The blend tool in Magma will make it easier for you to mix your colours to get smooth transitions and gradients, or smear paint for a more painterly look. There are a few presets already available, but you can also customize and save your own.
Blend tool settings
Many of the settings for the blend tool are the same as your regular brush, with the exception of the Stretch setting.
size - Adjust the size of you brush and toggle pressure responsiveness;
min size - limits how small your blend brush will be when the pressure setting is active;
size jitter - add variation in size to each stamp of the brush;
flow - determines the opacity of each stamp of the brush tip shape;
stabilizer - recommended to be zero as it can impact performance and is seldom needed;
spacing - spacing between each stamp of the brush tip shape. Lower values might impact performance;
stretch - this determines how far a color will be dragged with your stroke;
paint - this setting adds your selected color to your blend stroke.
Open advanced settings for more customization and save your blend tool.
The blend tool and brush tool share the same saved presets list, so be sure to mark your new blend tool clearly.
Settings examples
Check out the examples of the different settings in action below.
Brush tips
We have four different blend presets: a basic and soft which use the circle brush tip shape, and the textured 1 and 2 which use more textured brush shapes.
You can change the brush tip shape either in your advanced settings window.
Stretch
The stretch setting determines how far a colour will be pulled along in your stroke. A lower value means it will carry over a shorter distance. If you set this to 100% it will pull the maximum amount of the colour until you lift your pen.
Toggling the pressure sensitivity for this setting will let you control how strong this setting is based on how much pressure you apply with your pen.
Paint
When the paint setting is above 0%, your blend tool will add paint to your stroke. You can think of this as the opacity for your chosen color, but added to blend tool.
A 0% Paint setting will only blend colors already present on your layer. If the Paint setting is set to 100%, it will apply your chosen color at the maximum opacity and override any blending effect. This setting is best used with the pressure control ON if you are using a pressure-sensitive stylus.
Note: the Dual Brush setting does not work for the Blend tool at this time.
Blending with selections and alpha lock
When making a selection, colour and transparency from outside that area can still be pulled into the selection area. When making strokes from inside that area outward, the colour will not spread outside the selection.
When you have the Opacity Lock/Alpha Lock setting active for your layer, making a blend stroke from outside the locked area will not pull transparency into your painted pixels.
Blend tool lagging?
The blend tool requires a bit more computing power than your regular brush and might lag a bit more, especially with certain settings and canvas sizes. These are some things to try:
Turn off the Stabilizer setting;
Turn off pressure sensitivity next to the Size slider;
Ensure that the Spacing setting is above 10%. Some brush tip shapes will look weird with wider spacing, but the round shape with reduced hardness works well at 30%;
Don't make your canvases too big. Or recommended size for widest compatibility is 1920 x 1080.
Blend tool erasing?
For much older devices and some weakers ones such as sme Chromebooks, using the blend tool might appear to be erasing. However, this is due to your browser not being able to render the blending actions. Please try to update your system and browser, or try a different browser.
Example
Below is an example for how you can approach doing a basic still life study and incorporating the blend tool in the workflow.
lay in background… for bit of variety, use texture brush with a little bit of colour jitter
draw in the basic shape of the apple with flat colour
add flat shapes of full-opacity colour - large shadow and light shapes
what other colours do you see when you squint eyes and look at reference - add smaller shapes of those
then it’s time to blend -don’t mix whole thing into one. Blend the edges of the colours into each other
smaller details with brush and blend based on how realistic you want to go.
