Painting

Brushes, layers, and canvases on the board.

Painting on a canvas

The canvas#

You paint on Image nodes. Each one is its own canvas, with its own pixels, resolution, and layer stack. Select an Image node, press B, and paint.

An empty Image node is a blank canvas. Wire an image into its input and it turns into a viewer: it shows whatever flows in, and the paint and layer controls step aside. Disconnect the input (or lock the node) to paint on it again.

Tools#

Tool Key What it does
Move V Select and move nodes; drag inside a selection to lift pixels
Brush B Paint. Eraser is E, Smudge is S.
Lasso L Select a region of pixels
Eyedropper I Pick a color off the canvas
Color Picker C Open the color picker

Retouch tools have dedicated keys: Clone K, Heal H, Spot J. Annotate with Pen P or Laser G. Painting is pressure-sensitive on Wacom, Apple Pencil, and most styluses. [ and ] size the brush.

Layers#

Up to 32 per canvas, with the controls you expect:

Control What it does
Visibility Show or hide the layer
Opacity Fade from 0 to 100%
Blend mode 22 modes, the full Photoshop set
Lock Make it read-only
Alpha lock Paint only where pixels already exist
Clipping mask Clip to the layer below
Filter Apply a node-graph effect to just this layer

Brushes#

The brush engine runs deep: pressure response, wet-paint blending, scatter, custom shapes and grain. See Brush Engine.

Any Brush node dropped on the board becomes a preset in the brush picker, no wiring needed. Star the ones you reach for.

QuickShape#

Hold at the end of a stroke and Magerie snaps it to a clean line, ellipse, circle, rectangle, or quad. Nudge it before you let go. Tune it in Settings > Painting.

Size and export#

Set the canvas size on the Image node. To scale for output, add a Resize node downstream, then an Image Exporter node for PNG, JPEG, WebP, and TIFF (plus EXR on macOS). The document itself stays resolution-independent.

Where to next#