DISEGNO Toolbar

Every tool on the brass bookmark leaves a mark, and its glyph draws that mark — chalk's tapered stroke, a wash's soft pooled blot, scissors mid-cut — rather than a picture of the instrument. The active tool sits lit in a dark recess; tools with color/tint variants grow a small brass tab beside the bar while they're selected.

Tooltips: roll the Apple Pencil (hover, no touch) or a mouse over any glyph and its label appears after a moment. On a finger with no hover, touch and hold a glyph — it shows the label instead of switching tools; lift without moving to just take a look.

Chalk

The tapered stroke; tilt the pencil for the side of the stick. Has three color variants — tap the glyph again to reopen them.

Red chalk (sanguine)

Black chalk

White chalk

Silverpoint

The unwavering hairline; only marks on prepared ground, and catches a soft glint under the light.

Silverpoint ground

Coats the paper so silver can bite. Tint beside the bar:

Natural — warm cream

Sanguine tint — terracotta

Powder green — sage

Ink & wash

Reed pen

The committed incised line; dwell with pressure to blot.

Brush pen

Light touch for a fine line, press for a fat expressive stroke; never runs dry.

Flat wash

Translucent, pools and darkens at the rim; press harder for a bigger, wetter pool that bleeds more into other wet ink and wash — never runs dry.

Reed, brush and wash share the same three ink colors:

Bistre — warm brown (wood-soot, Renaissance)

Iron-gall — blue-black (Baroque)

Gold — opaque metallic ink

Clear water

Wets the paper, lifts and bleeds ink and wash.

Frisket (masking)

Frisket

Cut a mask that blocks future marks; it never erases what's already drawn.

Invert the cut — un-block instead of block

Lift mask from the drawing — block wherever marks already sit

Clear the mask — un-block the whole leaf

Pictures

Bring a picture

Arrange what lies on the pages — fragments and pictures wake under this tool.

Bring a picture onto this page — a GIF or APNG comes in moving

Bind a moving picture as a flipbook — its frames are dealt one per right-hand page, in the corner, so a thumb along the fore-edge plays it, on paper too

Choose a desk photo — it lies behind the book (choosing again replaces it)

Bare desk — put the photo away

Relic (kept gesture)

Relic

Draw with a kept gesture — take a scrap from the book's corner and every pen stroke stamps a copy of it in your last material. Drag sets size and angle; it stays in hand until you change tools.

Keep a relic — arm, and the next stroke you draw with any tool is captured as a reusable gesture

Scissors & glue

Scissors

Draw across a torn leaf or picture to cut it — a loop snips a shape, a stroke slices in two. Drag the loose pieces apart, then tap a piece's pin to keep it (tap bare paper to drop whatever's left). Once kept, the knob turns a piece and the corners size it.

Glue — tap a loose piece to press it into the paper forever, or draw the brush along one edge to glue just that edge (the piece stays a leaf you can lift, and what it hides is underneath)

Pin — tap a loose piece to rivet it through its middle as a wheel: a finger turns it, and it keeps whatever angle you leave it at. Tap a pinned wheel again to work it free.

Glue down every loose piece on this leaf — the whole collage becomes paper

Guides

Nine instruments for scribing true lines to work to. Most are guides, not marks — nothing is inked, nothing is exported. The mirror and the rotor are the exceptions: their own lines are never inked either, but their presence duplicates every real stroke.

Compass — prick a centre and swing out a radius

Straightedge — rule a line between two points

Plumb & level — the straightedge held true. Drag it mostly up-and-down for a true upright, mostly across for a true level; it will not wobble with the hand. What you check an alignment against, the way a painter holds a brush up at arm's length. It settles as an ordinary ruled line, so it snaps and sweeps away like one.

Ellipse — the circle seen at an angle, which the compass cannot strike. Drag out the box it sits in. Upright only for now: the common case of a circle lying flat and seen level, a cup's mouth or a wheel.

Vanishing point — prick a point and it throws a faint sheaf of rays. With snap on, a stroke that sets off along one of them rides it true to the point, at your own speed and pressure; the ray you're on lights up as you draw it. A stroke heading somewhere else entirely is left alone, so uprights and free marks are unhindered. Prick two for a corner view, three to look up or down.

Mirror — ruled like the straightedge, but it acts: wherever it's struck, every real stroke you draw is duplicated as a live reflection across it, in whatever material you're holding — the two sides pool and bleed into each other as one wet mark, not a copy pasted afterwards. The axis itself is still never inked. Drawn solid, with fold ticks, so it reads as a mark that does something rather than one to work to.

Rotor — the mirror's sibling. Prick a centre and every stroke is carried round it, repeated, without being flipped. This is the one thing mirrors cannot do: a reflection always reverses handedness, so any number of mirrors can only ever give you a figure and its twin. A rotor turns the mark instead of folding it, which is what a pinwheel, a spiral, or any chiral rosette needs. Its count picker sits below it.

Squaring up — Alberti's veil. Drag out a net of square cells to copy or scale a drawing by, square by square: lay one over a brought-in picture and another over bare paper, then work cell for cell. You choose the cells across; the rows follow, kept square. Three across gives you the thirds, if you work that way.

Root rectangle — Barnstone's aid: drag out a golden-section or root proportion, sized by its own diagonal. Drag sideways for landscape, downward for portrait; the diagonal and the golden gnomon both hang off the corner you started from, so the figure comes out handed the way you drew it. Several can sit on a page at once, for comparing a thumbnail-scale study against a full-page one.

The rotor, the squaring net and the root rectangle each carry a picker, shown in the flyout while that instrument is in hand — which is why those three sit last, so the picker hangs directly under its own glyph. Each picker draws the choice itself rather than a numeral: n spokes for the rotor (3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 12 times round), an n×n net for the squaring (2, 3, 4, 6, 8 across), and for the root rectangle each ratio drawn at its true proportion:

Golden section (φ ≈ 1.618) — the only ratio that also shows its gnomon cut, the mark of the square that would leave a smaller golden rectangle behind

Root-2 rectangle (√2 ≈ 1.414)

Root-3 rectangle (√3 ≈ 1.732)

Root-4 rectangle (√4 = 2)

Root-5 rectangle (√5 ≈ 2.236)

And the two that act on all of them:

Snap — the pen is drawn to a scribed line while you work near it (drawing only — scissors always cut freehand). Circles, ellipses, mirror axes and the squaring net's cell edges all pull; the vanishing point works differently, locking a whole stroke to one ray rather than tugging each point.

Sweep the scribed lines off the open pages — mirrors and rotors included, which is how you stop copying

Pastel (borrowed palette)

Pastel

Tap to import a TINCTURE palette as a temporary set of colors — a chalk stick's stroke, plus a torn paper tag marking it as a borrowed, temporary set. Colors appear as a grid of swatches; long-press a swatch that carries a fragment to lift its scrap into hand.

Sort swatches by colour, value & temperature (tap again to sort by time)

Put the borrowed palette away — nothing already drawn or glued with it is undone

Its swatch grid and the sort/put-away actions sit as two separately-sized plates — the grid can run wide for a big palette, while the two action icons below stay their own small width instead of stretching to match it.

DISEGNO

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