Shapes and drawing

Press D to draw freehand anywhere on a canvas. Four brushes — pen, marker, highlighter and pencil — and a stylus's pressure varies the line. 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 with layers and storyboard frame formats, and an art canvas card for a drawing that belongs to the board as a movable object.

Updated August 27, 2026

Four different things that all involve making marks, for four different situations.

Free-draw

Press D. On a phone or tablet the draw tool is on the rail itself, and in the add sheet. 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.

Line thickness is what you see in the picker at the moment you draw, whatever the zoom, and the stroke then scales with the board like everything else.

Brushes

Each is previewed in the picker as the stroke it actually draws.

The eraser

Drag it across a stroke and the stroke is cut where you crossed it — the surviving pieces stay. You can rub out the middle of a line without losing its ends. The eraser has its own size, separate from the pen's, and a ring shows how wide it is as you go. A swipe over empty space does nothing at all, so it costs no undo step.

Clear all drawings in the canvas right-click menu wipes the whole layer.

Lasso

Switch the brush to Lasso and circle some strokes to select them. A stroke is taken when most of it falls inside the loop. Clusters hands you to the select tool with them selected, so you can move, scale, recolour or delete the group straight away — deleting shows an undo toast like everything else.

On a touch device the lasso is the only way to select strokes: a one-finger drag with the select tool pans the board, so the rubber-band marquee is mouse and stylus only.

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 → Card 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

Canvas in the draw options opens a full-screen sketch pad: an overlay covering the whole viewport, with the same brushes and pressure as inline drawing but without having to fight for canvas space. It is where to do real drawing rather than annotation. Pressing Add to canvas places the result as an art canvas card.

Frame formats

A new sketch starts as a 16:9 frame, because drawing out shots for a shot list is what people mostly open it to do. 2.39:1, 4:3, 1:1 and 9:16 are alongside it. The format is offered while the frame is still empty — nothing rescales, so changing it later would crop what you had drawn.

Layers

Up to eight. Block a shot out loosely on one, ink over the top on another, then hide the rough. Each layer can be shown, hidden, reordered or deleted, and drawing and erasing act on the layer you have selected. Adding, hiding, reordering and deleting are all undoable.

A sketch that only ever used one layer is stored exactly as it was before layers existed, and an art canvas drawn before them opens as "Layer 1" with its drawing intact.

Undo and keys

The pad has its own undo — ⌘Z / ⌘⇧Z, plus toolbar buttons — covering pen strokes, eraser passes, bucket fills, Clear and every layer change. While the pad is open, keys apply to the sketch only; nothing you press can affect the board behind it. The whole session lands on the board as a single undo step.

On a phone or tablet

The pad goes edge to edge, with two rows of chrome that never scroll: close, undo, redo and Add on the top row, and the pen, eraser, bucket, a chip showing your current colour and width, Layers and an overflow button on the second. Layers carries its count, so how many you have and which one you are on is answerable without opening anything.

While the frame is still empty a third row offers the frame formats directly — the one choice that cannot be revisited later. It disappears with your first stroke and gives the space back.

The brushes, the full colour strip and the sizes are behind the chip; Clear and Cancel are behind the overflow button. Pinch to zoom into the frame and drag with two fingers to move around — a percentage chip in the corner resets it in one tap.

The board's own draw options get the same treatment on a phone: the sketch pad, undo, pen/eraser/lasso and a colour-and-width chip stay on the bar, and the brushes, colour strip and thickness picker sit one tap behind the chip.

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.

Drawing or erasing on an art canvas is one ⌘Z step per line or erase pass; editing one in the sketch pad saves the whole session as a single step.

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

A stylus is the best way to draw here. Pressure varies the width of the line, and the pen's sampling is built for a high-frequency stylus rather than fighting it.

Once Clusters has seen a stylus on a device, your finger switches to panning and only the stylus draws. This is what makes palm rejection work: a palm landing on the glass before the tip would otherwise win the race and own the stroke. It is the same behaviour as Procreate, GoodNotes and Freeform, it is announced the first time it happens, and there is a Draw with finger toggle in the draw options if you want both to mark.

Flipping a pen over to its eraser end erases, and the barrel button does too.

Two fingers always mean pinch-zoom, never a stroke — starting a pinch part-way through a line discards that line rather than smearing it across the board as the canvas moves underneath.

Machine-readable: /docs/canvas/shapes-and-drawing.md · /llms.txt
What changed and when: /changelog