- Make a Grease Pencil stroke and understand what makes it different from a drawing.
- Use layers and materials to separate rough work from clean line and color.
- Predict, roughly, where a stroke will sit in space before you draw it.
Do this first · 5 min The whole idea, in one move
Before any explanation: Add → Grease Pencil → Blank, switch to Draw mode, make a mark — then orbit the camera.
Feel that before anything else. The stroke is not on the screen; it is in the scene, and you are moving around it. Everything else on this page is a consequence of that one fact.
Build · 25 min Layers, materials, and where strokes land
- Layers are cheap — use lots
Strokes sit on layers, exactly like a traditional animation setup. Rough on one, cleaner line above it, color underneath. You can hide, reorder and adjust the opacity of each independently.
The mistake is drawing everything on one layer because it is quicker at the time. It is not quicker fifteen minutes later.
- Materials control line and fill separately
A Grease Pencil material governs the stroke and the fill as two separate things — you can have a stroke with no fill, a fill with no stroke, or both. This is why coloring a drawing here feels unlike coloring in a paint program.
- Find out where your strokes actually are
Draw a simple object from one angle — a cup, a box, a face. Then move around it and look.
That surprise is the lesson. Strokes are placed on a drawing plane, and which plane depends on your placement setting. Until you have seen your own drawing from the side, the setting is an abstraction; afterwards it is obvious.
Drawing in space genuinely is strange, and nobody is fluent in half an hour. The goal today is only that you know what the thing is and can make a mark with it.
- You made a stroke and orbited around it.
- You have a drawing on at least three layers.
- You have seen one of your drawings from an angle you did not draw it from.