Hi everybody, I've been wondering how difficult would it be to have a docker that acts as a traditional mixing area, or just plain "doodling" area. The user could use it to test color combinations, use it as a traditional painter's palette or just for sketching/doodling, without interfering with the canvas.
Of course one can create a new file, and use that for this purpose. But this is not so practical when we want to pick colors from one file to use them to the other, because every time we have to click on each window area to make it active, before we can interract with it. And in a workflow that's one click too many
Additionally it prevents us from having a maximized window, as it will hide the other.

To put it simply: How difficult would it be to make a new docker with the same functionality as the scratchpad area of the brush editor + the ability to pick colors from it?

Thanks!
Very excited about the successful campaign by the way, congratulations and thank you for the awesome work!

For the absolute basics, about two days of work -- but there probably should be some thought before we get the editors out. Should the scratchpad be savable? Should it have pages? Should it by default remember its own presets? Color picking should work, of course. What are the other things that would make it a useful addition to our already long list of dockers?

Hi Boudewijn,

thanks for the quick reply! These are good points. As far as features go, the savable option seems to be the most important.As for the others:
- Pages: Would be very practical indeed
- Remember its own presets: I remember CorelPainter having a similar area with its own toolset for painting, mixing, pan&zoom. But maybe that goes too far - I would vote for simplicity any day.

As for the other points, here is what I think: For my work it would be a game changer, so yes, very useful. But perhaps not enough people need such a feature, and I agree that the list of dockers is in the danger of growing out of proportion.
But if it was a part of an already existing docker? Perhaps one of the "onloved" old dockers that could use some refinement, or some other docker where it could "fit":

- As a tab in the reference images docker?
- As a tab of the digital color mixer?
- As an optional addition in the artistic color selector?

I have no way of knowing how difficult it is to realize any of these options, but from a real estate point of view, it seems to me that there are solutions that don't involve the addition of a brand new docker.
Providing that enough people would like to have such a feature and you are willing to consider it.

I think it should start out as a separate docker at least initially. Another question -- should the .kra file save your mix pad as well?

Like with the painting assistants, yes it would be very practical.

Right... And, hm, it might actually make sense to combine this with the reference images docker, if it's going load and save pages of scratch stuff.

Yes, if we were to combine it with an already existing docker, reference images seems to be the perfect counterpart.

Something like this... with some additional refinements. Not necessary by any means, but just to explore the idea a bit more:
The '+' icon would add a new page.
The eyedropper has a pressed state, which works like the eyedropper of the reference images, and an unpressed state which switches to the active brush.
The fill icon will fill the backround with the active color. This would imply that we actually have two layers on the mixpad: The background layer, of which we can change the solid color using the fill icon, and the actual layer we would be able to paint on using the brushes.



One thing that occured to me while making this was that if we are painting on a very large or very small canvas, perhaps the brush size would be out of proportion with the mixpad area. Could the mixpad use its own brush sizes?

I hope people are interested in this idea to ellaborate a bit more on the possibilities.

hm, the image seems invisible?

Maybe this looks a bit better?
(I reuploaded the image)

OH MY GOD PAGES

I might accidentally just end up using the scratchpad for everything that's so useful!! I never knew I wanted this until now. +1 for the scratchpad idea!

What I'm considering is whether another refinement would be useful: add two or three brush preset buttons. Long click them and a popup would fold out allowing you to select a brush, and the three buttons would be in a group, so only one is active.

You mean that hovering over the mixpad area will switch the canvas brush preset to the mixpad brush preset?
Something like this perhaps?


What about the scratchpad area? Will it have fixed pixel dimensions or the user will be able to resize it at will?
And what about this scenario:
We are painting with the "Basic Round" preset on a 5k canvas, with brush size 300. We have assigned the same preset to the mixpad area. Obviously that brush size will be enormous for that area.
So maybe it will be a better solution to create a preset tag, specific to the mixpad? So the popup list of presets will show that specific tag, similar to what the favourites tag used to do back in the days.

I added the size and opacity sliders as well as the eraser for the above reason. Since these presets are only used in the mixpad, these attributes will not interfere with the presets we are using on the canvas.

In the past I've fantasized about being able to drag&drop brush presets onto the canvas and pick them up again later. That could be a rad feature for this mix/scratch area instead of the normal canvas!

That was my favourite feature of Painter when I was using it for my work...before the Krita era
You could grab any preset, menu command, etc, and drop it on the canvas. It would instantly create a custom toolbar. Very handy.

My concern with this mixpad idea is the relative size (in resolution) of that area to the canvas, and the effect it will have on the size of the brushes.