The canvas

The canvas is where the drawing happens. It holds one frame at a time, with the ghosts of its neighbours showing through underneath.

Tools

There are three tools, in the rail down the left edge.

The eraser removes whole strokes

This is the one thing about the workshop that surprises people. The eraser is not a rubber that grinds away pixels. It deletes an entire stroke the moment you touch it, the way an undo would.

Drag across several strokes to remove all of them in one go. If you want to remove only part of a line, the answer is usually to undo back to before you drew it, or to draw the line as several shorter strokes in the first place.

Select

With the select tool active, click a stroke to pick it up. Drag to move it, or use the handles to scale and rotate. Del removes what you have selected, and Esc deselects.

Strokes are only selectable while the select tool is active, so you cannot knock a line out of place while drawing.

Brush size

Four sizes are available: 4, 8, 16, and 32. These are measured in canvas units, not screen pixels, which means a size 8 brush lays down the same line whether you are zoomed out to fit the page or zoomed right in on a detail.

The brush cursor is a ring showing the exact size of the stroke you are about to make, scaled to your current zoom.

Pressure

If you draw with a stylus, Flipghost reads its pressure and varies the width of the line accordingly. Press harder for a thicker stroke, ease off for a thinner one. This is what a tablet and a pen buy you over a mouse.

With a mouse or a fingertip there is no pressure to read, so the width is inferred from how fast you are drawing instead. Quick strokes taper, slow ones stay full width. The result is closer to a real line than a uniform one, but a pen is still better.

Strokes are also smoothed as you draw, which takes the jitter out of a line without flattening the shape you intended.

Colour

The swatch below the tools opens a colour picker. Pick visually, or type a hex value directly. The default is a near black rather than a pure one, because pure black tends to look harsh against white paper.

Zoom

You can also hold Ctrl and scroll. The controls sit in the bottom right of the canvas, and the percentage between them is a button: click it to fit the canvas back into view.

Zoom ranges from a quarter of the fitted size up to eight times it. The percentage shown is the real scale between canvas pixels and screen pixels, so on a large canvas fitted to a small window it will read well under 100 percent.

Canvas size

The size selector sits in the header. Seven presets are available:

The size you pick is the resolution you export at, so choose it for where the loop is going. Square for a feed, landscape for video, portrait for a phone screen.

Undo

Ctrl Z undoes, and Ctrl Shift Z redoes. History runs up to 50 steps.

Undo covers everything you do to the animation, not just drawing. Strokes, a cleared frame, and frames added, duplicated, reordered, or deleted all step back the same way.

If the edit you are undoing happened on another frame, undo takes you to that frame first, so you always see what changed rather than having a drawing altered out of view.