Pressure sensitivity in digital painting
If your drawing tablet or your stylus has a pressure sensitive tip, that is the single feature that makes digital painting feel like painting instead of coloring. Press lightly and the brush barely touches the canvas. Press harder and the stroke gets wider, darker, or more opaque. Nothing in a physical paint pot works that way, which is exactly why it is worth learning.
What pressure actually changes
In most programs pressure can drive two things at once: the size of the mark and how opaque it is. On a brush that is set to both, a light touch gives a fine, faint line and a heavy press gives a thick, solid one. That range is what lets you paint with one brush instead of twenty.
It also lets you do the thing paper does naturally: a line that starts thin, swells in the middle and fades at the end, because your hand did not press the same amount the whole way.
Test it in two minutes
- Open RobinPad and pick the round brush.
- Draw one straight line with almost no pressure.
- Draw a second line next to it, pressing harder as you go.
- Draw a third one with a single hard press from start to finish.
If the three lines look different, pressure is working. If they look the same, your device is not sending pressure, and it is worth checking the device settings before you blame the app. The technical chapter lists what the app expects from a stylus.
Tuning it so it feels right
The setting that decides how sensitive your brush is to pressure is usually called the pressure curve. A steeper curve means small changes in your hand produce big changes in the stroke. Beginners often want a gentler curve at first, because a sensitive brush makes fine lines hard.
Two habits help more than any setting:
- rest your wrist or forearm on the table so your hand does not float
- press with the side of the pencil rather than the tip when you want a thin, controlled line
If you have no stylus
You are not stuck. A mouse has no pressure, so you control the same things with sliders: size and opacity. It works, it just takes more attention, because you set a value by hand instead of by feeling.
Many people start that way and move to a tablet later, when they feel the difference. The brush chapter explains how to set size and opacity for a mouse, and the painting concepts chapter covers how the settings relate to each other.