The Drawing tool lets you sketch freehand strokes directly on the canvas — useful for annotating boards, circling ideas, drawing arrows by hand, or sketching out a quick diagram alongside your structured content.

Entering Drawing Mode

1. Open the drawing toolbar from the canvas controls
2. Pick a stroke color and width from the popover
3. Click and drag anywhere on the board to draw a stroke, including over other strokes, cards and images
4. Lift the cursor to finish a stroke; start a new drag for the next one
5. Click Save when you are done, or Discard to remove what you drew in this session

While the pen is active, every press draws: a tap leaves a dot. Hold Shift while you drag to draw a straight line.

While you draw, the rest of the board, including connectors, fades and cannot be clicked, so it is clear which strokes belong to this drawing, and the minimap, the zoom and undo bar and the AI button step aside (the drawing toolbar has its own undo). Your strokes still go over everything. Saving brings the board back.

Stroke Options

• Color: Pick from the palette or use the eye dropper to sample any color from your screen
• Width: Adjust the stroke thickness for fine notes or thick highlights
• Light/dark adaptation: Strokes render with mode-aware colors so they remain readable in both themes
• Highlighter: A see-through marker, wider than the pen: yellow unless you pick a colour. It sits under your pen strokes, so you can highlight over handwriting without hiding it

One Drawing, Many Strokes

Strokes you draw close together become one drawing, so a sketch moves, resizes and deletes as a single element. A stroke drawn far away from the others starts a separate drawing.

A drawing from an earlier session stays as it is when you draw next to it. To add to it, double-click it (or select it and click Edit drawing): new strokes near it join that drawing. While drawing, double-click a faded drawing to bring it into the session.

Editing Drawings

Click a drawing to select it, then use the edit overlay to change the color or width of all its strokes, move it around the canvas, or delete it. There are two erasers: the stroke eraser removes a whole stroke at a time, and the partial eraser rubs out only the part of a line under it. Undo (Cmd/Ctrl + Z) reverses your last stroke.

To hide a drawing, click the eye in its toolbar or right-click it and choose Hide drawing. Hidden drawings still show, faded, while you are drawing: double-click one to bring it into the session, pick the select tool, click it and click the eye again, or right-click it and choose Show drawing.

Drawings That Stick to Cards

Turn on the magnet in the drawing toolbar and a drawing you make on a card sticks to it: move the card and the drawing moves with it, so circles and notes on a storyboard frame stay where you put them. While you draw, a dashed outline shows the card the drawing will stick to. A card inside a wall counts as its own card, and a drawing follows its card into and out of frames. The magnet is remembered on your account, where it is also the Sticky Drawings switch under Settings › Configuration › Board, and only affects drawings you make while it is on; ones that already stick keep following their card after you turn it off.

With the magnet on, a stroke drawn on an image becomes part of the image, as if you had drawn it from the image's own Draw: it resizes and crops with the image, and the part of it beyond the image's edge is cut off. Drawings already stuck to an image become part of it the next time you open the board.

To stick a drawing you already made, right-click it and choose Stick to card; choose Unstick from card, or drag it off its card, to unstick it. On an image, Stick to card makes the drawing part of the image instead, so it has nothing to unstick: undo takes it back out. On a video, board, deck, document or file, a stuck drawing grows and shrinks with the card when you resize it or drop it into a wall. On a note, checklist, table or any other card whose text rearranges as it grows, the drawing keeps its size and its place from the card's top-left corner. Deleting a card deletes the drawings stuck to it, and undo brings them back together; copying or cutting a card takes its drawings along.

Drawing on Images

To mark up a picture, select the image and click Draw in its toolbar, or open the image full size and click Draw at the bottom. The image opens large and you draw straight onto it with the pen, the highlighter or either eraser; your colour and width carry over from the drawing toolbar, and Cmd/Ctrl + Z undoes your last stroke. Every stroke is kept: click Done, press Escape or click beside the picture to finish, and undo on the board takes the whole drawing back.

On a cropped image you draw on the part the crop shows. The ink becomes part of the image: it resizes with it, a crop or an aspect ratio hides the ink outside the visible part, and duplicating or deleting the image takes the ink along. Downloading the image saves it with your drawing on it. Replacing the picture clears the ink. Images inside walls and AI images work the same way.

When to Use Drawing

• Annotate a screenshot or image with arrows and circles
• Sketch a flow that's faster to draw than to lay out as connected elements
• Mark feedback on a shared board for a teammate
• Layer hand-drawn detail on top of a structured layout