces the corners you actually drew — for an exact hexagon, use the Shape tool. QuickShape also stays out of the way of wet and fluid brushes, and of hard perspective snapping, where the hold means something else.

Editing, either way

Rulers, guides & symmetry

Non-destructive overlays drawn above the canvas to help you align and construct — never part of the artwork or export. Open the Guides popover from the top row (it’s a movable, maximizable window). Everything here is saved with the drawing, so your setup is still there when you come back to it.

Rulers and guides

Shift + R puts tick bars along the top and left edges of the workspace. Drag from a bar onto the canvas to pull out a guide — from the top bar a horizontal one, from the left bar a vertical one. The bars stay on screen however far you zoom in and read the drawing's coordinates under them (past its edges too, where they go negative), so you can place a guide at an exact measurement without zooming out to find the corner. The stretch of each bar over the drawing is shaded a little lighter. Once you rotate the canvas, the bars move onto the drawing's own top and left edges and turn with it, so the numbers still measure the paper rather than the screen. Straighten it again and they return to the workspace edges.

Grid, symmetry and perspective

Images, camera & reference

Procedural FX (Render)

The menu bar's Adjust menu ends with aRender section. Light Rays casts god rays from a light you place (click or drag on the canvas): only bright areas cast them, so a lit window throws shafts and dark shapes cut shadows into them. Lens Flare draws a camera flare — core, star, halo ring, optional anamorphic streak and ghost reflections along the line through the frame centre — onto a new layer set to Screen, so it only ever brightens. The rest synthesize content onto a new layer: Clouds, Fog,Smoke, Nebula andStarfield and Lightning, each with a live-preview panel.

Recording & time-lapse

Record your session and replay or export it as a time-lapse — great for process videos and undo-proof history.

Animation (flipbook)

Turn a document into a frame-by-frame animation. Open it from theView ▸ Animation (or Shift + A). Each top-level layer becomes a frame (a layer group is a frame with sub-layers), bottom of the stack first. A timeline strip appears at the bottom; painting always lands on the current frame.

Documents, save & export

Pixel size sets the canvas resolution; DPI only sets how big it prints (300 = print, 72 = screen) — it doesn’t change the pixels. The dialog previews the physical size live.

Settings & customization

Shortcuts & gestures