Brush APIs

The Brush APIs provide you with the tools to define the visual style of your strokes. You can create brushes with different colors, sizes, and families to achieve a variety of looks.

Create a brush

To create a brush, use the Compose Brush companion methods with named arguments such as Brush.Companion.createWithComposeColor. This class lets you set the following properties:

• family: The style of the brush, analogous to a typeface or font in text. See StockBrushes for available BrushFamily values.
• color: The color of the brush. You can set the color using a ColorLong.
• size: The overall thickness of strokes created with the brush.
• epsilon: The smallest distance for which two points should be considered visually distinct for stroke generation geometry purposes. The ratio of epsilon and stroke points controls how much a stroke can be zoomed in on without artifacts, at the cost of memory. A good starting point for stroke units is 1 px, and a good starting point for epsilon is 0.1. Higher epsilon values use less memory but allow for less zoom before triangle artifacts appear. Experiment to find the right value for your use case.

val brush = Brush.createWithComposeColor(
  family = StockBrushes.pressure(),
  colorIntArgb = Color.Black,
  size = 5F,
  epsilon = 0.1F
)

Modify brush properties

You can create a copy of an existing brush using the copyWithComposeColor() method, which lets you change any of the brush's properties.

val redBrush = Brush.createWithComposeColor(
  family = StockBrushes.pressurePen(),
  colorIntArgb = Color.RED,
  size = 5F,
  epsilon = 0.1F
)

val blueBrush = redBrush.copyWithComposeColor(color = Color.BLUE)

Custom Brushes

While StockBrushes provides a versatile set of common brushes, Ink API also offers an advanced path for creating entirely new brush behaviors for unique artistic effects or to replicate specific existing brushes for backward compatibility.

A custom BrushFamily is loaded from its serialized format. The required format is the gzipped binary encoding of the BrushFamily protocol buffer. This lets you load and use custom brush files today. Once deserialized, the custom BrushFamily can be used to create a new Brush with a specific color and size, just like any of the StockBrushes families.