Sharper, more natural pencil strokes | Voters

Sharper, more natural pencil strokes

Rich W

Flow’s pencil strokes look blurrier and less realistic than its other tools — they’re good, but they look the most “computer-generated” by comparison.
To be more specific: the grain of the pencil strokes looks somewhat predictable and algorithmic, as if it’s following a repeating set of dark/light patterns.  
Similarly, the grain and texture of the strokes appear blurry/out-of-focus, even when zoomed out (especially in comparison to Linea and Tayasui Sketches Pro apps on my iPad Pro). I would love to be able to draw with sharper strokes that look more “stippled” than smudged.
Personally, I feel like the pencil is the one tool that should feel the most natural, as it best encapsulates the experience of sketching in a Moleskine notebook. Hopefully this is something the team can improve!

May 3, 2019

Tim Greenhalgh

I’d like to add to this as well - I am genuinely loving Flow and hats off to you, Ben, and the team - the pencil tool would be my ‘go to’ except I am finding it hard to get the marks I make to be strong enough - it is very feint and I am more conscious of the effort I need to apply to achieve something that stands out when writing or drawing and often feel like I need to go back over the line. The pencil in Apple notes is richer and feels more natural - in a way it feels more like the difference between a 6H in Flow and a 2B in Apple - added a couple of screen grabs to demonstrate and one from Morpholio Journal which is my preference of the three

Justin Hudgins

Just want to add that I also feel the pencil is weirdly blurry compared to other tools. I get that pencil is maybe a “blurrier” medium, in a sense, but it just makes me aware I’m using an app every single time I see it.

Ben Hamey

Hey Rich - thanks for sharing! I made the textures for the Pencil tool (from high resolution scans of real Moleskine notebooks, as you would expect!). It was quite a painstaking exercise to decide on the exact aesthetic of the pencil because everyone has a slightly different concept of what a pencil should be. I also like the more stippled style - in the future I'll certainly look at how we could incorporate this. Thanks again!

Rich W

Ben Hamey: Awesome, thanks for the reply! I can only imagine how difficult it would be to decide what a pencil stroke looks like =D Hope you guys are able to improve this (although I’m aware that my request only has six upvotes...). In any case — thanks for your guys’ great work!

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