Starting the program
Below is how the screen looks like when you start painting.
The black area is your painting, and below that is the tool panel, with all your commands and tools.
Key shortcuts
There are many key short cuts, described elsewhere. But a few are absolutely essential to get going.
| Key Shortcut | Meaning |
| SPACEBAR | Pressing the space-bar will hide or show the panel. Hiding the panel gives you more screen space to paint on. |
| u (lowercase) | Undo. Undo your change. Also called “Oops” on the panel. |
| U (uppercase) | Undo your undo (also known as Redo, or called “Unoops” on the panel) |
| + and – | Zoom in and out of the picture |
| cursor keys | Pan or scrolling around on the picture, when zoomed in. |
| J | Go to the spare picture or back to the main picture. |
Key concepts
Brush; You can grab any part of the screen, and start painting with it.
Oops; A funny way of saying “Undo”
Spare Screen; another picture where you can do draft work. And later copy back to your main picture. You do that by grabbing from the spare an area which is now a brush. And then press “J” to go back to your main picture, and use the free hand tool to stamp it where you want it.
Loading and Saving; Loading a picture is done by using the “upload” functionality of your browser. Saving, is done using the “download” functionality of your browser. To make it work more like a seamless desktop application, you can adjust your browser settings, like so: Go to settings in Chrome. Then go to “Advanced” and then to “Downloads”. There enable the “Ask where to save each file before downloading” option.
Background color; The “Background color”, is a “special” color that is selected either from the palette and the picture. It has special meaning.
- When grabbing a brush, the parts of the picture with the background color will be made transparent.
- When pressing the CLR, the picture will be erased and replaced with the background color.
Erasing; When using the paint tools, and using right click instead of left click, the painting will be done with the background color instead of the actual color. This is the same as erasing part of the picture.
Panel overview
The picture below shows the main areas of the panel.
More details can be found below.
Panel: 4 main menus
The 4 main menus File, Mode, View and Effect, work on the view or the whole picture. File is for loading / saving / resizing. Mode is for changing the way the painting tools work. View is changing the view of your picture (zoom, grid, stencil or guides). Effect is a list of operations that can be performed on the whole picture.
Panel: Quick button area
The quick button area, contains a quick access to clear the picture (CLR), zooming functions, and a toggle for the grid view.
Panel: Main tool area
The main tool area is divided in left and right. On the left side, you see the tools; solid draw, line draw, freehand draw, spraycan, square, rectangle, circle, oval, fill and magic fill. On the right hand side, buttons can appear to modify the behavior of the selected tool. For example: spray size can be chosen for the spray can tool.
Panel: Brush area
The brush area starts with the “Modify” menu. This contains operations that modify the current brush. Then there are the grab hands that allow you to grab a piece of the picture (transform it to a brush). Then there is 5 brushes you can select. Picture brush (the little stick men), pixel brush (brush of a single pixel), then; round, square and soft-round brush. And finally a brush resize slider button.
Panel: Palette and color bar
The palette and color bar contain the palette, and other color tools. On the left is the color indicator. It shows you what is the fill color, what is the background color, and the pen color. Either the fill color or the pen color is highlighted. This means, when choosing a color on the palette, this color will change.
Then there is the color sampler tool. After clicking on this, you move the mouse to a section on the picture, and click. And the current color (pen or fill), will be changed to the color of the pixel you selected. Right clicking on the picture will select your background color.
Then there is the 32 color palette. These colors can be clicked, to paint with that color. Right click is for selecting the background colour.
Then there are the Edit and Select buttons. With edit you can edit the palette. With Select you can select a predefined palette.
Panel: Information area
The information area shows you things like the size of your picture, the zoom level, and the position of the mouse cursor.