Intro to drawing in Compose

Learn how to draw something custom in Compose. With custom drawing, you can improve the look and feel of your app when the built-in components don't cover exactly what your app needs.

Key points

  • DrawScope is a declarative, stateless drawing API to draw shapes, paths, and more without needing to maintain the state of the component manually.
  • Several drawing modifiers give you access to DrawScope, letting you draw with other composables:
    • drawBehind: draws behind the composables content.
    • drawWithContent: useful for rearranging content. You can choose when to call the content of the composable, either before or after.
    • drawWithCache: caches the objects until the size changes or the state variables read inside change.
  • The coordinate system in Compose is the same as the view system.
  • All draw and layout calls are performed in pixel values, not dp. To draw consistently across screens, use dp and convert to pixels before drawing.
  • Draw calls are always relative to the parent composable.

Collections that contain this guide

This guide is part of these curated Quick Guide collections that cover broader Android development goals:

Discover techniques for using bright, engaging visuals to give your Android app a beautiful look and feel.
Quick guide collection

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