Sketchpad

A raster drawing plugin that aims to emulate the typical digital drawing experience with some inspiration from traditional sketching.

Quick Start

1. Install the plugin and enable it in Obsidian's Community plugins page.
2. Click the Sketchpad ribbon icon on the left sidebar to open a Sketchpad tab.
3. Click the New... button on the header to create a sketch file and start drawing.

Usage

Draw on a sketch file with 4 layers. Each layer is associated with its own drawing tool. If you pick a drawing tool, the layer linked with it automatically becomes active and vice versa. The layers and their associated tools are as follow:

• Paint layer - brush tool.
• Ink layer - pen tool.
• Sketch layer - pencil tool.
• Paper layer - base layer, can't be drawn on. Paper color is customizable.

Layer settings

• Blending mode: Normal, Multiply (except for paper layer)
• Layer opacity slider
• Visibility toggle

A grid overlay can be toggled on or off. The size, color, and opacity of the grid is customizable in the plugins's settings.

The layers can be reordered except for the Paper layer which always remains at the bottom of the stack.

Drawing tool settings

• Color: pick from a color picker that uses the Okhsl color space by Björn Ottosson.
• Size slider: 1-200 pixels
  • With optional custom pressure curve.
• Opacity slider
  • With optional custom pressure curve.
• Hardness slider
• Blending Mode: Normal, Replace Alpha, Compare Density

[!IMPORTANT] Enable Windows Ink to have pressure sensitivity on Windows devices.

Other tools

• Eraser: erase on the layer of the last active tool.
• Eyedropper: select color for the last active tool.
• Lasso: freehand select an area to modify it.
  • Rotate the selection by dragging the rotate handle.
  • Resize the selection by dragging the dragging the square handles in the middle of the edges.
  • Proportionally resize the selection by dragging the square handles on the corners.
• Hand tool: click and drag to pan the canvas.
• Zoom in/out tool: click to zoom once, click and drag left/right to zoom out/in.
  • You can also zoom by scroll wheel.
• Rotate tool: click and drag to rotate the canvas.

Features

• Create and draw on .ora files, an open file format for graphics editors created by OpenRaster.
  • Files created by this plugin can be opened by any application that supports .ora files such as Krita.
  • Each layer is a png image that can be accessed by simply unzipping the .ora file.
• Supports undo/redo up to 50 counts.
• Supports autosave in 5-30 minutes interval.
• Supports pointer/stroke prediction.
• Supports touch controls.
  • One-finger touch to pan.
  • Two-finger pinch to rotate, zoom, and pan.
  • Two-finger tap to undo.
  • Three-finger tap to redo.

[!IMPORTANT] Enabling Touch to draw in the settings will make the one-finger gesture draw instead of panning the canvas. All other touch gestures remain the same.

• Export any sketch file as a png image.
• Embed sketch files in notes with Wikilinks.
• Set custom keyboard shortcuts for tools and actions in Obsidian's hotkeys settings and the plugin's settings page.
• UI can be set to minimal or expanded.
• Left and right sidebars can be minimized and they can be moved in minimal UI mode.

Default Hotkeys

Tool	Default Hotkey
Pencil	P
Pen	N
Brush	B
Eraser	E
Hand tool	Space
Lasso	C
Rotate tool	R
Zoom in tool	Shift
Zoom out tool	Control
Eyedropper	Alt

Action	Default Hotkey
Open Sketchpad
Zoom in	Mouse Wheel Up
Zoom out	Mouse Wheel Down
Rotate counter-clockwise	A
Rotate clockwise	S
Decrease tool size	D
Increase tool size	F
Undo
Redo
New sketch file
Open sketch file
Save sketch file
Close sketch file
Fit sketch to view
Flip canvas horizontally
Flip canvas vertically