About the Brush Tool

T-HFND-004-003

The Brush tool is pressure sensitive and lets you create a contour shape with a thick and thin line effect, as if it was created with a paint brush.

Authors

Marie-Eve Chartrand
Christopher Diaz
chrisdiazart.com

With the Brush tool, you can draw solid vector strokes or textured bitmap strokes, depending on your brush properties. Solid vector brush strokes are made of a vector shape filled with a solid colour, making them limited in terms of art style, but lightweight and easy to manage. Textured brush strokes can have a bitmap brush tip, a bitmap paper texture, and various settings such as hardness, randomness, antialiasing and transparency. Hence, they can be used to draw in various art styles, add natural-looking details to your drawing and reproduce the feel of a real brush stroke.

When drawing on vector layers, you can use the Select Tool, Contour Editor, Smooth Editor, Perspective and Envelope tool to scale your brush strokes or to tweak their shape. If your strokes contain a bitmap texture, Harmony will scale or deform the texture to fit the new shape of your brush. If your brush is scaled up or deformed in a way that takes more volume, Harmony will automatically generate new pixels for the textures, which might cause them to lose quality.

On vector layers, textured vector brush strokes are composed of a greyscale bitmap mask applied to their colour. Hence, their colour can be repainted or updated as easily as with solid vector brush strokes. Changing the colour used to paint a textured vector brush stroke from the colour palette will update the colour in textured vector brush stroke, as it would with solid vector brush strokes, all the while preserving its texture.

You can also create dynamic brushes, which allow you to use artwork created in Harmony as if it was a brush tip or a stamp.

NOTETo learn more about the Brush tool options, see Brush Tool Properties.