Blender 3D

The new Blender 2.8 grease pencil

03 July, 2019.

In Blender 2.8 (still in beta, but release is imminent as of this writing), the Grease Pencil has had a lot of developer attention, resulting in new power and versatility. It’s a good time to start getting familiar with it.

This post assumes some familiarity with Blender’s interface, but the aim is to just be able to create some strokes with the new Grease Pencil.

Drawing grease pencil strokes

  1. Add a new Grease Pencil object (Shift-A).
  2. Go into Draw mode.
  3. Select a drawing tool (or “brush”) (Properties Editor-> Active Settings tab in Draw mode).
  4. Change the material, if desired. This is how colour and texture are controlled (separately for stroke and fill).
  5. Draw. Each stroke drawn becomes a part of the Grease Pencil object created earlier.

Blender grease pencil doodling with two different materials

The brush and its options are applied per stroke, not per Grease Pencil Object. You can change them between strokes, and the next stroke will take the new settings, while existing strokes will keep the ones they had originally.

If, however, you edit a material, that change will be seen in all strokes that have that material assigned.

When creating a new file, there is now a 2D Animation option, which sets the workspace up ready to draw, with a grease pencil object already created and in Draw mode. The camera field of view is indicated by a white rectangle when in camera view (numpad 0). The grease pencil object has two layers: Lines and Fills. A couple of materials of different colours are already created for instant use.