Smoother lines with the stroke stabiliser in Paint by Zaweba

Shaky hands, a slippery tablet or a mouse all leave lines that wobble. Inkers and letterers deal with it by making the brush lag behind the pen a little, so small tremors average out before they reach the canvas. Paint by Zaweba builds this in as the stroke stabiliser, with five modes.

The setting is per tool, so you can keep a heavily stabilised inking brush and a free, unstabilised sketching tool at the same time without changing settings every time you switch.

The five modes

None is what it sounds like: the stroke follows the pen exactly. Use it for loose sketching, texture and anything where a bit of wobble is welcome.

Basic is the pulled string method. Picture the brush tied to your pen by a short piece of string. While the pen is within the string's length of the brush, nothing moves; once the pen pulls the string tight, the brush follows. Little jitters never get far enough to tug it. This gives very clean curves and corners you can control, and it is a favourite for lettering.

Weighted gives the brush a sense of mass, so it follows the pen smoothly rather than snapping to every twitch. Strokes come out flowing, with fewer sharp kinks, which suits long confident lines in illustration.

Stabiliser averages the pen's movement. It has a delay distance, an averaging setting and a finish line option. The finish line option lets the stroke catch up to where the pen lifted, so the line ends where you meant it to rather than short of the mark. This is the mode for clean inking of long smooth lines.

Pixel art works in whole pixels and avoids doubled corners, the L-shaped clumps where a diagonal line steps one pixel too many. It is meant for low resolution sprite and icon work, where every pixel shows.

What you see on the canvas

When a stabiliser is active, Paint by Zaweba draws a lag line between the pen and the point where paint is going down, and a dead-zone circle showing how far you can move before the brush follows. These guides make the behaviour easy to learn. If the line feels sluggish, you can see exactly how far behind it is running, and adjust.

Choosing settings

Start low. A small amount of stabilisation removes jitter without making the brush feel disconnected. Too much makes it hard to draw tight curves and small details, because the brush cuts every corner.

Match the mode to the job. Lettering likes Basic, because you can stop, pivot and carry on to make sharp corners. Long curves in character art like Weighted or Stabiliser. Pixel art should always use the Pixel art mode.

Remember the finish line option on Stabiliser. Without it, a heavily stabilised stroke can stop short of where you lifted the pen, which is maddening when you're trying to close a shape for a fill later.

Working with the rest of the brush engine

The stabiliser shapes the path of the stroke; the brush engine decides how the paint lands. Your brush tip and its settings still apply as normal. A tool preset is a good way to save a favourite combination of tool options and brush as one named item, so a clean inking setup is one click away.

For truly straight lines, ellipses and perspective, the Painting Guides tool is the better answer. Guides snap the stroke to a ruler, ellipse or perspective shape, while the stabiliser only smooths freehand movement. The two work well together: a guide for structure, a stabilised brush for everything in between.

Stabilisation is about confidence, not correction. It won't fix a line you didn't mean to draw, but it will let the one you did mean come out clean, which is all most people need from a digital pen.