drawing with transparency stroke

[angelize]

one thing I have found with the custom brushes is that with all the improvements it is so easy to change colours on the fly, just tap your pen on the colourline! But now a new annoyance has crept up. Because the last stroke you draw is still selected it is easy to forget to deselect it and of course it changes colour too.

[handrawn]

Frances

are you saying that using sketch mode, as suggested by Phil, does not work?

[this is a button on the freehand tool infobar]

I am still in the process of trying to determine, for custom brushes, whether I need just this or autodeselect as well [if it works for custom brushes - this is set with Xareg on the blobs tab]
I am being rigorous about it so its taking time

Another Xareg blobs tab tweak you could make is to reduce 'end hit detect' to value 1 - this will mean that your nodes/points will need to be much closer to actually join

[angelize]

The sketch mode button keeps the lines from joining, but it does not deselect them. drawing a new line will deselect the previous one, but the last line you draw will be selected. When drawing or painting with a custom brush if you change colours on the fly by taping the colour on the colourline with the pen the last line you drew will still be selected and will change colour. If you remember to hit esc before you change colour it works great. (hmmm I wonder what I did with that rock)

The Xareg autodeselect doesn't work for brushes, at least not for me.

[handrawn]

you can't use the rock/stapler trick any more Frances, as that will reset your attributes to default all the time in XD6

I think autodeselect/sketchmode should be operable for custom brushes as well

this point is especially true with the change in ESC behaviour [insert thumbs down here]

I can suggest a [single!] tap, off-object, after each stroke as an alternative to pressing ESC [once!] but either way a big interuption to natural drawing flow

at root - I don't think Xara intended custom brushes for sketching/quick rapid strokes, which is a shame

[PhilM]

Sketch mode does work with custom brushes but Auto-deselect doesn't I'm afraid. That's not deliberate, just an oversight.

The way that colours work with selected and deselected objects is standard across all tools. Whether you're drawing a freehand line or drawing a rectangle, the object remains selected after you have created it deliberately so that you can change it's attributes or tweak it in another tool. That consistency is usually good.

A slight change to the way you work with lines & brushes might help: Don't try to set the colour before you draw the line - get into the habit of setting the colour afterwards. Arguably that's more natural because you are changing something you can see rather than trying to preset the appearance of something you can't yet see.

Is that any help?

Phil

[handrawn]

Hi Phil

thanks for the update

well actually if you are mimicing what you do when you draw non-digitally, having the color there as you draw is exactly what you have, not afterwards, and so is far more 'natural' - therefore I would argue the opposite to what you suggested


if autodeselect coud be added for custom brushes that would be great, and fix most, if not all, of the problems for me relevant to this thread

[handrawn]

another update

further tweaking in the registry - I can get to draw transparent strokes and pressure senstive too, just still no 'live drag' - still that is better than it was before ....

thanks again

[handrawn]

and today I can !

nothing to do with the live drag button which was on all the time, so maybe as a result of the update to version 6.1.1 - or just me not getting it right

pressure sensitive brushes with transparency are possible - worth the upgrade for me then...