Selection & stamps
Two region tools built on the same gestures: Select turns a region into a mask that constrains where paint lands; Stamp grabs a region of the committed canvas as a reusable brush footprint (the classic Aura brush-grab).
The mode bar
Each stroke-operation button cycles through modes: paint outline, paint filled (where the op supports it), stamp and select. The active mode decides what a gesture does — the same rectangle drag paints, captures, or selects.
Selection
In Select mode, a gesture (rectangle, ellipse, or freehand lasso) becomes the canvas selection: paint only lands inside it — including flood fills. While you drag, a thin marquee previews the region; once selected, the boundary is marked by animated diagonal stripes drawn just outside the selection, so the selected content itself stays clear. Strokes crossing the boundary are clipped per-pixel at the edge.
The Select mode's operation-parameters row has three buttons:
- All — drop the mask (the default: everything selected).
- None — select nothing; painting is a no-op until you change it.
- Invert — flip the selection (the region and the rest of the unbounded canvas).
The selection survives restart — it is saved per canvas as local user-preference data. It never travels with the canvas: exports, sharing and the journal are unaffected by it.
Capturing a stamp
In Stamp mode the same gestures capture the region's committed content — its full spectral pixels plus a coverage mask in the gesture's shape (up to 1024×1024). The capture immediately becomes your current stamp and the workbench switches to the Stamp engine in painting mode, so the very next stroke draws with it.
A fresh capture stays ephemeral: it survives restarts, but the next capture replaces it. The stamp bin is your curated collection — click the + tile (shown while an unpromoted capture is waiting) to keep the capture in the bin permanently. Captured stamps are local user data, stored on your node.
Click a stamp in the bin to make it the current stamp.
Painting with stamps
Pick the Stamp engine in the engine row (see Stroke engines) and paint: the cursor becomes the stamp itself, and every deposit is the current stamp at Size × its cut-out dimensions — Size defaults to 1.0, so a stamp draws 1:1 with what you cut out. Edges come from the stamp's own coverage (Hardness does not apply). Spacing separates the deposits along the stroke — stamp presets default it to 0.25 so footprints read as a train rather than a smear. Blend modes apply to the stamp exactly as they do to a dab.
With no current stamp the engine paints nothing.
Notes:
- Very large stamps take a moment to upload on first use; after that, stamping is as cheap as a normal stroke. Oversized or dense stamp trains reduce footprint resolution before they reduce frame rate.
- Stroke presets and the journal reference stamps by id + content hash. Replaying on a node that lacks the stamp skips those strokes with a logged warning — canvas pixels themselves are never lost.