Palettes

Palettes are essential components of your tool set. For one, palettes help you define the nature of your tools. That is, palettes help you customize how the tools in the toolbox perform. For example, you might "sharpen" (make the line thin) or "dull" (make the line thick) your pencil tool using the "Brushes Palette". Palettes also help you perform some of the more complex tasks such as layering or manipulating complex color schemes.

By default, there are three floating palettes. These can contain all ten palettes available through the "Window" menu selection. The "Window" sample below shows all ten with blue dots.

The various palettes are available in the floating palettes through "tab" selections as shown in the floating palette sample below.

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Though these five palettes control many different aspects of your drawing, they do share several properties.

For one, all palettes are made up of a title bar with close and collapse buttons, a set of tabs, and a list of options for each tab. Further, all palettes have a fly-out menu of options. Consider the figure below:

Another generic property of palettes is the ability to dynamically adjust contents. That is, you can customize the tabs in any palette simply by dragging tabs between palettes. Try it out! Click and hold your left mouse button over a tab in one palette and without letting go of the mouse button, drag the tab to another palette and let go. Now drag the tab back.

Finally, note that if you close a palette, you can easily get it back on screen by choosing "Palettes" from the "Window" menu item and selecting the palette you want shown.

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