Pencil tool
Draw a vector path freehand, the way you would sketch with a real pencil, and let Celas Studio fit the curve for you.
The Pencil tool (N) draws by dragging, not by placing points one at a time: sketch a stroke and Celas Studio fits a bezier path through it when you lift the pen. The fit comes out as smooth curves with far fewer points than it used to leave behind, so a sketched line is workable with the Node tool straight away. There is no closing click and no handle editing while you draw; adjust the result afterwards with the Node tool.
Drawing a stroke
Press and drag to draw; releasing finishes the stroke. There are no modifier keys, no snapping and no right-click or double-click behaviour: the Pencil is a single continuous gesture from press to release.
The fit is what keeps a sketch editable. Nodes are placed only where the neighbouring handles cannot carry the curve on their own, and a turn has to be genuinely sharp before it is pinned as a corner, so a gentle bend comes back as one curve instead of a cluster of anchors.
Smoothing and stabilizing
| Option | Range | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|
| Size | 1 to 100 px | 2 | Width of the stroke you draw |
| Smooth | 0 to 1 | 1.0 | How much the fitted curve is allowed to depart from your raw input: higher values simplify the line into fewer, smoother handles |
| Stabilize | 0 to 1 | 0.0 | Lags the line behind the cursor to iron out small shakes, the way a lazy-mouse setting does |
| Auto Close | on/off | off | Closes the path automatically when you finish a stroke of three or more points |
Anti-alias is shared with the Brush tool's setting, so turning it off here also turns it off there, and vice versa.
The stroke brush
The stroke-brush swatch on the bar gives the line a textured tip instead of a plain even width, with its own spacing, scatter, jitter, count and grain. It is drawn live: the stroke you are dragging already looks like the brushed line it will become, rather than turning into one when you let go.
The same swatch is on the Pen, Node and Shapes bars, so a line you draw with any of them can be brushed, and the setting also converts what is already selected: pick a shape, turn the stroke brush on, and that shape takes it. The Properties panel owns the values, so a change made there and a change made on the bar are the same edit.
Where the stroke goes
What the Pencil actually produces depends on the layer you have selected:
- Nothing selected, or a layer that cannot hold a path: the New Layer option decides, and a new Shape or Pixel layer is created
- A Vector layer: the stroke becomes a shape on the current cell, so it belongs to that frame's drawing
- A Raster or Pixel layer: the Pencil paints pixels instead of a vector path, using the Brush tool underneath
Draw Into, under the chevron at the end of the bar, decides whether a finished stroke becomes its own layer or joins the shape already selected. New Layer is the default and is why a long sketch turns into a long layer list; Current Layer folds each stroke into the selected shape instead.
The Pencil's own preset
On a bitmap layer the Pencil is a brush, so it paints with a preset, and it keeps its own rather than borrowing whatever the Brush was last set to. The choice is remembered between sessions, and picking the tool restores it and jumps the Brushes panel to the Pencil family.
On first use it seeds from Pencil Hard, a hard aliased line that holds its width and varies in darkness with pressure, which is what pencil means on pixels. The graphite leads beside it, Pencil 4H through 8B, are softer and lay their tone into the paper's tooth; pick one from the Brushes panel and the Pencil keeps it from then on.
The tip swatch at the end of the options bar opens the same tip popup the Brush, Eraser and Smudge carry, with the tip shape grid, Tip Angle, Angle Jitter, Scatter and Direction Follow. It edits the active preset, so a change here is a change to the brush itself and shows up wherever that preset is used.
| N | Pencil tool |