Every drawing tool, explained

Every tool in a drawing app is a different answer to one question: what happens to the pixels between where you pressed down and where you lifted up? Width, opacity, edge hardness and how the stroke reacts to speed — change those four variables and you get a pencil, a marker or a crayon.

Understanding the variables means you stop picking tools at random.

Pencil — construction and detail

What it does: a thin, hard-edged line at roughly 40% of your set brush size, drawn slightly translucent.

Why the translucency matters: construction lines need to sit visually behind your final artwork. A fully opaque scaffold competes with the outline you draw over it; a translucent one recedes. This is why traditional artists sketch in light graphite before inking.

Use it for: blocking in shapes before committing, fine interior detail, hatching and shading, and any line you expect to erase later.

Do not use it for: final outlines. A pencil line at the same width the whole way along reads as flat and mechanical when it is the dominant line in a drawing.

Brush — outlines and painting

What it does: a fully opaque stroke that thins as you move faster and thickens when you slow down or press harder.

That speed response is the whole point. A real loaded brush deposits less paint when dragged quickly, and reproducing that gives digital lines a tapered, living quality. It is why a brush outline looks hand-drawn and a pencil outline looks traced.

Use it for: final outlines, confident gesture strokes, painting large areas with visible stroke direction, lettering.

Technique: draw brush outlines fast. Slow, careful brush strokes come out uniformly thick and lose the taper that makes the tool worth using. Speed plus undo beats caution.

Crayon — texture and warmth

What it does: scatters many small, semi-transparent flecks along the stroke path instead of laying down a solid line, so colour builds up unevenly and the paper shows through.

Why you want that: flat digital colour can look sterile. A crayon layer breaks up large areas, suggests a physical surface, and reads as handmade — which is exactly the appeal for children's drawings and for illustration with a nostalgic feel.

Use it for: filling shapes with warmth rather than flat colour, shading, ground and sky textures, and anything meant to feel playful.

Technique: crayon rewards repeated passes. One pass gives a light wash; three overlapping passes at slightly different angles builds depth the way real wax does.

Marker — flat colour and fills

What it does: a wide, translucent stroke that lays down uniform colour. Crucially, overlapping passes within a single stroke do not darken — the whole stroke is flattened at one opacity when you lift.

Without that behaviour, going back over a spot while filling produces ugly dark patches. With it, you can scrub freely and the fill stays even, exactly like a real marker.

Use it for: filling large areas quickly, laying base colour under a crayon or brush layer, highlighting, and bold graphic shapes.

Technique: because separate strokes do build up, you can deliberately overlap two marker strokes to create a third, deeper tone without changing colour. This is the cheapest way to get shading out of a flat palette.

Eraser — the shaping tool

Beginners treat the eraser as a mistake-correction device. It is better understood as a drawing tool in reverse — you can carve highlights out of a filled shape, sharpen a soft edge, or cut a clean silhouette out of a messy block of colour.

A well-built eraser removes your strokes without touching the background colour, so you can work on black or coloured paper without leaving white scars. That is what makes erasing on a coloured canvas usable at all.

Try this: fill a shape solidly with the marker, then use a small eraser to cut two or three highlight streaks across it. Instant form, no second colour required.

Rainbow Pencil — spectrum strokes PRO

What it does: shifts hue continuously as you draw, so a single stroke travels through the spectrum and produces a gradient with no colour picking at all.

It is a genuine time-saver rather than a gimmick: producing a smooth multi-colour gradient manually means blending several strokes and matching edges. Here it is one gesture.

Use it for: decorative outlines, lettering and titles, patterns and borders, energy and motion effects, and anything aimed at children — the colour change alone holds attention.

Technique: the hue shifts with distance travelled, so a short stroke gets a subtle two-tone gradient and a long sweeping stroke covers the whole spectrum. Control the effect by controlling stroke length.

Gravity Lines — strokes that fall PRO

What it does: strokes obey physics after you draw them — they fall down the canvas instead of staying where you put them.

This is the most unusual tool in the set and the least obvious. It is for marks you explicitly do not want to keep: quick annotations, playful effects, rain and falling-leaf motifs, and practice passes that clean themselves up.

Use it for: temporary marks, animated-feeling doodles, weather effects, entertaining a child for a surprisingly long time.

Brush size: the control nobody uses enough

If you change one habit after reading this, make it this one. Most beginner drawings use a single brush size from start to finish, and that is what makes them look flat — the eye has no cue about what matters.

A working hierarchy:

• Large (30–60px): the outer silhouette and any fills. The silhouette is what the viewer reads first, so give it weight.
• Medium (12–25px): major interior forms — the line between a cat's head and body, the edge of a window.
• Small (2–10px): detail only. Whiskers, texture, small shadows, anything in the last five per cent.

Move between these constantly. It costs one drag of the slider and it is the highest-return adjustment available to a beginner.

Five combinations worth knowing

1. Pencil scaffold → brush outline → eraser cleanup. The standard workflow for any subject. See the step-by-step drawing guide.
2. Marker base → crayon on top. Flat colour underneath, texture over it. Gives depth that neither tool achieves alone.
3. Two overlapping marker strokes. Free shading from a single colour, because separate strokes accumulate.
4. Marker fill → small eraser highlights. Carve form out of flat colour without picking a second shade.
5. Brush silhouette → pencil interior. Heavy outer line, light inner detail. This one contrast is what makes illustration read as professional.

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