Vector brush strokes and width profiles in Paint by Zaweba
Turn pen pressure into a width profile, apply taper or bulge presets, outline strokes and offset paths with round, miter or bevel joins in Paint by Zaweba.
A line with the same thickness all the way along looks mechanical. Hand lettering, inked outlines and calligraphic swashes get their life from the way the stroke swells and thins. The vector brush in Paint by Zaweba captures that from your pen: as you draw on a tablet, the pressure you press with becomes a width profile on the stroke, and the stroke itself stays a vector you can reshape later.
Alongside it, the Vector menu has three commands that help you shape and finish strokes: Width Profile, Outline Stroke and Offset Path.
Drawing with the vector brush
Draw as you would with any brush. Press harder where you want the line to fatten and lighten off where it should taper. Because the result is a path with a width profile rather than a trail of pixels, you can still move points, smooth curves and change the colour without redrawing. It suits outlines for illustrations, signatures cleaned up for a letterhead and the loose brush lettering that often goes on posters and packaging.
If you are working with a mouse, or your pressure came out uneven, you are not stuck. That is what the presets are for.
Width Profile presets
Vector > Width Profile applies a ready shape to any stroke, whether it came from the vector brush, the pen or a shape outline. The presets are taper, bulge, pinch and teardrop. Taper narrows towards the ends, like a brush lifting off the paper. Bulge swells in the middle, which is good for leaves and petals. Pinch does the reverse and narrows the middle, for a bow tie or an hourglass feel. Teardrop is fat at one end and fine at the other, the classic comma shape for swooshes and motion lines.
A good trick is to draw a whole set of lines with the pen, select them and give them the same profile. Decorative flourishes, hair strands or simple rain streaks then share a consistent style without each one being drawn by hand.
Outline Stroke
Strokes are handy while you are editing, but sometimes you need the stroke to become a filled shape. Outline Stroke does exactly that, turning the stroke, profile and all, into a shape with a fill. After that you can apply the boolean commands to it, fill it with a gradient, or give the new outline a stroke of its own for a two-tone look. It is also useful before exporting, so the thickness can never change if someone scales the file without scaling strokes.
Offset Path
Offset Path grows or shrinks a shape by a number of pixels you set. You choose round, miter or bevel joins for the corners. Round joins give soft, sticker-like outlines. Miter keeps sharp points, which suits angular lettering and geometric icons. Bevel clips the points off, a neat compromise on spiky shapes where miters would shoot out too far.
Its most common use is the cut line around a sticker or label: grow the artwork outline by a few pixels with round joins, put it on a layer underneath, and fill it white. A negative offset gives you an inner line for a stitched or inset border.
Mistakes to avoid with strokes and profiles
Applying a profile to a very short stroke can make it vanish into its own taper. Keep strong profiles for longer lines. With Offset Path, a big miter offset on a shape with sharp points can produce long spikes, so switch to round or bevel if the corners look wild. And remember that once you outline a stroke, the profile is baked into a shape, so keep a copy of the original stroke if you might want to change it.
Where it fits in Paint by Zaweba
These tools sit with the pen, the shape tools, the Corner tool and the boolean commands in the vector part of the app. Together they let you add crisp, scalable linework to photos and paintings in the same document, and everything can go out through the SVG export when you need it in another program.
