Brush Engine

Pressure, wet-paint blending, scatter, custom shapes and grain.

Brush wet-paint controls

A brush that behaves like a real one. Pressure shapes the stroke, paint runs out as you drag, colors mix wet-into-wet, and any texture can become your bristle or your paper.

Every setting below lives in the Brush node. Tweak one, and it becomes a preset in the picker.

Pressure#

Pressure drives size and opacity independently, each with its own range, shaped by the brush's pressure graph. Set a soft response for a feather-light touch, or a hard one for instant ink. Works with Wacom, Apple Pencil, and most styluses.

Painting with a mouse? Strokes are smoothed automatically, so lines come out clean instead of shaky.

Wet paint#

This is what makes Magerie feel like paint, not pixels.

Control Effect
Dilution Water-to-paint ratio. Higher makes every stamp more transparent
Charge Paint loaded on the brush. It runs down as you drag, like a real bristle
Pull Picks up the colors already on the canvas and blends them in (wet-into-wet)
Wet edges Pigment pools at the edges, the watercolor dark ring
Burnt edges Darkens where the stroke crosses itself, the cauliflower bloom
Wet blur Softens the canvas underneath the fresh stroke

Pull plus wet edges plus a low charge gives you watercolor washes. High opacity with no wetness gives you hard ink.

Scatter and jitter#

Spread and randomize dabs to build texture, spray, and natural-media grit.

Control Effect
Spacing Gap between dabs along the stroke
Lateral jitter Throws dabs out to the sides, up to heavy scatter sprays
Linear jitter Nudges dabs forward and back along the stroke

The randomness is repeatable: the same stroke always lands the same way.

Shape and grain#

Two images define how a brush looks:

  • Shape: the silhouette of a single dab. Soft round by default; load any PNG to make your own.
  • Grain: a paper or canvas texture pressed into every dab. Set it to follow the stroke, or pin it to the canvas like real tooth.

Both travel inside the document, so a brush looks the same on any machine.

Blend modes#

Thirteen per-dab paint modes: normal, multiply, screen, overlay, soft light, hard light, color dodge, color burn, darken, lighten, difference, plus erase and smudge. (Clone and Heal are two more, reached through the Retouch tools.)

The layer panel and Blend node offer a larger 22-mode set. See Blending.

Alpha lock#

Paint only over pixels that already exist. Toggle it on the layer. Edges stay crisp.

QuickShape#

Hold at the end of a stroke to snap it to a clean line, ellipse, circle, rectangle, or quad. Adjust before you lift. Tune it in Settings > Painting.

Where to next#