Book › Connections
Connections
A connection is the web a brush weaves between nearby points. Pick one from the navbar Connecting combo and any connecting brush wears it. The styles are grouped into Classic, More and your own Custom presets.
What they are
Round 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, after the three classic Harmony brushes.
Airy
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.
String Art →
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.
Shading
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.
More
The expressive and decorative styles.
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.
Arc
Bulging arcs between points instead of straight lines - each connection bows outward into a curve. Reads as scallops, petals and looping ribbon; pairs well with a dotted dash and some inset (the basis of Lace).
Custom presets
Made a look you like? Save it as your own preset. Tweak any connection's dials (and the brush's Opacity), open the Connecting box with the gear, and 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 combo 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 combo 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.
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.