Freeform

A Freeform drawing holds strokes: paint freehand with Pencil, Spray, Charcoal or Airbrush, or click out a Connector — a line whose corners you place click by click, each one marked with a dot, a triangle, a star or an arrowhead.

Draw. Pressing Freeform in the Add menu puts an empty drawing down, selected, with all of its menus along the bottom — Freeform, Effects, Border and Transform — and you are drawing straight away. There is no box around the drawing while you draw: every press is a stroke into it, anywhere, even over other things, and the drawing grows to hold it. The right end of the Freeform menu reads Drawing, with an Exit to tap when you are done. Exit, Escape, opening another of the drawing's menus or closing its menu all stop drawing: a drawing with strokes stays selected, with its box back — drag its border to move it, its handles to resize it, and the rotate button above it to turn it — while an empty one you never drew in is removed.

Draw into it again. Selecting a drawing later is an ordinary selection. To carry on drawing into it, press the brush you want in its Freeform menu, Draw at the menu's right end, or Enter, and you are drawing again. On a video that first moves the playhead into the drawing's time if it is not showing. A locked drawing, one following something in the picture and one tilted in perspective take no strokes, so a brush press does not start drawing there, and the menu says why beside its state (Locked, Following or Tilted).

Work on one stroke, or all of them. The right end of the Freeform menu shows the drawing's state and lets you change it. With the whole drawing selected it reads Whole drawing, with Draw and Select all beneath, and the menu sets your next stroke. Click a stroke to work on that stroke alone: the menu reads Stroke 2 of 5, the stroke is outlined so you can see which one it is, every setting — its brush, width, style and colour — changes just that stroke, and under the line are Remove, Copy, which puts a copy of the stroke just beside it, and the arrows that move the stroke in front of or behind the others (an arrow is dimmed when the stroke is already at that end). Click another stroke to switch to it, and click off the strokes, or press Escape, to go back to the whole drawing. Select all reads All strokes and changes every stroke at once, and your next stroke matches them.

The menu's four rows. The first is the brushes, each shown as a straight line in its own look. The second is the line's Style (solid, dashed, dotted or dash-dot) with its Ends (round or square dashes and dots), Dash and Gap, then Picture — what a stamping brush stamps in place of its own tip: Brush tip, a ready-made picture, or one of your own from Image gallery, Emoji / icon / shape or Upload image, the same picker a weather look's Sprite uses. The third is a Connector's Curve — with how Round its corners are, beside the corner styles once you pick rounded — its Points and their Size. The last is Stroke, the line's width, on the left and the colours on the right. Press a setting and its control opens in its place while the others shrink to their names, and its ✕ goes back. A setting the brush can't use stays where it is, dimmed — Spray, Charcoal and Airbrush stamp rather than draw a line, so they have Picture and no Style, the Pencil and Connector the other way round, and only a Connector has Curve and Points — so the menu stays the same whichever brush you pick.

The brush's Recipe. The settings button, last on the bottom row of the menu's right-hand container, opens the Recipe of the brush in use in the four rows' place — the named stroke's, every stroke's under Select all, or your next stroke's — and pressing it again puts it away. Its settings are listed on the Brush page; hover over one, or hold a finger still on it, to read what it does. They stand in three sections. Stamps is how a stamping brush puts its marks down: how far apart they stand, how many land at each point, how far they scatter, whether they Turn — not at all, at random, or Along the line, so a picture brush lays footprints, stitches or arrows that follow the path — how see-through they are and which random pattern they follow; the Pencil and a Connector draw a line rather than stamps, so on them these stand dimmed. Taper grows or thins the line and fades it from one end to the other — along its length, a connector's included, or by how hard the pen pressed or how fast it moved, picked under Changes with. Lands is Over, inking over the strokes drawn before it, or Erase: any brush can erase, taking ink away only where it passes inside its own drawing and never from anything beneath the drawing. Erasing removes no stroke, so an erased drawing can still be worked on stroke by stroke.

Drawing with a pen. Every stroke you draw keeps how hard the pen pressed, how far it leaned and when it passed each point, so a Taper that changes with Pressure draws a line thicker or more solid where you press harder, and one that changes with Speed follows how fast you drew. Nothing changes until you set a taper, so a line drawn with a mouse or a finger looks as it always has; a mouse presses evenly, so on its strokes a taper that changes with pressure stands dimmed, as a pressure or speed taper does on a Connector, whose corners are placed rather than drawn.

Connectors. Every stroke lands in the same drawing and undoes on its own. A Connector is one more stroke: your first click starts it and your second lands it in the drawing you are in, beside anything you have painted; every click after that extends the line from the last corner, and Escape ends it, so the next click starts a new one. To work on a connector's points, click that stroke — a drawing that is just one connector needs no choosing — and its points appear as small blue rings. Drag one to move it; pick one and its buttons stand in a small container under the drawing — a plus to add a point past that end and an arrow to put an arrowhead on it (both on an end point), and a bin to delete the point. Escape steps back out one level at a time: from its points, to the connector, to nothing selected.

An empty drawing goes. A drawing you leave with nothing drawn in it and nothing changed in its menus is removed when you move on, leaving nothing in your undo history. Change it in Effects, Border or Transform and it stays. Its opacity is in its Transform menu. Draw past a cropped drawing's edge and its crop widens to show the new stroke.

Change a stroke's brush at any time — including between a painted stroke and a Connector. Painted strokes are thinned down to their corners on the way to a Connector so you get a handful of points rather than hundreds, and both shapes are kept: switch back and the stroke returns exactly as you drew it.

Where you can use a drawing

• Image — Groups
• Video — Groups
• Document — Groups

What you can do with a drawing you made

Once a drawing holds a stroke, a star at the end of the colour row in its Freeform menu stars the drawing whole:

Star · Copy