Pencil and Eraser

Pencil

Use Pencil for freehand drawing. Work at 1 px for precise contours and corrections, or use a larger tip to paint broad areas.

Select Pencil or press B. With Mode > Paint (the default), choose a size, Round or Square tip, and opacity in the context bar. Over the canvas, Ctrl+mouse wheel changes the size of standard Pencil/Eraser tips from 1 to 128 px. Custom tips use the size steps described below. Increasing a tool above 1 px turns off its Pixel-Perfect option.

Pixelithra remembers the Pencil and Eraser settings separately between launches, along with the active brush, collection, and foreground and background colors.

A fully transparent foreground or background color erases in Paint mode with the corresponding mouse button, using your Pencil tip, size and opacity. Hold Alt and click a transparent image pixel to pick it: left sets foreground, right sets background. Click the Transparent checkerboard beside Opacity in the color chooser, or use the permanent first checkerboard swatch in Palette: left-click for foreground, right-click for background. The opacity control remains available for partial transparency. Holding E still uses the temporary eraser without changing either drawing color. Palette-step Shading keeps its own behavior.

To adjust size without a mouse wheel, hold Ctrl+Alt and drag left/right on the canvas. Left decreases size; right increases it.

The brush outline follows the pointer, while painted pixels stay aligned to the image grid. To show only the outline aligned to the pixel grid, enable Align brush cursor in the context bar. You can also enable Edit > Preferences… > Editing > Brush cursor > Snap to pixels, then choose Apply. This shared Pencil/Eraser display option is off by default, is remembered between launches, and does not change strokes.

Custom brush presets

Open Brush in the Pencil context bar to choose a saved preset from the current collection, using the same tip previews and names shown in the Brushes panel. The menu lists Standard followed by that collection’s tips. Changing collections only browses tips; it keeps your active brush until you select another. To make a preset from artwork, select up to 128 × 128 pixels on a Pixels layer, then choose New brush from selection… from that menu. You can also choose Import PNG / GBR…. Name the preset in the dialog, then create it or choose a file. The menu also lets you rename and delete the selected preset. Presets are stored locally apart from documents; painted strokes remain ordinary raster pixels. A preset uses the current foreground or background color by default, with the tip image providing transparency. Enable Use original colors to paint with the PNG or selection colors instead. Size and opacity remain adjustable in the context bar.

Custom tips keep their original pixel pattern when enlarged. Size measures the longer side: a 5 px tip supports 5, 10, 15 px and so on, up to 125 px within the 128 px limit. The native size is the minimum. Typing a value rounds it to the nearest supported size; dragging the field, Ctrl+mouse wheel and Ctrl+Alt+drag move one scale at a time. Both dimensions grow by the same factor, with each source pixel becoming a square block. The cursor shows the tip’s width and height around its center. Standard tips keep 1 px increments.

The Brushes panel between Color/Palette and Layers shows saved tips as thumbnails; its options menu also provides create, import and manage actions. The context bar remains a quick way to switch tips while drawing. Click a tip or Standard in the Brushes panel to select it and activate Pencil. Standard is the first tile in the tip grid, marked with the Pencil icon; hover it for its name and help. The accent border marks the selected tip. Selecting Standard returns to the round or square tip. Changing tips keeps the current Paint/Shading mode. Finish an active stroke or transformation first.

Draw with a graphics tablet

Pressure is off by default. Use Edit > Preferences > Graphics tablet to enable size or opacity independently. Enable Windows Ink in your PC tablet’s driver first.

With size pressure enabled, the context-bar size is the maximum diameter and light contact produces smaller, whole-pixel marks. Use a maximum of 1 px to retain 1 px Pixel-Perfect behavior. Larger variable-width strokes do not apply L-corner correction. Custom tips use whole-number scales and never shrink below their native size, including with light pressure. At native size, pressure cannot make the tip smaller; choose a larger size to vary its scale while drawing. Opacity pressure can introduce semi-transparent pixels; leave it off when your palette needs fully opaque marks. Opacity applies once to each covered pixel within a stroke, without airbrush-style buildup while holding still.

These settings work in the docked workspace and Free Canvas. They leave editable shapes and palette-step Shading unchanged. Devices without pressure data use the fixed brush settings. See Preferences for driver requirements and limits.

Brush collections

Group tips into collections, such as foliage, stone or small effects.

In the Brushes panel, choose a collection above the tip thumbnails. Starter provides six editable CC0 tips: Cross, Diamond, Slash, Grain, Cluster and Spark. Existing presets are kept in My brushes. Hover a tip to see its enlarged imprint, native dimensions and a few separated stamps at 100% opacity. With nonzero spacing, a second example shows the actual repetition and its preview size. The previews show repeated stamps. They do not make the tip a seamless pattern.

Open Brush options to create or edit a collection. Give it a name and optional author/license credits. Only empty collections can be deleted. Select a tip and choose Move or duplicate brush…, then choose Move or Duplicate under Action, choose the destination collection, then confirm with the matching primary button. Conflicting imported names receive a numbered suffix; existing brushes are kept. The local library holds up to 32 collections and 128 tips in total.

Repeat a texture or motif

Stamp leaves, grains or other small motifs with a custom tip. Click for one imprint. Set Spacing beside the context-bar brush selector, then drag to repeat the mark. In Free Canvas, use the same control beneath the floating Brushes grid instead; the normal dock stays dedicated to choosing tips.

100% places centers one current brush diameter apart.
150% leaves room between most motifs; 200% uses two diameters.
0% restores continuous drawing. The maximum is 1000%.

Spacing follows traveled distance, not drawing speed or time held down. Stopping the pointer adds no marks, and release adds no extra endpoint stamp. Positions and sizes remain on the pixel grid. Pressure can vary size and opacity if you have enabled those options in Preferences.

Spacing is saved with each tip. New PNG and selection tips start at 100%; Starter tips use 150%. Choose 0% for continuous drawing.

Import and export tips

Choose Import PNG / GBR… and name the tip. PNG uses image alpha as its mask; enable Use original colors in the import dialog to retain its colors. GBR v2 determines its own type: grayscale coverage or RGBA color, and imports its spacing. PNG stores the tip image and starts with 100% spacing. Hard pixel edges is on by default: imported alpha below 128 becomes transparent, and alpha of 128 or above becomes opaque. Disable it to keep semitransparency. This changes only the imported copy; RGB colors are retained. Each tip must fit within 128 × 128 px; individual input files are limited to 8 MB.

Select a tip, open Brush options, and choose Export brush PNG… or Export brush GBR…. PNG preserves image pixels and transparency but cannot store the preset’s mask/color choice. GBR exports foreground-mask tips as grayscale coverage, and original-color tips as RGBA. Spacing is imported and exported, converting between GBR’s width-based percentage and Pixelithra’s maximum-dimension basis. PNG exchanges the image only. ABR and Krita presets are unsupported. External brush engines may repeat marks differently.

Choose Export collection ZIP…, check the author and license, then choose a file. The ZIP preserves tip names, mask/color choices, spacing and collection credits. Size, opacity and other current Pencil settings are not part of the collection.

Choose Import collection ZIP… to add someone else’s collection. Disable Hard pixel edges if you need an exact alpha round trip; its default conversion also applies to ZIP tips. A plain ZIP of PNG/GBR tips also works, using its filename as the collection name; PNG tips start in foreground-mask mode. ZIPs are limited to 8 MB compressed and expanded, with at most 128 tips and 1 MB per image entry. Unsupported or invalid contents are rejected together. Nothing overwrites an existing collection.

The collection format is specific to Pixelithra. You can exchange its PNG/GBR tips separately with other editors, but they may paint differently there. Check the collection’s license before redistributing it.

For palette-based shading of existing pixels, see Palette shading. The inputs below describe Paint mode. With Pencil active, press D for Normal (Paint) or S for Shading without changing the selected shade sequence. These keys and the tool selection keys can be changed in Edit > Preferences… > Shortcuts; the keys below are defaults.

Input	Result
Left-click or drag	Paint with foreground color
Right-click or drag	Paint with background color
Hold Space and left-drag	Pan
Hold E, then draw	Erase temporarily using Pencil settings
Tap E without drawing	Select the independent Eraser tool
Hold Alt and click or drag	Temporarily sample a canvas color; left for foreground, right for background

Temporary erasing keeps the Pencil’s size, shape, opacity, Pixel-Perfect setting, and symmetry. Release E to resume painting. A correction remains an erasing stroke until you release the mouse, even if you release E first.

A small eraser indicator appears beside the cursor during temporary erasing. Release Alt to resume Pencil. Sampling does not change the artwork or undo history.

Eraser

Select Eraser in the rail or briefly press E. Drag to remove pixels. Eraser has independent tip and opacity settings; selecting it does not overwrite your Pencil settings. Press B to return.

Undo and selection

A finished painting or erasing gesture is one history edit. Press Ctrl+Z to undo, and Ctrl+Shift+Z or Ctrl+Y to redo.

Drawing respects the active selection and layer locks. For clean single-pixel contours and mirrored drawing, see drawing options.