Brush Tool

The Brush tool is Lumi’s core painting instrument: a responsive, expressive way to draw, paint, shade, texture, and build marks directly on the canvas. It is designed to feel immediate while still giving artists room to shape how a stroke behaves.

Rather than being a single fixed brush, it acts as a painting system. Brush shape, texture, movement, pressure, timing, and colour can all contribute to the final mark, making it suitable for clean line work, soft painting, dry media effects, calligraphic strokes, scattered textures, and multi-headed brush formations.

Expressive brush marks

Brushes can be based on bitmap stamps, procedural shapes, or frame-based animated sources. This allows a stroke to range from a simple soft round mark to a richly textured or evolving brush head. The same painting engine can support precise drawing, painterly buildup, decorative marks, and natural-media-style breakup.

When a brush becomes visually complex, the preview can remain simplified so painting stays responsive and easy to read.

Dynamics and input response

The Brush tool responds to live input such as stylus pressure, speed, direction, tilt, and other controller values. These signals can influence the visible stroke in many ways: thickness, opacity, angle, texture response, colour behaviour, spacing, and other qualities can all change as the hand moves.

This makes the Brush feel less like a stamped pattern and more like a physical drawing instrument. A light touch can produce delicate marks, faster motion can open up texture or shape, and direction-sensitive behaviour can help strokes follow the gesture of the hand.

Stroke behaviour

Strokes can be direct and immediate, or they can be assisted by smoothing and stabilization. These features help reduce unwanted jitter, soften abrupt changes, and make longer movements feel more controlled without removing the character of the artist’s input.

The Brush also supports different approaches to paint buildup. It can behave like a continuous stroke, accumulate repeated dabs, or emit marks over time while the pointer is held in place. This flexibility makes it useful for both deliberate line work and slower tonal construction.

For calligraphic or ink-like marks, the Brush can generate a more continuous shaped stroke rather than relying only on repeated stamps. This produces flowing, ribbon-like forms that respond naturally to gesture and speed.

Colour and texture

Brush strokes can use the active paint colour, respond to gradients, or vary colour through dynamics. Texture handling lets a brush shift between solid coverage and broken, surface-skimming marks, which is useful for dry brush effects, grain, and expressive shading.

Because colour and texture can be part of the same dynamic system as shape and opacity, a single stroke can evolve as it moves across the canvas instead of remaining visually uniform.

Brush heads and formations

The Brush tool can paint with more than one head at a time. Multiple heads can be arranged around the stroke path to create paired marks, fanned strokes, bristle-like behaviour, spray patterns, or broad textured formations.

These heads can follow the direction of travel, vary from one another, and scatter in ways that make the stroke feel organic rather than mechanically repeated. This is especially useful for natural media brushes, decorative strokes, foliage, fur, hatching, and other marks that benefit from controlled irregularity.

Animation and variation

Animated brush sources can change frame as a stroke progresses, giving brushes a sense of movement and variety. Randomisation and per-stroke variation can keep repeated marks from looking identical, while stable seeding can preserve a consistent character when repeatability is needed.

These behaviours are useful for brushes that should feel alive: bristles shifting through a stroke, textured stamps changing subtly over time, or multi-head tools where each head has its own personality.

Artist-focused workflow

The Brush tool is organised so common painting decisions stay close at hand, while less frequent setup choices remain out of the way. The intent is to keep the tool approachable during painting while still supporting deep customisation for brush design.

Overall, the Brush is built to cover both everyday painting and specialised mark-making: quick sketching, polished illustration, textured rendering, expressive ink work, and complex procedural brush effects all share the same flexible foundation.