Elements & Tools
Drawing & Apple Pencil
The Draw tool turns the canvas into paper — with a twist: every stroke you lift becomes a regular element, so sketches can be moved, scaled, rotated and organized like everything else.
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Drawing basics
Press D (or the Draw tool) and just draw — with mouse, trackpad, finger or Apple Pencil. The popover offers:
- Nine colors from the visualOS palette.
- Four pen sizes — 2, 4, 8 and 16.
- An eraser that removes entire strokes it touches (strokes are objects, so there are no half-erased smudges).
Press Esc or V to get back to selecting — on iPhone/iPad, tap “Done” in the bottom bar.
Strokes are elements
Each stroke you complete becomes its own element: select it, move it, scale it up (it stays crisp — strokes are stored as geometry, not pixels), rotate it, group it with other strokes, connect arrows to it. A quick sketch can graduate into a proper diagram piece without redrawing.
Apple Pencil, properly
On iPad, drawing is tuned for the Pencil:
- Pressure affects the stroke, and input is sampled at the Pencil’s full 240 Hz for smooth curves.
- Streamline smoothing steadies wobbly lines without deadening them.
- Palm rejection: while the Pencil is down (and for a moment after), finger touches are ignored — rest your hand on the glass like on paper.
- Ink is never lost: even if iOS interrupts a stroke mid-way, the part you drew is kept.
Draw on top of images, notes or whole layouts — circles, underlines, margin scribbles. The annotations are separate elements, so you can move or delete them later without touching what’s underneath.