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Drawing straight horizontal or vertical lines
Use the Display plugin to force your lines onto the grid

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It's easy to draw straight lines, using the Line tool.

Whatever your current brush is, it can be drawn along a perfect straight line with the line tool. (also called Linear tool).

Keyboard shortcut:  v  (as in vector)

But can you easily make a horizontal line, or a vertical one?


Let's take a look at some options:



When you use the Linear tool, whatever your currently active brush is, that's what gets 'thrown' along the linear path.

If it's an airbrush, it'll be a clean airbruhed straight line.

However, if it's flowers with random poition, it may follow the line's straight path, but it will still have randomness in the flower's positions.



In the case of crisp, sharp brushes, like pen, pencil or the simle brush, it may be relatively easy to line up the rubberband line in such a way that there's no jaggies (stair steps) and it must be horizontal (or vertical).

 

But it's not easy if you have a high resolution screen.

The staircasing becomes more difficult to see or eliminate because we're drawing a dashed line, not a solid rubberband.




The Display Settings panel

open the Display Setting panel:

    menu:  Windows > Display Setting...

This tool lets you do a few things. ne thing i to display a grid which you can use to manually and visually use as a reference markers. This is the "Visible grid"

Even more, you can use it to force the grid into locking down the mouse poition of the painted brush to a discreet set of values along the grid. That's the "Drawing Grid"

And there's also rulers and artist guides.





Here's the Visible Grid enabled, and with rulers enabled too, but WITHOUT DRAWING GRID, i.e. without grid snapping:
You can still freely draw any way you wish: (color = blue)

Below is the same path in the brush stroke but rendered with Drawing grid ENABLED.
(and color red) The brush is stuck against the nearest grid lines as it progresses along the brush stroke's path:

Note that it's not strictly going to the nearest grid element: it drifts to the nearest one in the upper-left direction.



With a little bit of practice and a good choice of brush, you can draw diagonal stairs in a single brush stroke from lower left to upper right. You can also draw along vertical or horizontal lines.

However, some 'knots' may apear along the grid points:


If you now use the Linear tool again, while Drawing Grid (snapping) is still enabled, you can easily create perfectly horizontal or vertical lines.

<== Here's the result after turning off the visible grid.