Canvas Basics Guide

Three areas to know

• The tool strip holds the selection, brush, shape and text tools.
• The canvas itself is the working area. Zoom and pan change what you are looking at without moving anything on it.
• The properties panel shows the settings for whatever is currently selected — with nothing selected, there is nothing to change.

Setting a project up

• Set the canvas size at the start. Objects keep their positions if you change it later, so nothing reflows to fit.
• Choose a background colour, or leave the canvas transparent when the export will sit on top of something else.
• Zoom in for detail work, then fit the whole canvas back into view before you judge the layout — almost every spacing mistake is invisible at 200%.

Working with objects

• Everything you add — a shape, an image, a text box, a generated picture — is an object you can move, scale and rotate on its own.
• Stacking order follows the order you added things: later objects sit above earlier ones. Move an object forward or back when it disappears behind another.
• Select several objects at once to move them as a group, so their relative positions survive the move.
• Duplicate rather than rebuild when you need a second copy of something you have already styled.

Getting things aligned

Turn the grid and snapping on while you are placing objects, and off again for the final nudge. Snapping to the grid and to other objects is the difference between a layout that looks deliberate and one that looks approximate — and it costs nothing to use.

Text controls

• Font, from your system fonts and any custom font you have installed.
• Size, either from the presets or by typing an exact value.
• Alignment: left, centre, right or justified.
• Style: bold, italic and underline.
• Line height and letter spacing, which is what tightens a heading that is sitting too loose.

Drawing tools

• Brush, with adjustable width and opacity.
• Fill, with a colour picker and saved presets.
• Shapes: rectangle, circle and line.
• Opacity control on any object, for watermarks and for greying out an answer key.

A word on colour

Choose a small palette at the start of a document and reuse it. The preset swatches and the custom picker feed the same palette, and consistent colour does more for a worksheet than any filter or effect will.

Bringing images in

• Import from a file, or paste from the clipboard.
• Resize, rotate, flip and crop once the image is placed.
• Fit an image to the canvas when you want it as a full-bleed background.
• Keep the original on the canvas while you experiment on a duplicate.

What the AI tools add

• Sketch to image: draw roughly, send the drawing to the model, and the generated picture comes back onto the same canvas.
• Vision analysis: select a photograph of handwriting and get editable text back.
• Background removal, for lifting a subject out of a photograph.
• Adjustments and effects: brightness, contrast, saturation, blur, greyscale, sepia and invert.

Save and export

• Save the project to keep every object separate and editable.
• Export to an image file when you need something to print, hand out or paste elsewhere.
• Export at the size you will actually use — a printed worksheet needs far more pixels than a slide.
• Choose PNG for text, lines and transparency; JPEG for photographs where file size matters more.

Keyboard shortcuts

• Ctrl + S — save the project.
• Ctrl + Z — undo. Ctrl + Y — redo.
• Ctrl + C and Ctrl + V — copy and paste the selection.
• B — brush. T — text. M — move. C — crop. S — shape.
• On macOS, use Command in place of Ctrl throughout.