Drawing with Textured Brushes on Vector Drawing Layer

In Harmony, you can use the Brush tool to draw bitmap textured lines.

In the Brush Tool Properties view, you will find a series of default textured "brushes", but you can also create and import your own custom collection. In Harmony, when using a textured brush on a vector layer, the texture of a brush is referred to as the Paper Texture. In other words, we are attributing the texture not to the tool, but to the texture of the surface that is revealed when a stroke passes over it. You will understand why when you work with bitmap brushes on bitmap layers, where it is possible to have both a textured brush tip and a paper texture.

To create your own textured brush, you must prepare your texture file ahead of time, either in Harmony or in a third-party software, such as Adobe Photoshop. Colour is not supported and transparency is not supported in the traditional sense. Black appears as 100% opaque, white appears as 100% transparent, and all the shades of grey in between appear as varying degrees of semitransparenty. A range of file formats are supported—.jpeg, .png, .tif, .psd, .tga to name a few. Alpha channels are disregarded on import. It is recommended that you maintain the texture resolution between 100 x 100 pixels and 400 x 400 pixels.

You can import your custom paper textures in the extended Brush Properties window. Browsing for a texture file with a brush selected that is already using a paper texture will replace the file currently in use. It will not, however, replace the texture in lines already drawn. The replaced texture swatch will no longer be the selected texture, but it will remain in the texture library and not be deleted.

Harmony also allows you to import textures as an .xml file that was exported from another project. In this way, you do not have to import individual image files one-by-one to have the same texture library and brush presets as others who you are collaborating with. You can also export brush presets and textures, in order to share your default or customized textures and presets with other project collaborators.

When you use the Eraser tool to erase a portion of a textured line, the vector frame is cut straight and you lose the feather created while drawing with the Brush tool. In Harmony, a special option in the Eraser Tool Properties lets you create a soft edge on your textured lines. You can also cut or keep the vector frame as is.

At some point, you may want to modify the look of a textured drawing if you suddenly find that your lines look too hard or too light. You can adjust those parameters by using the Adjust Line Texture Opacity command.

To draw with textured lines, use the Brush tool and the correct brush in the list. You can also draw with pencil line texture—see Pencil Line Texture