Guide · Drawing
Start from a primitive, or draw the path yourself.
Parametric shapes cover predictable geometry. The pen tool covers everything else with an explicit command sequence.
Drag a rectangle or an ellipse.
The rectangle and ellipse tools construct directly on the canvas. Dragging is the right choice when the proportion is judged by eye against surrounding artwork rather than by a number.
Whatever you drag becomes a real path in the document, so it can be refined node by node afterwards without a conversion step.
A future demonstration will show direct dragging next to parametric creation.
Create a shape from its measurements.
The shapes panel offers the isosceles right triangle, the right triangle, the equilateral triangle, the square, the rectangle, the regular pentagon, hexagon, and octagon, the circle, and the ellipse. Each one is created from numbers rather than from a drag.
A shape can be measured in more than one way, so the panel asks which measurement you are supplying: side, hypotenuse, leg, diagonal, height, radius, diameter, across corners, or across flats. Choosing the basis you actually know avoids converting the number by hand.
- Triangles, quadrilaterals, regular polygons, circles, and ellipses
- Side, hypotenuse, leg, diagonal, height, radius, diameter, across corners, across flats
- Tipped or geometric-centre placement
Impossible measurements are refused, not approximated.
A leg has to be shorter than its hypotenuse, and a side has to be shorter than its diagonal. When the numbers cannot describe the requested shape, the panel says so and the shape is not created.
This is deliberate: a silently adjusted figure would look correct on screen while carrying a measurement you never asked for into the exported file.
Build a subpath command by command with the pen.
The pen tool names its steps the way path data does: move to, line to, quadratic Bézier to, cubic Bézier to, and arc to. You are choosing segment types as you draw rather than drawing a polygon and correcting it later.
Finish subpath ends the current subpath, close path joins it back to its start, and finish drawing completes the path. Enter finishes the drawing from the keyboard and Escape cancels the draft.
- Move to, line to, quadratic, cubic, and arc commands
- Finish subpath, close path, and finish drawing
- Enter finishes the drawing; Escape cancels the draft
A future clip will show a subpath built from mixed line, curve, and arc commands.
New drawings are named predictably.
Every tool that creates a node takes its name from the same convention: the localized type followed by the first number still free for that type. Two drawings never collide, and the layer tree stays readable without manual renaming.
Names you supply yourself, including an id carried in from an imported SVG, are preserved and only feed the counters, so a generated name never overwrites a name you chose.