Repository navigation
style palettes
Home > Style palettes & Re-ink
< Previous: Weld & seams | Next: Dimensions >
Eight ready-made strokes per palette - pencil grades, technical-pen nibs, drafting standards - picked from the Layers panel and applied across a whole drawing in one step.
Every object you draw carries a stroke: a color, a width, and an optional dash. Rather than set those by hand, Locus gives you style palettes - named sets of eight ready-made strokes you ink with from the Layers panel style strip. Pick a palette, click a swatch, and the selected geometry takes that stroke.
A stroke's width is measured in millimeters, not screen pixels - the same weights a draftsperson reaches for (the ISO 128 series runs 0.13, 0.18, 0.25, 0.35, 0.50, 0.70, 1.00, 1.40 mm). Widths scale with zoom, so a 0.13 mm hairline and a 1.4 mm heavy line keep their true relationship as you zoom, and they export at those real sizes.
A swatch's color can carry its own opacity - the Colored Pencil palette's eight pigments are all inked at partial opacity, which is why they read as translucent rather than flat. Fill or stroke a swatch with opacity below 100% and the geometry it's applied to renders see-through by that amount, same as a Color node's Alpha.
Each palette is eight swatches sharing one idea. A stroke-only swatch re-inks a shape without touching its fill.
The eight drawing-ink stroke palettes. Apply a swatch to re-ink a shape; Re-ink maps every object to the same slot of a new palette. Strokes are shown at their real millimeter weights, so the width ramps and the dash-coded ISO / Blueprint slots read true.
- Graphite: pencil grades 4H -> 6B; the stroke darkens and thickens together. (On a dark ground this palette becomes Chalk - the same ramp run pale.)
- Rapidograph: one black ink, eight nibs across the ISO 128 width series.
- Colored Pencil: eight translucent pigments at one weight, evenly spaced round the hue circle (OKLCh, constant lightness and chroma) - for telling parts apart, not for hierarchy. Grey belongs to Graphite.
- Sepia: bistre and iron-gall, the manuscript register, run as dilutions from a thin wash to full-strength ink.
- ISO 128: the drafting standard, where the dash pattern carries the meaning: visible, hidden, center, phantom, cutting-plane, dimension, hatching.
- Blueprint: cyanotype blue: on paper the diazo reversal, on a dark ground the print itself.
- AutoCAD: the index colors (red / yellow / green / cyan / blue / magenta / ...) on black, with color-encoded lineweight - modelspace, not a plot.
- Fusion: constraint status as color: black is solved, blue still has freedom, orange is construction.
The palettes are authored twice - once for a light ground, once for a dark one - because a stroke isn't ground-agnostic: Graphite's near-black 6B vanishes on a dark canvas, so its dark form (Chalk) runs the ramp the other way in pale strokes to mean the same thing. Switching the app between light and dark keeps you on the same palette - the slots match across the two sets - and the swatches simply re-author for the new ground.
Click a swatch to ink the current selection. With nothing stylable selected, the swatch you pick becomes sticky - new geometry takes it. But when you do have something selected and its objects agree on one style, new geometry inherits that instead, so what you draw matches what's already there. Clearing the selection reverts to the sticky swatch.
The sticky swatch starts as Graphite 4H, the lightest pencil grade. That is what a fresh install draws with, and File > New puts it back every time - a new design always begins on Graphite 4H no matter which palette or swatch you were using before.
To make one object look like another, use Copy Style (the eyedropper - Edit > Copy Style, or the command palette). Select the object or objects you want to change first, run Copy Style, then click the object whose look you want: its whole style - fill, stroke color, width, and dash - is handed to your selection in one step. A field the source doesn't carry (say it has no fill) is cleared on the targets rather than left behind, so the result really matches the source. It lands as a single undo, and Esc cancels the pick.
Re-ink takes an entire drawing into the selected palette in one move. Each object's current style is matched against every palette's swatches and re-inked to the same slot of the target - Graphite's HB becomes Sepia's mid, ISO 128's hidden becomes Blueprint's hidden, and so on. It's a single undo step, and it reaches across a light<->dark switch: it searches both authored sets, so an object inked in light mode still re-inks correctly after you flip to dark.
Dash is matched too: a dashed object never collapses onto a solid swatch (or ISO 128's hidden would read as visible thin, which differs only by its dash), and inking into a solid slot clears a dash the previous slot set.
Tip
Palettes change how a drawing reads - its ink - not the geometry. Re-ink is the fastest way to see a construction as pencil, as a blueprint, or in the ISO drafting register without redrawing anything.
< Previous: Weld & seams | Next: Dimensions >
- The Layers panel: where the style strip lives
- Themes: the app's own UI colors, a different thing from these drawing inks
- Exporting SVG | Exporting DXF