Shapes and drawing
Press D to draw freehand anywhere on a canvas. Shapes are proper cards — rectangle, ellipse, line, arrow, diamond, triangle, hexagon and star — with stroke, fill, width and dash controls. There is also a full-screen sketch pad for a bigger surface, and an art canvas card for a drawing that belongs to the board as a movable object.
Four different things that all involve making marks, for four different situations.
Free-draw
Press D. Draw anywhere — over cards, between them, across the whole board.
Strokes live on the board's own drawing layer. They do not attach to a card, so moving a card does not drag your annotation with it. This is the right behaviour for circling three images and writing "these" beside them, and the wrong behaviour if you wanted the mark to belong to one image — use an art canvas for that.
The eraser removes whole strokes rather than parts of them. Clear all drawings in the canvas right-click menu wipes the layer.
Shapes
From the rail's + menu → Tools → Shape.
Eight kinds: rectangle, ellipse, line, arrow, diamond, triangle, hexagon and star. Each is a real card, so it moves, resizes, layers, groups and gets tagged like anything else.
Per-shape controls: stroke colour, fill colour, stroke width, and solid or dashed. Settings → Defaults sets what new shapes start with, so you are not restyling every one.
Shapes are the tool for boxing off regions of a board, drawing a rough frame, or building a simple diagram. For connecting two specific cards, use an arrow instead — arrows anchor to cards and stay attached when things move.
Shapes have no title text. To label one, put a note on top of it, or wrap the area in a group, which does have a name.
The sketch pad
The rail's + → Tools → Draw also offers a full-screen sketch pad: an overlay covering the whole viewport, with the same stroke behaviour as inline drawing but without having to fight for canvas space.
Useful for a quick diagram you want to think through at size before placing.
Art canvas
An art canvas is a card with a drawing surface inside it. Unlike free-draw, it has edges, and it behaves like every other card — move it, resize it, group it, tag it, put it in a grid cell.
Reach for it when the drawing is a thing on the board rather than an annotation over the board.
Colours
Everything here shares one colour picker: saturation-value pad, hue slider, hex field, presets, an eyedropper, and the swatches from any palette cards on the board.
Recently used colours are remembered, so a board built in one palette stays in that palette without effort.
Tablets and styluses
Pointer handling treats stylus, finger and mouse the same. Drawing gestures are guarded so the canvas will not start panning halfway through a stroke, which is the failure that makes drawing on a touch device unusable.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between free-draw and an art canvas?
Free-draw strokes sit on the board's own drawing layer and do not move when you move cards. An art canvas is a card with its own bounded drawing surface, so it moves, resizes and can be grouped like anything else.
How do I erase just part of a stroke?
You cannot. The eraser removes whole strokes. Annotating quickly is the use case, and partial erasing was consistently slower than redrawing.
Can I draw with a stylus on a tablet?
Yes. Pointer input is handled the same for stylus, finger and mouse, and the canvas will not pan out from under you mid-stroke.
Machine-readable: /docs/canvas/shapes-and-drawing.md · /llms.txt