02 Drawing Fundamentals

Ch. 02 🖌️ Core Drawing Fundamentals

What you'll learn: Free-hand brushwork, geometric shapes, polygons, the flood-fill tool, the spray can, and the eraser — the seven tools that account for 90% of pixel art.

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Brush, Dot & Freehand Drawing

🎯 Goal: Master basic freehand pixel drawing.

The two beginner tools you'll meet first are the Brush (B) for freehand strokes and the Dot (D) for single-pixel placement. Both share the same brush size and shape state.

Tool	Icon	Key	Behaviour
Brush		B	Drag to paint a continuous stroke.
Dot		D	Click to stamp one pixel (or one brush footprint).

Brush size runs from 1 to 50 pixels and is adjusted with [ (smaller) and ] (larger). The brush shape toggles between circle and square with \. To preview the current footprint and color before committing, hold the backtick key (`).

DRAW follows the universal "left = foreground, right = background" convention. Left-click paints with the FG color, right-click paints with the BG color. Holding Shift while drawing constrains the stroke to a perfectly horizontal or vertical axis. Holding Shift and right-clicking draws a connecting line from the previous click to the current position — invaluable for stitching together long straight lines without ever touching the Line tool.

If you have a steady hand but find that single-pixel stairsteps creep into your strokes, enable Pixel Perfect mode with F6. DRAW will retroactively remove L-shaped corners as you draw, leaving cleaner outlines.

The Organizer widget on the left contains four brush size presets (1, 3, 5, 9 pixels for sprite work).

🎨 Try it — your first 16×16 sprite

1. Ctrl+N for a new canvas at 16×16 pixels.
2. Press D for the Dot tool, set size to 1 with [.
3. Sketch out the silhouette of a simple character.
4. Switch to B (Brush), increase to size 2, and fill the larger regions.
5. Save as .draw so you can come back later.

Lines, Rectangles & Ellipses

🎯 Goal: Draw clean geometric shapes.

When freehand stops being precise enough you reach for the geometric trio. All three respect the current brush size, color, and symmetry settings.

Tool	Icon	Outlined	Filled
Line		L	—
Rectangle		R	Shift+R
Ellipse / Circle		C	Shift+C

The shared modifier vocabulary across all three:

• Shift — constrain (line: H/V; rect: square; ellipse: circle).
• Ctrl — perfect aspect (forces square / circle even after you start dragging).
• Ctrl+Shift while drawing the rect or ellipse — anchor from the center instead of the corner.
• Ctrl+Shift while drawing a line — angle snap to 15°/30°/45°/90° increments.

🎨 Try it — house in 30 seconds

1. Filled rectangle for the body. Shift+R
2. Two lines forming the roof triangle. L
3. Filled circle (the sun). Shift+C
4. A few short lines for the sun's rays. L
5. Filled rectangle for the ground. Shift+R

Polygons & the Fill Tool

🎯 Goal: Draw complex shapes and fill regions.

The Polygon tool comes in two flavours: outlined (P) and filled (Shift+P). Each click adds a vertex to the in-progress polygon; press Enter to close and commit. As with the line tool, Ctrl+Shift snaps the segment angle.

The Flood Fill tool (F, ) pours the FG color into every pixel contiguous with the click point that shares its starting color. By default it samples only the active layer; hold Shift to sample from the merged visible composite (useful when you have outlines and fills on separate layers).

DRAW's flood fill is unusual in two ways:

1. It supports custom brushes as a tiled fill — if you have a brush captured (Chapter 9), the fill is rendered as a seamless tiling of that brush rather than a flat color.
2. It also honours the paint mode — set Pattern or Gradient mode (Chapter 9) and your fill becomes a dithered gradient or tiled pattern instead of a solid color.

Press F8 to enable Fill Adjustment overlay. Now when you fill using pattern mode or gradient mode, or with custom brushes in color mode (loaded from the bins), drag the canvas to reposition the tile origin, mouse-wheel for uniform scale, drag the L-handle for independent X/Y scaling, and drag the rotation handle (small arc) to rotate the tile. Enter applies, Esc cancels.

🎨 Try it — tileable pattern fill

1. Draw a small 8×8 motif.
2. Capture it as a custom brush (see Chapter 9).
3. On a fresh layer, flood-fill a large rectangle with the brush active.
4. Press F8 and experiment with scale, rotation, and offset.

Spray Tool & Eraser

🎯 Goal: Use spray-can effects and clean up mistakes.

The Spray tool (K, ) emits randomized dots within a circular nozzle. The nozzle radius doubles for every brush-size step, and density scales with radius — small brush = pinpoint mist, large brush = thick coverage. Spray respects custom brushes too: every "drop" stamps the brush instead of a single pixel, which is wonderful for foliage, dust, and confetti.

The Eraser (E, ) paints fully transparent pixels — it does not paint with the BG color, it removes alpha. Two non-obvious tricks make it indispensable:

• Hold E to temporarily eraser anything while a different tool is active. Release E to return to your previous tool. This is the fastest way to nudge an outline or clean a stray pixel.
• Smart Erase (Shift while erasing) operates on all visible layers at once, with per-layer history tracking so each layer's undo step is independent.

The eraser uses your current brush size, shape, and even custom-brush stamp. The status bar shows FG:TRN to remind you transparent painting is active.

💡 Tip: Combine the eraser with a layer's Opacity Lock (Chapter 4) to clean up overpaint while preserving the layer's silhouette.

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➡️ Next: Chapter 3 — Color & Palette Mastery