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Covering bigger areas

Make a single stroke carry more weight - without losing the faint, hairy texture.

The golden rule: impact comes from more thin lines, never a fatter or more opaque one. A thick connection drawn as one bar goes muddy and kills the look; the controls below add weight by fanning each connection into many 1px hairs instead.

The controls

In Round (the connecting brush), open brush settings (b) → Connection art style:

Weight: Hairs per connection. This is your main impact dial - raise it for a bolder mark made of many faint lines (1 = a single delicate line).
Spread: How wide (px) those hairs fan out. Narrow = a dense ribbon; wide = an airy band that covers ground.
Scatter: End-jitter, 0→1: parallel band → loose crossing hairs (hand-drawn). (under More)
Speed: Links stroke speed to weight: slow, deliberate passes gain hairs and stay strong; fast flicks stay light. Great for shading by feel. (under More)

Pick a preset first, then nudge these. Full reference: Memory maps & connecting.

Recipes

Bold confident line: Weight 8–12, Spread 4–8, Scatter ~0.2. A solid-reading stroke that's still a bundle of hairs up close.
Soft wide shading: Weight 4–8, Spread 20–30, Scatter ~0.4, low Opacity (~0.1). Sweep back and forth to fill an area with tone.
Pencil build-up: Round with the Shading style + a little Weight + Speed up. Linger to deepen, flick to keep it light - go over an area repeatedly to build value.
Reach across a gap: Raise Reach so points connect over a wider span, and Density to fill it in.

Tips

If it goes muddy / solid black, don't lower Weight - lower Opacity and/or Density. Keep many faint hairs; just make each fainter. Saturation is what kills the texture.
Build in passes. Several light passes read richer than one heavy stroke - that's the Harmony way (tone accumulates).
Weight, not thickness. Use Weight + Spread for size, never a fat line. (At Weight 1 it's a single thin, delicate line.)
Keep it on its own layer. Put the web on the connection layer so you can fade its opacity or erase it without touching your strokes.
Speed is feel-based - it reads how fast you move, so the same settings give a lively, varied mark.

Try this Take the Soft wide shading recipe and sweep slowly back and forth over one area, building it in three or four light passes instead of one firm push. Stop the moment it reads right - it's always easier to add another whisper-light pass than to rescue a patch that's gone muddy.