Brushes and Tools

QUICK SUMMARY

1. Enter the brush menu by tapping an active tool.
2. From the brush menu, you will find Basic Brushes, Tools, and Brush Market.
3. Add different brushes to your Tool Wheel and try them out. We suggest Nudge for adjusting lines and Slice as a vector eraser.

To use a tool, tap it and start sketching. Tilt and Pressure are supported with several brushes. Experiment with the different brushes to discover which you like best.

Brush Properties

As mentioned in the Tool Wheel section, the middle ring allows you to adjust the active brush's preferences: size, opacity and smoothing.

1. Size. Use the size slider to set your brush's size. Choose one of the four presets at the top to quickly toggle between your favorite brush sizes.
2. Opacity. Use the opacity slider and presets to set the opacity for your brush. 100% is fully opaque; 0% is fully transparent.
3. Smoothing. Use the smoothing slider and presets to set the amount of smoothing you want your line to have. 0% smoothing provides the stroke directly from your hand input, 50% smoothing removes many bumps for a more polished stroke, and 100% smoothing refines the stroke into a perfectly straight line between start and end points, regardless of how it began.

Brushes Menu

1. To access the Brushes menu, tap an active tool in the Tool Wheel.

2. At the top of the menu is your brush preview, which changes to reflect the brush you choose. On iOS, you can test the different brushes directly in the preview.
3. In My Brushes, you can select a tool from the Basics Brushes and Tools.
4. Below My Brushes, you will find the Brush Market, which offers different types of brush libraries. You can buy them individually or unlock them all with a subscription.
5. You can edit existing brushes. This includes the basic preferences: size, opacity and smoothing, as well as some additional options for self-created brushes (iOS only).
6. You can also create your own brushes. Any brush or brush pack you create will appear in My Brushes. Read more about brush creation here (iOS only).

Basic Brushes

Pen

The Pen tool reacts to velocity to vary the line width. Draw quickly for thinner strokes or slowly for thicker ones.

Fountain Pen

The Fountain Pen reacts to velocity to vary the line width. Draw slowly for thinner strokes or fast to get thicker ones.

Dynamic Pen

The Dynamic Pen reacts to pressure to vary the line width. Draw lightly for thinner lines; add pressure to get continuously thicker strokes. Note that the dynamic pen renders a raster on top of the vector line. This can result in larger file sizes and may make pixelation on edges more noticeable at higher zoom levels.

Fixed Width Pen

The Fixed Width Pen preserves a constant width while drawing. This is useful for situations where you need uniform stroke thickness.

Wire Tool

The Wire tool's line width is maintained at any zoom level, making it suitable for wireframes, light CAD drawings, perspective layouts, and more. Export an SVG file using Wire to use in another vector program.

Soft Pencil

The Soft Pencil is modeled after a real pencil. The Soft Pencil reacts to tilt, pressure and velocity with a supported active stylus. For shading, tilt your stylus like you would a real pencil.

Hard Pencil

The Hard Pencil is modeled after a real pencil. The Hard Pencil reacts to tilt, pressure and velocity with a supported active stylus. For shading, tilt your stylus like you would a real pencil.

Marker Brush

The Marker Brush has the same texture, transparency and edge as physical markers, making it great for highlighting, texturing, and illustration work. The Marker’s chisel follows the rotation of your supported stylus. On iOS, you can see this in action with the Apple Pencil Pro barrel roll and stamp preview features.

Airbrush

Use the Airbrush to achieve a subtle texture and soft edges, similar to a real airbrush.

Watercolor Brush

The Watercolor Brush blends with consecutive Watercolor strokes on the same layer. You can interrupt the blending by using other types of strokes in between (like Pen) on the same layer. You can also use different layers for your Watercolor Brush strokes that you do not want to blend together. You can use the Hard Mask or Soft Mask tool to mask different pieces without affecting the blending.

Fill

The Fill tool allows you to draw any type of shape—simple, complex or organic—with a stylus or finger, and it fills the positive space inside. Your resulting fill is customizable with opacity and smoothing. Try the Fill tool for shadows, light and complex figures.

Troubleshooting. Since Fill takes into account the start and end points of your line, ensure line smoothing is set below 100%. Otherwise, your shape will disappear into a line or a point.

For a tutorial on the Fill tool, check out Drawing Shapes Instead of Lines: 8 Exercises for Filled Stroke.

Dotted

The Dotted line is great for annotations and boundaries. The dotted line is a single vector stroke with raster dots rendered on top.

Tools

Selection

The Selection tool has two modes: Lasso and Item Picker. Toggle between these two options using the popup at the bottom of your canvas, or use a second finger anywhere to temporarily toggle the mode.

You can also activate the Selection tool via Tap+Hold anywhere on the Canvas. This is helpful when you do not want to change tools. You can also assign it as your finger gesture or stylus button gesture in Interaction settings.

Nudge

The Nudge tool is an intuitive way to edit strokes in Concepts. Nudge allows you to push your lines like a piece of string or touch your stroke directly to pull it. Use a smaller size and zoom in to nudge tight corners, or use a larger size and zoom out to nudge gentler curves. 

Similar to other editing tools, you also get some filters you can use to control whether to include locked items, masks or focus on a single layer.

It is worth noting that some items, such as a stroke drawn with 100% smoothing or a square object with only four points, will act differently when nudged. This is due to the lack of points in the item's vector path.

Slice Eraser

As opposed to masks, the Slice Eraser tool is a destructive tool that permanently deletes the part of the stroke it touches. It acts as a more traditional eraser tool. You can filter out locked items, layers or masks. 

As with other tools, you can adjust the size from the tool wheel or by zooming in and out, which will affect the relative size of the tool. If you set the width all the way to zero, the Slice tool will split your strokes into smaller pieces without affecting their size or shape. 

Slicing a stroke will not result in a sharp edge like a hard mask does. That is because the slice cuts the vector path. 

Please note that imported images cannot be erased with the Slice tool, and you’ll need to use the Hard or Soft Mask instead.

For a full tutorial on how to use Slice (and when to use it versus the Hard and Soft Masks), check out The Slice Tool: Divide and Conquer Your Ideas.

Hard Mask & Soft Mask

Mask tools allow you to hide sections of your drawings and imported images, while retaining their editing capabilities. The Hard Mask gives you a crisp, clean edge, while the Soft Mask gives the area a soft edge. As with other tools, you can adjust the mask size from the Tool Wheel or by zooming in and out, which will affect the relative size of the tool.

Mask tools function a lot like erasers, but are non-destructive, meaning underlying strokes as well as the strokes drawn with a mask tool, remain editable. You can select your mask strokes and edit the size, opacity and smoothing as well as apply other changes.

If your mask strokes interfere with your selection, you can exclude them from the selection with the selection filters.

To remove strokes completely, try selecting them and using Delete, or use the Slice tool.

Quick Clear Menu

If you want to delete everything from a certain layer, or all strokes, text, images or measurements all at once, Double-tap the mask tool in the wheel to open a Quick Clear menu.

Text

The Text tool is an easy way to add annotations to your drawing. Set the active tool to Text and Tap anywhere on the screen to add a text label. After you're finished typing, tap on the canvas to set the label.

Edit Text

To edit a text label, Select it, then tap the text edit icon in the selection popup. This will take you back to editing mode.

You can select and modify the appearance of your text label just like any other stroke. Select the text, then change its color or opacity via the tool wheel, use the Selection popups to rotate, flip, scale, group, lock, delete the text, or use the control points to transform your text into perspectives and align it with your drawing.

Concepts has full support for any language your device can input, including emojis.

Pan

The Pan tool allows you to pan your Canvas without accidentally selecting or changing anything in your drawing.

You can also use the keyboard shortcut Space key to access Panning mode:

• Tap the Space key to activate canvas pan mode. Drag with the mouse or finger to pan around. Tap Space again to return to the previous tool.
• Keep the Space key held down to quickly access pan mode. Release the key to return to the previous tool.

Rotate

The Rotate tool allows you to rotate your canvas. Set Rotate in one of the tool slots and when activated, you'll get a visual handle on the canvas to adjust your canvas rotation.

You can also use keyboard shortcut R key to access rotation mode:

• Tap the R key to activate canvas rotation mode. Click the left mouse button and rotate in either direction, or use your stylus or finger. Tap the R key again to return to the previous tool.
• Keep the R key held down to quickly access rotation mode. Release the key to return to the previous tool.
• If a selection or a shape guide is active, press shortcut R to rotate the selection or shape guide.

Zoom

The Zoom tool allows you to Zoom on your canvas. Add the Zoom tool to one of the tool slots. When activated, drawing right or up will zoom in, and drawing left or down will zoom out.

You can also use the keyboard shortcut S key to access Zoom mode:

• Tap the S key to activate canvas zoom mode. To zoom in, click the left mouse button, or use your stylus or finger and drag right or up. To zoom out, drag left or down. Tap the S key again to return to the previous tool.
• Keep the S key held down to quickly access zoom mode. Release the key to return to the previous tool.
• If a selection or a shape guide is active, press shortcut S to scale the selection or shape guide.

Brush Market

The Brush Market offers a variety of purchasable brushes to add extra flair to your drawings. You can buy them individually or get them all with a subscription.

Strokes made with these brushes are movable and adjustable like all of our other vector-based tools, but their size may be limited.

Many of these brushes have textures made from raster images, meaning they may pixelate if you zoom in too far, depending on the brush. We encourage you to try them out and discover which ones you like best. You can also change the look of existing drawings by selecting your strokes and switching to a new tool. Please note that using many pixel-based brushes can increase file size and require more performance from your device.

Creating a Custom Brush (iOS only)

You can create your own brushes and edit brushes from the Brush Market in the Brush Editor (with Subscription or Essentials). These brushes are image or stamp-based brushes that you can apply pressure, tilt or velocity settings to, as well as spacing, scatter and rotation settings.

1. Go to the My Brushes section in the Brushes menu.
2. Tap + New Pack to create a new brush set.

3. Tap the Untitled brush that appears in the set, or tap Edit Untitled, located at the top of the viewer. You'll be brought to the Brush editor.

In the brush editing menu, you'll see the:

4. Live Preview of the brush.
5. The name of your brush (tap to rename).
6. Brush reset (to reset all settings).
7. Duplicate (to duplicate the brush).
8. Delete brush.

Core Setup

Next, you will find the Core Setup for your brush. You have two types of brushes to choose from: a Stamp brush and a Reveal brush.

• A Stamp brush uses one or several images and draws them on Canvas at certain intervals to create your brush texture. Similar to ink stamps, they repeat as they create a stroke.
• A Reveal brush uses its stroke to unmask a grain underneath, similar to how the watercolor brush reveals the texture of the underlying paper. The resulting stroke of this brush type is even and consistent; there is no overlap when a stroke doubles back on itself.

Stamp & Grain

We’ve created a complete tutorial on creating stamps and grains for your brushes.

1. Choose a brush type and then move down to Stamp & Grain.
2. Upload a stamp source (JPG or PNG) to use as an image base for your brush. Stamp here refers to the image, not the brush type above. You can add up to nine images to use as stamps to add variation. Using several stamps to create a stroke will give you more randomness to your stroke.
3. After importing your stamps, import your grain. The grain is a background image that adds additional texture to your brush. Grains work best when they are seamless; otherwise, you will see the edges where the image repeats. Read more on how to make a seamless grain.

4. If you don't want your grain texture to overlap with itself, check the Line up the grain position for every stroke box.
5. You can edit the scaling of your grain.
6. You can edit the rotation of your grain.

Presets & Basic Dynamics

In Presets & Basic Dynamics, you will find the Size, Opacity and Smoothing presets, as well as variance graphs that let you adjust how your brush reacts to your stylus' pressure, tilt, and velocity inputs.

Adjusting Size / Opacity / Smoothing

1. Use the slider to set your brush's default presets.
2. Tap and adjust each preset. You can also Tap+Hold to inline edit the preset values.

After setting up the base values and presets for your brush, you can adjust the Variance curve to affect how Pressure, Tilt and Velocity affect your brush's size or opacity.

• Note that smoothing does not have a variance curve.
• Note that there is not a variance graph for opacity when the Reveal brush is selected.

3. To help you adjust your brush, draw a stroke in the Preview. This stroke will update live as you adjust your variance curve.
4. Choose which of the three—pressure, tilt, or velocity—you want to affect your brush's properties. You can choose several to affect the brush.

5. Draw the Variance Graph for your brush directly in the graph. The left side of the graph represents the low end of pressure, tilt or velocity, and the right side represents the high end. A graph for a pressure-sensitive fountain pen, for example, will start small and gradually increase in size depending on the pressure.
6. The white range behind the graph, reflects the pressure/tilt/velocity range of your preview stroke. As you adjust the graph, you can see the stroke update live. The range for your stylus pressure can be edited in Settings → Stylus.
7. The vertical value axis represents the percentage change in your brush's properties. By default, the graph is level in the middle, meaning the brush's properties are as set in the Tool Wheel. Drawing your graph below the midpoint will make your brush smaller in size or lighter in opacity. Going above the midpoint will make your brush bigger or more opaque. To reset your graph, double-tap the vertical value axis.

Shape Controls

With Shape Controls, you can adjust the spacing, scatter and rotation of your stamps. Your stroke preview will update live to show your adjustments.

Each control handle is split in the middle. This allows you to create a range of random jitter for your shapes to appear in. When the handles are together, there is no jitter; they will appear along the stroke path with even spacing or rotation, etc. If you pull the handles apart, you create a range of randomness in which the stamps can appear.

1. Shape Spacing allows you to adjust the distance your stamps appear from each other. Separate the handles to create a more random spacing.
2. As with Size and Opacity, Shape Spacing also has a variance graph you can adjust.
3. Shape Scatter will scatter your stamps vertically in relation to your stroke path. Separate the handles to create a more random scatter.
4. Shape Rotation affects the rotation of the stamp along the stroke line. Separate the handles to create a more random rotational effect.
5. Rotate Along Stroke Path. By default, your stroke follows the azimuth of the stylus. If you want your stamps to rotate along the drawn stroke instead, check this box.

Advanced Settings

Under Advanced Settings, you have the ability to define the layer your brush will appear in when using Automatic layering.

1. To change the assigned layer, tap on the layer label. By default, this will be set to Custom. A keyboard, along with several preset layer labels, will appear.
2. Choosing Active Layer will always put strokes drawn with the brush on the currently active layer.
3. You can choose one of the existing layers to set your brush on: Image, Pencil, Marker, Airbrush, Pen, Wire, Text, Fill, Watercolor or Custom layer.
4. You can also type a custom name for your layer.

For more practice, try our photo-based brush tutorial and create a brush using your own photographs. You can also try creating an acrylic-based brush with ready-made stamps provided in the tutorial.

Brush Sharing (iOS Only)

If you have a Concepts subscription, you can share your custom-made brushes with anyone who has a free Concepts account, or even sell a link to your brush library in an online store. Shared brushes are read-only, non-editable by anyone except you. Any change you make to a brush will update live on the accounts you’ve shared your brushes with. (Please note that sharing and receiving brush packs is only available on iOS at the moment.)

Live Sharing a Brush Pack

1. Tap+Hold the title of the brush pack you wish to share.
2. Tap Share in the popup that appears.

3. In the Brush Pack Sharing screen, you can tap Share to directly share the pack from your device.
4. You can also copy the link to your brush pack, and share it via email.
5. If you want to unshare your Brush Pack at any point, tap Unshare.

Exporting a Brush Pack File

In addition to live sharing, you can export your brush pack file to share with your colleagues and friends. This feature is only available for Essentials and Subscription customers.

1. To export a brush pack Tap+Hold+Drag on the pack you want to export.
2. Swipe upwards from the iOS Home Bar.

3. Open Files and find the location you want to save your brush pack into.
4. Drag & Drop the brushpack to the location.

If you want to share your brushes via an online store, you can do that, too. Some of our customers already sell Concepts brushes on Creative Market and Gumroad. If you want to learn more about this or have a chance to promote your brushes in the Brush Market send us a message at support@concepts.app.

Importing Brush Packs

Brush pack import is available for customers who have purchased either Essentials or Subscription.

Importing a Brush Pack via Link

1. Tap the link you have received for the shared Brush Pack. This will open a browser window.

2. Tap the "Open in Concepts" button.

3. Tap Accept, and you're good to go.

Importing a Brush Pack File

If you want to import a Brush Pack file, you can import it straight into your brush library.

1. Tap the Import Icon in the Status Bar.

2. Choose Files from the Import menu.

3. Locate the Brush Pack you want to import in your Files app and tap it.

4. Once the Pack has been added, you'll see a notification. Go to your Brush Menu to try out your new brushes.
5. You can also import a Brush Pack file by tapping it directly in Files.

Note that the Imported brushes and Brush Market brushes behave a bit differently from the ones you have made yourself. If you have purchased Essentials or a Subscription, you can duplicate and edit the brushes within the pack. To preserve the rights of the creator, you can't move them out of that pack. If you accidentally edit the original brush, you can always reset it in the Brush editor.

Custom brushes and brush sharing is currently only available on iOS.