Book › Connections
Connections
A connection is the web a brush weaves between nearby points. Pick one from the Brush settings' Web tab (press c) and any connecting brush wears it. The styles are grouped into Classic, More and your own Custom presets.
What they are
Web doesn't just lay a stroke - it reaches out to nearby remembered points in your drawing's memory and draws lines between them. A connection is a named look for those lines: their density, reach, opacity, line shape, grain and texture. The mark is made of many faint lines, so the look builds up as you cover an area - at a steady rate however fast you draw (tuned to match mrdoob's Harmony).
Classic
The everyday connecting looks - ports of Ricardo Cabello's (mrdoob) Harmony brushes of the same names.
Sketchy
The sketchy web (after Harmony's “sketchy” brush): faint, brush-width lines, slightly inset so they float between points rather than piling up on the dots. Raise Weight for a bolder mark made of more thin hairs.
Web →
A sparser, slightly stronger net of full-length lines (Harmony's “web”): distinct strands stretched between points over a bolder core line. Great for spider-webs, nets and wireframe-like fills.
Shaded
The default style. Dense, short, full-length lines whose opacity fades with distance (Harmony's “shaded”): scribble back and forth to build smooth, soft tone. It draws no solid core line, so the web is the mark.
Chrome
A port of Harmony's chrome brush: short, inset crossing lines whose colour is a random darkened shade of your ink, so the web shimmers in mottled metallic tones instead of one flat colour. The lines blend with a Blend mode, so overlaps build a bright sheen - it reads best on a plain layer. Colour still follows the Colour dial below, so a gradient or rainbow tints the shimmer.
The Blend dial sets how overlapping lines combine - the part of chrome that makes it read as metal rather than a flat scribble:
- Lighten (default)
- Overlaps keep the brighter tone, so the web builds a bright metallic sheen. The everyday choice on a dark canvas.
- Screen
- Adds light rather than just keeping the brightest - a glossier metal that feels lit from within. For a glow on dark.
- Normal
- No blend: the random tones simply paint over each other and layer softly. The subtle option, and the only one that looks the same on any background.
- Darken / Multiply (light background)
- Overlaps keep (Darken) or stack (Multiply) the darker tone - Harmony's original chrome look, dark metal drawn on paper. They subtract light, so use them on a light canvas or layer; on a dark canvas they show almost nothing.
Longfur
A port of Harmony's longfur brush: like the web, but every hair overshoots both ends, running long and wispy past the dots it links instead of stopping between them. Faint and wide-reaching, so drawing back over your own points builds a soft, long-furred pelt. The Length dial sets the overshoot - turn it to 0 for a plain web, up for very long hairs.
More
The expressive and decorative styles.
Bloomer
Made for mandalas: your own stroke multiplies into a full, glowing web from almost nothing. Where Shaded only fills as fast as you cover an area, Bloomer tops the web up to a target fullness around your stroke - so even a single tap blooms into a complete mandala under Radial symmetry. It's the style the Start page's Mandala uses, and the Bloom dial drives it: it adds where the web is sparse and little where it's already dense, so the fullness stays even and never piles into mud, however much you draw.
Captured in the app with Record GIF: press r (or pick it from the canvas menu), draw to start, then preview, set the speed, trim the ends and save.
Fur →
A combed pelt of soft, flowing guard hairs that lie along a grain, taper to wispy tips and fray at the edges. See Texture connections.
Lace →
A fine crossing net of floating, dotted scallops (arc connections + a dotted dash + inset ends). Best for filling a shape with lace. See Texture connections.
Colour
By default the web draws in your Primary toolbar colour, or pick Secondary. The rest pull a living, varied run of colour from a gradient or palette as the web draws, rather than one flat tint: Gradient (Primary→Secondary), Complement (Primary and its opposite hue), Rainbow, and the curated palettes Fire, Ocean, Sunset and Neon - so a fanned web blooms into bands of colour, lovely for an iridescent Web or rainbow mandalas under symmetry. Pair any of them with a low Links so a clean mesh shows the colours instead of muddying them. This is colour for life and texture, not for picking one exact shade.
From mark works differently: instead of a fixed scheme, the web inherits the colour your strokes already painted into the cloud. Lay some colour with the Color Pen (or just change your Primary between strokes), then weave over it with From mark and the web carries those colours out along its threads.
When a gradient source is chosen, a Colour direction wheel appears. By default each line is coloured by its own angle; tick Colour follows stroke and the whole web is coloured by the way your hand travels, so the colour walks the gradient as you move. Rotate spins which heading shows which colour, Range limits how much of the palette a turn covers (low keeps a curving stroke inside a colour arc), and Relative anchors the colour to the stroke's start so the same gesture repeats whichever way you draw it.
Custom presets
Made a look you like? Save it as your own preset. Tweak any connection's dials (and the brush's Opacity) in the Web tab, then click + Save as preset… - name it in the dialog. It captures the art-style dials plus the current line opacity (not the memory-map routing). Saved presets live in a Custom group shown first in the style picker and persist in your browser between sessions.
- Update or branch off
- When a custom preset is the active style, the box shows two buttons: Update “name” overwrites it in place, or Save as new… saves a copy (the name is pre-filled “name copy”).
- Delete
- The × on a custom entry in the style picker removes it.
- Import / Export
-
The Custom group header carries two icons: Import (↓,
always) and Export (↑, once you have presets).
Export opens a checklist (all ticked) and downloads the chosen presets
as a
.presetfile; Import reads a.presetfile back (validated - a malformed file imports nothing) and merges it in, overwriting any with the same name. Handy for sharing or backing up your looks.
.preset file and either
email it to
barak.bloch@gmail.com or open a
pull
request on GitHub. Questions and ideas are just as welcome - if a dial
or slider you need is missing, ask and we'll see what's possible. A
gentle heads-up: we can't promise to act on every preset, idea or PR;
whether something lands depends on the idea and on what's feasible to
build. Thank you for sharing either way.
Links
By default each point connects to every neighbour within Reach - in a dense patch that piles up into a tangle of crossing lines. The Links dial caps each point to only its nearest few: 0 = all (the usual web); a small number (3-5) trims the long crossing lines into a clean, even mesh. It differs from its cousins - Density drops lines at random, Stipple spaces the web along your stroke, but only Links removes the long connections specifically, so it's the one that yields a crisp lattice and keeps the Gradient / Rainbow colours legible.
Stipple
Every style has a Stipple dial (folded under More). At 0 (default) the web is smooth; raise it to break the web into evenly spaced tufts or dots - a hand-stamped, textured feel. Purely artistic: it doesn't change how fast the mark builds up.
Bloom
Bloom turns the web into a fill. It sets a target density and, as you draw, tops the area around each point up to it - scattering extra points where the web is thin and adding nothing where it's already full. At 0 it's off (the default for every style but Bloomer); raise it and a tap or a short stroke blooms into a dense, even web. Because it targets a density rather than adding a fixed amount, it's self-levelling: drawing more fills fresh ground instead of muddying what's there. Pair a high Bloom with a generous Reach and a Rainbow web under symmetry for instant mandalas.
A companion dial, Bloom radius, sets how far each bloom scatters its dots from your stroke - tight for a soft halo along the line, wide to flood a broader area. It appears once Bloom is turned on.