The canvas
Sketching and shapes
Draw on the canvas with real pressure, box things out with rectangles and lines, and hand a drawing to a model.
Sketch strokes carry pressure. The engine reads it off the pointer event, so a pen gives you a stroke that thins and swells the way a pen should, and a mouse gives you an even line without complaining about it. A fast gesture comes out tapered rather than as a polygon with visible corners. ## Drawing Pick the sketch tool from the bottom toolbar and draw. Strokes land on the canvas as objects, so they move, scale and delete like anything else. Two uses, and they want different habits: - **Marking up.** Draw over the top of an image to say what you mean. A circle round the wrong bit and an arrow are faster than a paragraph, and they land in the same place the work is. - **Drawing something new.** Start on empty canvas when a rough shape is the fastest way to explain a form you cannot describe. ## Shapes Three primitives: **rectangle**, **ellipse** and **line**. Drag one out from the bottom toolbar; a size pill follows the drag so you can hit a dimension. They are deliberately plain. Shapes here are for blocking out and pointing at, not for illustration, and anything more expressive is either a sketch stroke or a vector. :::tip[Shapes versus vectors] A rectangle is canvas furniture. A vector is artwork with editable paths that scales losslessly and can be exploded into parts. If it needs to end up in the deliverable, you want a [vector](/docs/using-plnty/what-you-can-make/vectors/). ::: ## Handing a drawing to a model A sketch is an input in its own right. Several tools take a drawing as their starting point and treat the geometry as instruction: - **sketch-tool** turns what you draw into a rendered image - **plnty-baloons** re-renders your outline as an inflated foil balloon, then turns that into a textured 3D mesh - **seedance-director** takes a freehand path drawn over a hero image and reads it as camera and subject motion The seedance case shows what a drawing is for here. The path you draw never reaches the video model. It feeds a vision model inside the card, which translates your geometry into motion words and writes the prompt from them. You then edit that prompt before running. :::note[The drawing is the brief, not the frame] That indirection is deliberate. A hand-drawn line is a precise way to say "the camera goes here, then here", and a terrible thing to feed a model that expects a clean image. Translating it into words keeps the precision and drops the noise. :::Sketch strokes carry pressure. The engine reads it off the pointer event, so a pen gives you a stroke that thins and swells the way a pen should, and a mouse gives you an even line without complaining about it.
A fast gesture comes out tapered rather than as a polygon with visible corners.
Drawing
Section titled “Drawing”Pick the sketch tool from the bottom toolbar and draw. Strokes land on the canvas as objects, so they move, scale and delete like anything else.
Two uses, and they want different habits:
- Marking up. Draw over the top of an image to say what you mean. A circle round the wrong bit and an arrow are faster than a paragraph, and they land in the same place the work is.
- Drawing something new. Start on empty canvas when a rough shape is the fastest way to explain a form you cannot describe.
Shapes
Section titled “Shapes”Three primitives: rectangle, ellipse and line. Drag one out from the bottom toolbar; a size pill follows the drag so you can hit a dimension.
They are deliberately plain. Shapes here are for blocking out and pointing at, not for illustration, and anything more expressive is either a sketch stroke or a vector.
Handing a drawing to a model
Section titled “Handing a drawing to a model”A sketch is an input in its own right. Several tools take a drawing as their starting point and treat the geometry as instruction:
- sketch-tool turns what you draw into a rendered image
- plnty-baloons re-renders your outline as an inflated foil balloon, then turns that into a textured 3D mesh
- seedance-director takes a freehand path drawn over a hero image and reads it as camera and subject motion
The seedance case shows what a drawing is for here. The path you draw never reaches the video model. It feeds a vision model inside the card, which translates your geometry into motion words and writes the prompt from them. You then edit that prompt before running.