Pencil and brushes

What is in the slot

The pencil slot on the rail opens showing the Pencil. Click the slot's triangle for the flyout and you get all five members. Whichever you pick stays in the slot until you change it, remembered on your device.

• Pencil (N): freehand drawing fitted to a chain of cubic beziers. The result is an ordinary editable path.
• Smooth: drag along an existing path to relax it into fewer, calmer anchors.
• Calligraphy: a pressure-sensitive brush that produces a variable-width filled outline.
• Blob Brush: paints filled shapes that merge with matching artwork underneath.
• Shaper (Shift+N): draw a rough gesture and it is recognised into a crisp shape.

Blob Brush has no keyboard shortcut, and neither does Smooth or Calligraphy. Pick them from the slot's flyout. If you find a source comment or an old note claiming otherwise, it is stale.

Pencil, and the Smoothing number that matters

Press N and drag. Your raw point stream is fitted to beziers as you go and committed as a path you can edit with the Node tool afterwards. The option bar has five controls plus the two shared pills.

• Path mode, three chips: Regular Bezier (the Schneider fit, and the default), Spiro (auto-smooth) and B-Spline.
• Smoothing, a number from 0 to 100, default 4. This is the curve-fit tolerance in screen pixels. Low values track your hand closely and leave many nodes. High values simplify the stroke into fewer nodes and calm the wobble. The caret beside it offers quick picks at 0, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64 and 100, each previewing a jittery stroke fitted at that value.
• Caps: round (default), butt or square.
• Shape: a cross-section profile that turns the stroke into a variable-width filled outline. None (default), Ellipse, Diamond, Triangle in, Triangle out.
• Scale: the width multiplier for that Shape. 0.1 to 10, default 1.

If your strokes feel scratchy, raise Smoothing before you blame your mouse. Going from 4 to 16 is often the whole fix.

The Auto-join and Guides pills on this bar are the same two flags as on the Pen and Brush bars, not separate settings. Changing one changes them all.

Smooth, Calligraphy and Blob Brush

Smooth is the repair tool. Drag along a path and the anchors your drag passes over are re-fitted with fewer, smoother anchors. The ends of the span you touched stay put. It relaxes the path rather than pulling it towards your cursor, which is worth understanding: it is not a nudge, it is a simplification. A Fidelity setting from 0 to 100 controls how aggressive it is.

Calligraphy is a real brush. Raw points plus pen pressure produce a variable-width outline, which is bezier-fitted into one closed filled path. Note the word filled: the output is a shape, not a stroked line. Its bar is kept short on purpose, showing a preset picker, Size and a More button. There are 23 built-in presets, from Ink pen and Fountain pen through Sumi-e, Marker and Highlighter. The More popover holds everything else: Thinning, Streamline, Smoothing, Easing, Taper start, Taper end, the pressure and cap toggles, and Save as preset. Streamline is the one to reach for if your hand shakes; it damps wobble by lagging the stroke behind the cursor.

Blob Brush also paints filled shapes, with a calligraphic ellipse tip, but its point is the merging. Paint over existing artwork and the new shape fuses with it, so you build one clean object instead of a stack of overlapping strokes. The merge is fussy on purpose: it only happens with artwork that is strokeless, fully opaque, on normal blend mode, and carrying the same flat fill. If your strokes refuse to merge, check those four things before anything else.

Shaper

Shaper (Shift+N) is the odd one out and the most fun. Scribble a rough gesture and it is recognised into a crisp shape at the same place and size: a line, rectangle, ellipse, triangle, pentagon or hexagon. Draw a wonky box, get a rectangle.

It also edits. Scribble over existing artwork and the scribbled region is punched out or merged, depending on what you crossed.

If Shaper cannot recognise your gesture, it creates nothing at all rather than guessing. A gesture that vanishes was not rejected artwork, it was never a shape.

Common questions