Sketch Editor

A layered paint canvas with AI generation onto layers, backed by an image asset.

The Sketch Editor is a layered raster editor. A layer can be painted by hand or generated from a prompt or a workflow, and Save to image renders the composite back into the image asset.

Sketch Editor

Runs: locally for painting. Generation runs on the provider you pick, or through one of your workflows. Needs: a provider key for the model you generate with (see Providers). Painting needs no key.

Open a sketch

  • + in the workspace tab bar, then New sketch. NodeTool creates a blank white image asset and opens it in edit mode. To edit an existing image, open the asset in a tab and switch it to edit mode.
  • The left Sketches panel lists your sketch documents grouped by date.
  • Every sketch has its own URL, /sketch/<documentId>. Changes autosave.

Save to image in the document bar renders the flattened composite back into the asset. The eye icon beside it returns the tab to view mode. The tab, the Sketches panel, and the standalone page share one document.

Workspace

Region Contents
Toolbar (left) Tools, foreground and background colors
Tool options (top) Size, opacity, hardness, shape type, transform handles
Layers (right) Add, reorder, blend, lock, hide, group. Mark a mask layer
History (right) Jump to any earlier state
Properties (right) Per-layer details, AI generation controls, vector layer settings
Canvas size (right) Resize the canvas, toggle resize handles
Assistant (left) Chat with the editor assistant

The panels dock like the timeline and game editors. The Layout menu switches between Essentials, Painting, Compositing, and Assistant, saves your own layouts per user, and shows or hides each panel. Tab hides all panels.

Tools

Key Tool Notes
V Move  
B Brush Round, soft, airbrush, and spray styles. Pen pressure and a stabilizer
P Pencil Hard-edged, aliased
E Eraser Shares brush size, hardness, and opacity
G Fill Contiguous flood fill with a tolerance setting
T Gradient Foreground to background color
Q Blur  
S Clone Stamp Alt-click sets the source
J Color Adjust Paints hue, saturation, and brightness
I Eyedropper  
M Select Rectangle, ellipse, lasso, or polygon lasso, set in the tool options
W Magic wand Tolerance, contiguous, and sample-all-layers options
none Segment AI selection (SAM). Click adds a point, Alt-click a negative point, or drag a box
C Crop Enter commits, Esc cancels
F or Ctrl/⌘ + T Transform See below
U Shape L line, R rectangle, O ellipse, A arrow

Brush size is [ and ], hardness is { and }, and a digit 0 to 9 sets opacity (5 is 50%, 0 is 100%). X swaps colors, D resets them to black and white. With a selection active, edits apply only inside it.

Shapes: Shift constrains proportions or snaps lines and arrows to 30 degree steps. Alt draws from the center.

Transform modes

Mode Behavior
Move/Scale Scale and rotate the box. Ctrl/⌘ on a side handle shears. Ctrl/⌘ + Alt + Shift promotes the drag to Perspective
Perspective Four-point projective transform. Dragging a corner mirrors the opposite edge
Deform Free four-point quad. Only the dragged corner moves. Shift locks one axis

Perspective and Deform produce a four-point quad, so a layer carrying one is transformed on its own. A multi-layer union applies one affine delta and cannot carry a quad. . resets the box. Ctrl/⌘ + Shift + T repeats the last transform.

Layers

  • Blend modes: Normal, Multiply, Screen, Overlay, Darken, Lighten, Color Dodge, Color Burn, Hard Light, Soft Light, Difference, Exclusion, Add. ↑ and ↓ in the Layers panel step through them.
  • Mask layer: the document’s mask. It is exported as the separate mask output for inpainting and compositing nodes.
  • Symmetry: horizontal, vertical, dual, radial, or mandala. Radial and mandala take 2 to 12 rays (6 by default).
  • Pen pressure: pressure can drive size, opacity, or both. The pen-pressure settings tune the light-press scale and curve.
  • History: the last 30 steps. Older steps merge into the baseline.

Generate onto a layer

Select a layer and open Properties to bind it to a generator.

  • Prompt: pick a provider and model, write a prompt, and generate text-to-image or image-to-image. Image-to-image takes a source layer, edit strength, and inference steps. Properties shows an estimated cost before you generate. Typing @ in the prompt picks an entity from the library. The prompt holds an entity:// reference, and the server replaces it with the entity’s name, descriptor, and reference image at generation time.
  • Workflow: click Generate Layer in the Properties toolbar and pick a workflow with an image output node (ImageOutput, MaskOutput, or Output). If it has several, choose which node feeds the layer.

Each generation is a version on the layer. If a prompt, parameter, or upstream layer changes, the layer is flagged stale. Re-generate Stale runs all stale layers in dependency order and skips locked layers. Generation runs as a job over the WebSocket connection with progress on the layer.

Agent editing

The agent edits a saved sketch’s layer structure with edit_sketch, which takes ops that run in order against the stored document. An open editor picks the change up live. It never reads or writes pixels: painting and generation happen in an open editor or a workflow run.

From packages/agents/tests/capabilities-sketches.test.ts, on a sketch created with create_sketch:

{
  "tool": "edit_sketch",
  "arguments": {
    "image_document_id": "<sketch id>",
    "ops": [{ "op": "add_layer", "name": "Ink" }]
  }
}

The result reports applied: 1 and the layer list changes from ["Layer 1"] to ["Layer 1", "Ink"]. The id may be the full 32-character id or its first 12 characters. Run validate_sketch afterwards. Other sketch tools are list_sketches, get_sketch, render_sketch, and the *_sketch_version tools.

An open editor receives the ui_sketch_* tools. nodetool sketch debug replays them headlessly (see CLI: nodetool sketch).

Recipes

Sketch and generate. Choose + → New sketch, block in a composition on one layer, add a layer, select the region, bind it to a model or workflow in Properties, and generate. Then paint on top and Save to image.

Mask for inpaint. Open an image in a sketch, add a layer, paint the area to change, and mark it as the mask layer. Wire the Render Sketch image and mask outputs into an inpaint node.

Retouch. Select Clone Stamp (S), Alt-click clean pixels, paint over the blemish, and adjust layer opacity.

Keyboard shortcuts

Shortcut Action
Ctrl/⌘ + Z Undo
Ctrl/⌘ + Shift + Z or Ctrl/⌘ + Y Redo
Ctrl/⌘ + C / X / V Copy, cut, paste
Ctrl/⌘ + Shift + V Paste masked
Ctrl/⌘ + A Select all
Ctrl/⌘ + D Deselect
Ctrl/⌘ + Shift + D Reselect
Ctrl/⌘ + Shift + I Invert selection
Ctrl/⌘ + Shift + Alt + T Repeat last transform on a copy
Ctrl/⌘ + ] / [ Move layer forward or back
Ctrl/⌘ + J / Ctrl/⌘ + Shift + J Layer via copy or cut
Ctrl/⌘ + I Invert colors of the active layer
Delete or Backspace Clear layer or selection
Ctrl/⌘ + Backspace / Alt + Backspace Fill with background or foreground color
Arrow keys Nudge by 1 px
+ / =, - Zoom in, out
Ctrl/⌘ + 0 / Ctrl/⌘ + 1 Fit, 100%
Space + drag, or middle-click drag Pan

Workflow nodes

  • Create Sketch: puts an input image on the base layer.
  • Render Sketch: flattens layers with blend modes and opacity. Outputs image and, when a mask layer is set, mask.
  • Sketch Layers: outputs each visible layer as an image (layers) with its name (names).

On nodetool.ai AI image editor →

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