Draw right in your studio

1Opening the canvas

The canvas opens where your pages already are. On a page tile, open Page actions (the ... button) and pick Draw on this page. It opens full screen over the studio, so you never leave the document. Unlike Procreate, this is not a general art program: comic issue pages only. Books, visual novels and media have no canvas. Body pages work, and so do cover slots that already hold a page. Your existing art arrives as a pinned Background row in the Layers panel, subtitled The existing page. It has a visibility checkbox and nothing else: no delete, no reorder, no opacity, no blend. Below it, Background color starts white; tap the swatch to change it. On an empty page, Layer 1 is created for you so you can draw at once. Muse rides along, if your studio has the Muse entitlement.

2The interface and gestures

Your finger navigates, your pen (or mouse) draws. That split is the whole mental model: no modifier juggling, no accidental strokes while you pan. Two fingers pan, zoom and rotate at once. Quick, still taps do the rest: two fingers undo, three redo, four toggle full screen. A three-finger scrub side to side clears the layer, and a three-finger swipe down opens Cut, Copy, Copy all, Duplicate, Cut & paste, Paste. Unlike Procreate, we have no single-letter tool keys and no bracket resizing. The keyboard set is small and honest: Space, Ctrl/Cmd+Z, +Shift+Z, +C, +X, +V, plus Shift to constrain a QuickShape. Everything else sits where your hand already is: the left rail (Brush size 1 to 240 on an exponential slider, Brush opacity, Eyedropper, Fill, Undo, Redo) and the QuickMenu's six slots, reassignable from 13 actions.

3The pens

Sixteen pens ship with the studio, sorted into five categories inside the Library panel: Inking, Halftone, Pencils, Markers and Charcoal, with My Pens and Community underneath. Every row draws a live preview stroke, so you pick by looking, not by guessing from a name. Two engines sit behind them: stamp pens (ink, pencil, charcoal) lay down marks, and screen pens build halftone tone. Pressure character is per pen and we widen that envelope on purpose, so Technical Pen stays flat and crisp while Brush Pen tapers hard. Unlike Procreate, each tool keeps its own pen: brush, eraser and smudge all start on Ink Pen but drift apart. Erase with a halftone if you like. Size and opacity are remembered per tool and per pen.

4Build a pen in Brush Studio

New pen (or the pencil icon on a custom pen) drops you into Brush Studio, full screen and dark so nothing competes with the stroke. The model is simple: a pen is one shape stamped repeatedly along your path. Stroke path sets how often it stamps (Spacing) and how much it wanders (Jitter). Taper maps Pressure -> size, with Minimum size as the floor so a light stroke never disappears. Rendering owns the edge and the ink: Hardness, Pressure -> opacity, Opacity. Switch Model to Screen (halftone) in Properties and a Grain section appears with Screen shape, Frequency and Angle. Save pen lands it in My Pens, where the share icon offers Share to community or Send to a colleague. Unlike Procreate, there are no brush files to import or export; Install on a community pen is the whole story.

5Layers and the stack

Layers stack bottom to top, and the stack is the picture. Tap + to add one; there is no limit, so stop rationing. Every row carries a visibility checkbox, but the working controls live on the active row only: Opacity (0 to 100), Alpha lock: paint only on existing pixels, Clipping mask: clip to the layer below, Duplicate layer, Delete layer. Rows badged Text or Assisted tell you where they came from. Swipe left for Duplicate, Merge down and Delete. Gestures do the rest: swipe right to multi-select, drag the grip to reorder, two-finger tap to toggle alpha lock, two-finger drag to scrub opacity (the HUD reads Opacity NN%), pinch two rows to merge the span. Unlike Procreate, every gesture has an on-screen twin, so none of it is a secret handshake. Select two rows and Group appears.

6Blend modes

A blend mode decides how a layer reacts with everything under it. There are twelve, shown as a letter on the layer row and as a label plus letter in the menu. Multiply (M) darkens and drops white, so it is your tone and shadow layer under ink. Screen (S) lightens and drops black, so it is glow and highlight. Overlay (O), Soft Light (SL) and Hard Light (HL) push contrast, which is how you tint and light a scene. Darken (Dk) and Lighten (Lt) choose per pixel. Color Dodge (CD) and Color Burn (CB) are the extremists: blown highlights, crushed shadows. Difference (Df) and Exclusion (Ex) are for effects and for lining art up. The classic comic stack: ink on top, a Multiply layer for tone, colour flats underneath. Unlike Procreate there is no Add or Linear Burn, and no Hue, Saturation, Color or Luminosity. Twelve, and that is the set.

7Colour

Open Colors and you get four ways into the same colour, as tabs. disc is a hue ring with a saturation and value square inside it, for hunting by feel. classic gives you a square plus a hue bar. value is three honest sliders (Hue 0 to 360, Saturation and Brightness 0 to 100) when you need a number, not a vibe. palettes holds groups of exactly 30 slots, starting with Palette 1; + New adds another. Empty slots read Add the current colour, filled ones Tap to use; right-click to clear. There's an Opacity slider, a History strip with Clear, and a hex field taking #rrggbb or rrggbb (shorthand is rejected). The Eyedropper on the left rail and in the QuickMenu is one-shot: it samples, then switches itself off. Unlike Procreate, there's no harmony wheel and no colour profiles. Hit Done and paint.

8Selections

A selection is a stencil, not a lasso. Once one is active, paint lands inside it and nowhere else, which is how you keep a flat colour inside a shape without owning a steady hand. Open the Selection panel and pick your shape: Freehand, Rectangle and Ellipse all tell you "Drag on the canvas to select. Drag inside a selection to move it." Automatic selects by matching colour, so it says "Tap the canvas to select a matching area." instead. The marching ants show you the stencil edge. With one live you also get Cut, Copy and Delete. Done stencilling? Deselect, and the whole layer is yours again.

9Transform and QuickShape

Transform gives you four modes: Freeform stretches any which way, Uniform keeps your proportions honest, Distort pushes perspective, and Warp bends the pixels freely. Three handles do the work: grab the blue square at a corner to scale, the emerald circle to rotate, the blue circle to move. Flip H, Flip V and Rotate 45° are there for the quick stuff, Reset undoes your fiddling, and Cancel discards it.

QuickShape is the other half of this. Draw a shape, hold your pen still for about 0.4s, and it snaps to a line, arc, polyline, rectangle, ellipse or triangle. Keep holding to drag it bigger or spin it. Add a second finger (or Shift on desktop) for a true circle or square with rotation snapping every 15 degrees. Then nudge the control nodes until it sits right.

10Adjustments

Adjustments holds three groups. Color covers Hue, Saturation, Brightness, Color Balance, Brightness & Contrast, and Gradient Map, which maps your tones onto one of five presets (Noir, Sepia, Dusk, Ocean, Ember) with an Amount dial. No custom gradient colours here, unlike Procreate. Effects gives you eight: Gaussian Blur, Motion Blur, Noise, Sharpen, Bloom, Glitch, Halftone (Cell size 3 to 24px, your instant screentone), and Chromatic Aberration. Interactive holds Liquify and Clone, which you drive with the pen rather than sliders. There is no Apply button: a slider panel keeps your changes as you go, and its footer reads Kept automatically. Cancel to revert., so Cancel is the only escape hatch you need. An adjustment is a pass over the whole layer, not a retouch on one patch.

11Drawing guides and assist

Open Drawing guide and the off-state tells you the deal: "Guides are a studio aid: they never appear in the reader or in print." Pick 2D grid, Isometric (30, 150 and vertical rails), Perspective (1, 2 or 3 vanishing points, tap the canvas to place them and drag to move) or Symmetry (Vertical, Horizontal, Quadrant, Radial, plus Rotational symmetry). Tune Grid size, Rotation, Opacity, Thickness and a swatch until it reads without shouting.

Then Drawing Assist, which does two different jobs. A line guide constrains: your stroke projects onto the nearest rail and locks, so a wobble cannot flip it, and the line begins wherever your pen did. Symmetry mirrors: every copy is a real stroke, and they undo as one step. It ignores pasted images, text and adjustments. Our Radial is fixed at 8 sectors, unlike Procreate.

12Text that stays editable

Type sits on its own layer, and it stays editable. Tap Text in the toolbar (or Actions, then Add text) and write in the Type here box. Four fonts, the same set the balloon letterer uses: Comic (the default), Classic serif, Clean sans, Typewriter. They are font stacks rather than bundled files, so exact rendering depends on the machine. Shape it with Size (8 to 600), Line height (0.7 to 3), Tracking (-20 to 80) and Box width (40 to 4000), plus Align left, Align center, Align right, Bold, Italic, Underline. One text object per text layer, so a second caption means a second layer. Unlike Procreate, colour is not in the panel yet. These are not speech balloons either: balloons with tails are a separate lettering feature that only shares the same four fonts. Rasterize bakes type into pixels and it stops being editable, one way.

13Animation Assist

Flip on Animation Assist: frames, onion skin, playback in the toolbar (or tick the Animation Assist checkbox under Actions) and a frame bar unfurls along the bottom. The mental model is simple: every top-level layer is a frame, bottom to top, first to last. A group counts as one frame. Add frame literally adds a layer. Procreate keeps its animation timeline separate from your layer stack. We do not, and once that clicks, layer discipline is animation discipline. Tap the active frame again for Frame options: Duplicate, Delete, a Hold duration slider (0 to 12, badged like 3x), plus background and foreground checkboxes, badged BG and FG, for cels that sit under or over everything instead of taking a turn. Settings holds Loop, Ping-pong, One shot, Frames per second (1 to 60, default 12) and Onion skin frames (0 to 6).

14Saving and resolution

Your canvas saves itself. Pause for about 2.5 seconds and it commits; keep drawing without a break and it still commits at least every 8 seconds, so a two hour session is never one unsaved lump. There is a Save button too (it reads Saving…, then Saved) if you want the reassurance. Closing saves first, and if that save fails the editor simply stays open rather than eating your work. Two things get stored: a layered stroke log, which is your real document, and a flattened composite, which is what readers see. Autosave bakes the composite as well, so readers get your art without you lifting a finger. That composite counts against your studio's storage. Unlike Procreate, there is no layer limit and no canvas size limit.

15Talking it over

You are not drawing in a silo. Every asset, the canvas included, carries the same docked shelf: a slim tab rail down the right edge with Tasks, Member chat and Notes. Click a tab and a panel slides out over your work, click it again to tuck it away.

Member chat is the team conversation for this one asset. Everyone working on it is there automatically (its empty state literally says Start the member chat), and anything that comes up which actually needs doing can be turned into a task without leaving the page. So you answer your editor, pick up the next task, and keep drawing, all without switching windows. Procreate has nothing like this, because Procreate has no editor waiting on page 14. You do.

Coming from Procreate?