How to Draw

When you create a scene, your scene comes with a default Drawing layer in which you can immediately start drawing.

NOTE Depending on your drawing style and what you are comfortable with, you may prefer to draw with the Brush tool or the Pencil tool. For more information on the difference between those tools, see When you create a scene, your scene comes with a default Drawing layer in which you can immediately start drawing. .

How to draw with the Brush tool

In the Timeline or Xsheet view, click in the first cell of the drawing layer.

If you want to try drawing with the Brush tool, do one of the following:
- In the Tools toolbar, select the Brush tool.
- In the top menu, select Tools > Brush.
- Press Alt + B.
If you want to try drawing with the Pencil too, do one of the following:
- In the Tools toolbar, select the Pencil tool.
- In the top menu, select Tools > Pencil.
- Press Alt + /.

In the Presets list of the Tool Properties view, select a brush or pencil preset to use.

Use the Maximum Size slider to select the desired size for your brush or pencil.

To select a colour, click on the colour you wish to use in the Colour view. For more information on how to create and edit colours, see How to create or edit colour swatches.

In the Drawing or Camera view, start drawing.

If you want to make changes to your brush or pencil, in the Tool Properties view, click on the arrow button to open the Brush Properties or Pencil Properties dialog. In the Brush Properties dialog, you can customize the size, shape, texture, feathering and smoothing of your brush. In the Pencil Properties dialog, you can customize the size, smoothing, texture and line ends of your pencil.

TIPS

You can quickly adjust the size of the selected drawing tool by pressing and holding the O key, then clicking and dragging in the drawing space. If you are using a tablet pen, doing this with the eraser tip of your pen will adjust the size of the Eraser tool, regardless of which drawing tool is selected.
If you press and hold the Shift key before or while drawing, you will draw a straight line.
If you press and hold the Spacebar key while drawing a straight line, the angle of your line will lock. If you are using a pressure-sensitive tablet, you can draw over your line to adjust its thickness.
If you press and hold the Shift and Alt keys before or while drawing, you will draw a straight horizontal or vertical line.
If you press and hold the Ctrl (Windows/Linux) or ⌘ (macOS) key while drawing, your drawing stroke will turn into a closed shape.
If you press and hold Alt before drawing a stroke, and start drawing near existing artwork, the start of your drawing stroke will connect to that artwork.
If you press and hold Alt while drawing a stroke, and end your drawing stroke near existing artwork, the end of that drawing stroke will connect to that artwork.

Adjusting Artwork

Harmony offers multiple ways to adjust drawings. You can undo your last drawing stroke, erase parts of a drawing, move, transform or delete drawing strokes, and tweak the points and curves of your drawing strokes.

NOTE You cannot manipulate or tweak individual drawing strokes when drawing on a bitmap layer—see How to Add Layers.

How to manipulate drawing strokes

In the Tools toolbar, select the Select tool or press Alt + S.

In the Camera or Drawing view, select the drawing strokes you want to edit by doing one of the following:

Click on a drawing stroke to select it.

Hold Shift while clicking on a drawing stroke to add it to your selection.

Draw a lasso around drawing strokes to select them simultaneously.

Do one of the following to edit your selection:
- To reposition the selected artwork, click on it and drag where you want to position it.
  
  NOTE You can also nudge your selection using the arrow keys, and fast-nudge your selection by holding Shift and pressing the arrow keys.
- To rotate the selected artwork, click and grab just outside one of the handles at the corners of the control box and rotate it.
- To scale the selected artwork, click and drag on one of the control points at the corners or the middle of the edges of the control box.
  
  TIP While scaling artwork, you can preserve its proportions by pressing and holding the Shift key.
- To skew, drag sideways or up and down the sides or top and bottom segments, between the control points.
- To delete, press Del (Windows/Linux) or Backspace (macOS).

How to edit lines

Do one of the following:
- If you drew with the Brush tool, in the Tools toolbar, double-click on Contour Editor and select the Centerline Editor in the pop-up menu, or press Alt + W.
- If you drew with the Pencil tool, in the Tools toolbar, select the Contour Editor tool or press Alt + Q.

In the Drawing or Camera view, click the shape, contour or pencil line you want to edit near the area you wish to change.

The shape or line's control points appear.

Click on one of the points to select it.

The point's Bezier handles appears, as well as Bezier handles for the surrounding points.

TIP You can select several points by drawing a lasso around the points, or by holding Shift while clicking on points to add them to your selection. You can use the Contour Editor to scale and rotate a selection of multiple points by enabling the

Show Contour Editor Control option in the Tool Properties view.

Do one of the following:

To move a point or a selection of multiple points, click and drag it.

To change the curve on both sides of a point, drag one of its Bezier handles.

To change the curve on only one side of a point, press and hold the Alt key, then drag one of its Bezier handles.

To deform the contour, drag a part of the contour between two points.

To deform the curve between two points, hold the Shift key and drag the contour between two points.

To remove a point's Bezier handles and make the lines it is connected to straight, press and hold the Alt key and click on the point.

Straight lines have no Bezier handles at their points by default. To create Bezier handles for these points and make their lines curved, pres and hold the Alt key, then click and hold the point and drag the mouse cursor away from it. A new Bezier handle will follow your mouse cursor until you release the mouse button.

To add a control point, press Ctrl (Windows/Linux) or ⌘ (macOS) and click on the contour where you want the new point to be created.

To remove a control point, select the control point and press Del (Windows/Linux) or Backspace (macOS).

About Art Styles, Drawing Tools and Layer Types

The two main drawing tools in Harmony are the Brush tool and the Pencil tool. Depending on the drawing style you want to achieve, you may prefer to work with vector or bitmap layers.

On vector layers, it is possible to draw with pencil lines, textured pencil lines, vector brushes and textured vector brushes. While pencil lines are vector centrelines to which you can add thickness, brush strokes are solid vector shapes filled with a colour, and textured brush strokes are brush strokes filled with a bitmap texture that filter out their colour.

On bitmap layers, you can only draw using solid or textured bitmap brushes. Hence, while vector layers are more flexible because they allow you to easily manipulate and tweak parts of your artwork, they can also accommodate more art styles.

However, if you use a textured brush on a vector layer, your brush strokes will have a bitmap texture. This means that, just like with artwork in bitmap layers, attempting to tweak or resize a textured brush stroke will require Harmony to resample the texture, which is liable to make it lose picture quality, unless its texture resolution was sufficiently increased before you started drawing.

One pitfall of using textured brushes on vector drawings is that, while bitmap drawings are always made of a single flat canvas, vector brush strokes are kept as separate objects. This means that laying on a lot of textured brush strokes on a vector drawing will require Harmony to store the texture for each of these strokes, and to composite them together in real time to display your drawing. This can cause texture-heavy vector drawings to be heavier on application performance and in file size than bitmap drawings. This is however the only case where a vector drawing is likely to be heavier than a bitmap drawing.

Though not recommended for sketching, textured pencil lines are a good compromise. Textured pencil lines are lighter and easier to edit. This means that the texture will update with the transformation if you scale or tweak your pencil line. This also means that you are able to change the texture applied to an existing pencil line or to apply a texture to a pencil line that does not already have one. Brush textures are recommended over textured pencil lines when trying to achieve natural-looking brushes.

NOTE Even if you flatten your artwork, textured brush strokes of different colours cannot be flattened together on vector layers.

The following table compares the different approaches to drawing available in Harmony:

Drawing Tool	Layer Type	Specifics
Solid Pencil	Vector	Advantages: Very light and easy to tweak. Can be manipulated, recoloured and tweaked by the centreline. Can be zoomed in on or scaled up without losing quality. Disadvantages: Not optimized for transparency. Recommended Use: Clean drawings with a solid and uniform outline style.
Textured Pencil	Vector	Advantages: Light and easy to tweak. Can be manipulated, recoloured and tweaked by the centreline. Can be zoomed in on or scaled up without losing quality. Disadvantages: Not optimized for transparency. Not recommended for sketching. Does not look as natural as textured brushes. Recommended Use: For light textured or mixed-style artwork that demands a lot of line manipulation.
Solid Vector Brush	Vector	Advantages: Light file size. Reproduces traditional animation style. Can be manipulated, recoloured and edited by the contour or centreline. Can be zoomed in on or scaled up without losing quality. Disadvantages: Cannot reproduce the look of natural media. Recommended Use: Sketches, clean traditional animation-style drawings.
Textured Vector Brush	Vector	Advantages: Can reproduce the look of natural media. As capable as textured bitmap brushes, but can be manipulated, edited and recoloured like solid vector brushes. Disadvantages: Overlapping brush strokes can make the drawing heavy on application performance and file sizes. Brush strokes of different colours cannot be flattened together. Tweaking, scaling up or zooming in on artwork is liable to make it lose texture quality. Recommended Use: For light bitmap-style textured artwork or mixed-style artwork.
Textured Bitmap Brush	Bitmap	Advantages: Can reproduce the look of natural media. Better performance and lighter file size than texture-heavy vector artwork. Can be edited pixel by pixel. Disadvantages: Brush strokes are always flattened together and cannot be modified individually. Can only be drawn or erased upon. Scaling up or zooming in on artwork is liable to make it lose picture quality. Recommended Use: Texture-heavy bitmap artwork.