Pencil

The Pencil (B) is the freehand tool. It has three modes: Draw paints with the brush, Shade steps the colors under it lighter or darker, and Spray is an airbrush.

#Painting

• Shift+click draws a straight line from where the last stroke ended.
• Alt+click picks the color under the pointer (left button the primary, right the secondary).
• [ and ] make the brush a size smaller or bigger.

Each stroke's undo step is named after the mode (Pencil, Shade, Spray, or Brush for a picked-up brush).

The Pencil paints in the format's own pixels: a multicolor pixel is two hires pixels wide, Multicolor + sprites paints its bitmap's pixels in pairs, Hires 240's wide pixels are painted on both their columns, and a chunky block is painted whole. The cell limits are kept as the Cells option says.

#Draw, Shade and Spray

#Draw

Paints with the brush: the primary color, or what Paints says (below). With a size 1 brush, Pixel-perfect keeps the lines one pixel thin.

#Shade

Each pass steps a pixel's color one step along a ramp of colors: the left button one step lighter, the right button one step darker. A pixel steps once per stroke however often you go over it, so you shade a little at a time, a stroke at a time. Shade paints no color of its own: it works on the colors that are there.

Ramp chooses the colors it steps through:

• Auto: the color's own family (the default): the classic C64 shading ramp of the color the stroke starts on: the grays, the blues, purple, the reds, browns to yellow, or the greens.
• All 16 by the palette's lightness: every color, darkest to lightest as the palette shows them.
• A named ramp: Gray, Blue, Purple, Red, Brown to gold, Green, Cyan, Acid, Fire, Sunset, Chrome, Rainbow, Night or Neon.
• Your own ramps, saved in the gradient editor, marked (yours).

A color that isn't on the ramp joins it first, at its nearest step in the direction you shade. The ends of the ramp stay as they are: shading the lightest color lighter changes nothing. Colors left out of the picture's Allowed colors are left out of the ramp too (unless that leaves fewer than two). Keeping the cell limits, a step goes on to the next color along the ramp that its cell can take.

A Shift+click line in Shade doesn't step the joint with the stroke before twice. Shade isn't available on the sketch layer, which has no colors to step along.

#Spray

The airbrush: pixels land at random within the brush, in what Paints says. Flow (1 to 100%, 30% to start; double-click the slider to go back to 30%) sets how fast: a share of the brush's area a second. At 100% a second covers about two thirds of the brush, since some pixels land on others. The spray is round on the screen; sizes 1 and 2 spray a square.

#The brush

• Size: 1 to 32 pixels ([ and ], or Edit ▸ Brush ▸ Bigger brush and Smaller brush). The brush is square in the format's pixels: on multicolor's wide pixels it has twice as many lines as pixels across, so it is square on the screen. An even size leans up and to the left of the pointer.
• Square or Round: a round brush with hard edges, for sizes 3 and up (a 3 is a plus sign).
• Soft: a round brush whose edge is dithered, so the paint thins out toward it. It paints fully inside 40% of its radius and fades to nothing at its edge. It is round on the screen, counting the picture's pixel aspect. With Soft on, a menu beside it chooses the dither of the soft edge (the same maps as a dither mix; while the Pencil paints a dither mix, the mix's own). Sizes 1 and 2 are always hard.
• Pixel-perfect (on to start): a size 1 stroke in Draw leaves out the corner pixels that freehand drawing makes where it turns, so its lines are one pixel thin, as Aseprite's pixel-perfect does. It does nothing at other sizes, in Shade or Spray, or with a picked-up brush.
• Mirror: paints mirrored or turned copies of each stroke. See Symmetry.

Spray has no Square, Round or Soft: its spray is always round.

#Paints

Paints chooses what Draw and Spray put down. These are the Pencil's own fill style: it has its own pattern, mix and generated fill, apart from the Fill tool's.

Each kind but the first brings a swatch beside the menu; click it to edit the pattern, the mix or the generated fill. Their editors are described on the Fill page.

Patterns, mixes and generated fills are laid from the picture's top left corner, so they line up wherever you paint them, and painting over a pattern or a mix again changes nothing. A dither mix with Secondary is see-through mixes the primary into what is already there. With a dither mix, Shift+[ and Shift+] make the mix a level less or more.

Paints isn't shown in Shade, or while painting with a picked-up brush.

#A brush from the picture

Any part of the picture can become the Pencil's brush, as Deluxe Paint's custom brushes do. Select the pixels, then click Brush from selection on the options bar, press Ctrl+B, or choose Edit ▸ Brush ▸ Use selection as brush.

The brush is the selected pixels as the picture shows them, in the box around them; what's outside the selection is clear. The selection then goes and the picture stays as it was (a floating piece isn't placed: one lifted from the picture goes back where it was, a pasted one goes away). The Pencil is taken up, in Draw.

While it paints with a picked-up brush, the options bar shows:

• Brush W × H: its size;
• ⇆ flips it left to right (Shift+H), ⇅ top to bottom (Shift+V), ↻ turns it 90° clockwise (Shift+R). The keys work while nothing is selected. A turn is made in the format's own pixels, as the selection's Rotate does: nothing is lost, but on wide pixels the brush comes out stretched;
• Secondary clear (on to start): the secondary color is clear too, as Deluxe Paint's background color is, so the brush paints only its other colors;
• Usual brush: back to the square, round or soft brush (also Edit ▸ Brush ▸ Usual brush).

The left button stamps the brush in its own colors; the right button stamps its shape in the secondary color. Shade and Spray use the usual brush. A picked-up brush goes away, with a message, when the picture's format changes to pixels of another shape, or when the picture's allowed colors leave out some of its colors.

#Edit ▸ Brush

#Related

• Eraser: the same brush, taking edits away
• Paint colors
• Cell limits and clashes
• The sketch layer: the Pencil can draw there instead