Concepts for Android 

for advanced, natural design 

Welcome to Concepts! 
Few things in life satisfy like creating with your hands. Concepts is a power tool for 
your quickest and most intricate ideas. It's natural, flexible and portable, and it helps 
you to get things done. This is your instruction manual. 

To start learning about Concepts, please choose a category from the sidebar or 
dropdown menu. You can also read the full manual as a PDF. 

Like any idea, Concepts for Android™ and Chrome OS™ is a work in progress. In the 
next year, we hope it will rival and complement its original counterpart for iOS. We 
update every 4-6 weeks, adding new features and improvements based largely on 
your feedback. If you have suggestions, let us know. 

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Help Doesn’t End Here 

While this manual has detailed information on specific features, we write and 
publish how-tos and interviews with industry experts almost weekly on Medium. If 
you’re a visual learner, you might appreciate our video tutorials and workflow videos 
on YouTube. If you still can’t find what you’re after, find us on your favorite social 
channel, email us at [email protected], or tap Ask Us Anything in app for 
some lovely, direct conversation. 

  
Your fans, 

The Concepts Team @ TopHatch   

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Welcome to Concepts! 1 

Help Doesn’t End Here 2 

The Gallery 5 

Your Workspace 6 
The Status Bar 7 
The Tool Wheel 7 
The Infinite Canvas 9 
Undo / Redo 10 
Layers 10 
Using a Stylus 11 

Brushes and Tools 11 
Brush Gestures 11 
Brushes Menu 12 
Basic Brushes and Tools 13 
Pens 13 
Soft & Hard Pencils 13 
Airbrush 14 
Filled Stroke 14 
Soft Eraser 14 
Selection 15 
Pan 16 
Brush Market Tools 16 

Colors 17 
The COPIC Color Wheel 17 

Selection 18 
The Selection Menu 20 
Item Picker 22 
Lasso 24 
Adjusting a Selection 26 
The Selection Popup 27 

Layers 29 

Export 31 
JPG 31 
PNG 32 

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.concepts 32 

Settings 33 

The Pro Shop 35 
Basic 35 
The Essentials 36 
A­la­Carte 36 
Subscription Gives You Everything 36 
 
 

   

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The Gallery 
The first time you open Concepts, after the short onboarding, you’ll start in the 
Gallery. This is where all of your drawings are stored. They’re organized into 
“projects.” 

1. Start Something New. Start a new project, or check our sample drawings for 
inspiration. 
2. Breadcrumbs. You’re now in the Gallery, in the “Sample Drawings” project.   
3. Pro Shop. Show your status, find cool tools and libraries to make your life 
easier, and support us! 
4. Help. Always available with a tap. 
5. Project Meta. Tap to change. 

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6. Drawings. All of your drawings in this project. Swipe left / right to switch 
between projects. Tap+hold a drawing to drag it about, duplicate it or delete it. 
Dragging a drawing opens the Projects side-menu, where you can drop your 
drawing into another project. Tap a drawing name to rename or delete it.  
7. New Drawing. Tap this plus button to start a drawing from scratch. 
 

Your Workspace 
After tapping the plus button in the lower right corner of the gallery, a new drawing 
will open. 

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The Status Bar 

Up at the top, you’ll see a black Status Bar. From left to right on the bar, you’ll find: 

1. The Gallery. Tap to return to the Gallery from your current drawing. 
2. Breadcrumbs. You’re in the “Sample Drawings” project, in the “Action 
Camera” drawing, working in “outline.” 
3. Pro Shop. Show your status, find cool tools and libraries to make your life 
easier, and support us! 
4. Export. You can export to JPG, PNG and .concepts file types. 
5. Settings. Tap the Settings gear to find workspace settings, canvas options 
and stylus settings. 
6. Help. Tap Help to find resources like our FAQ and our 24/7 support line Ask Us 
Anything. We like to talk with you and help you out - it helps us make the app 
better, too. 

 
The Tool Wheel 

Below the status bar is your Tool Wheel, including eight of your favorite tools (each 
configurable), and an Undo and Redo button. 

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The wheel is movable. If you tap+hold+drag (or click+drag) on the wheel, you’ll find 
you can drag the wheel about and put it anywhere you’d like on the canvas. Pass the 
center line and the wheel will switch to left-handed mode. 

Some people prefer their buttons larger or smaller to fit their fingers. You can scale 
the tool wheel by pinching or expanding your fingers on it, and find the size that is 
most comfortable for you. If you’re on a desktop, hover the mouse over it and scroll 
up or down. 

Tap a tool on the outer ring to activate it and start drawing. Tap it again to enter the 
Brushes menu, where you can choose from many different technical and artistic 
tools. More about this in Brushes. 

On the inner ring of the tool wheel are three settings you can use to configure your 
current brush. 

1. Size. Use the size slider to determine the size of your brush. Choose one of 
the four presets at the top, and set those for fast toggling between favorite 
brush sizes. 
 
2. Opacity. Use the opacity slider and presets to set the opacity for your brush. 
100% is fully opaque, 0% is fully transparent. 
 
3. Smoothing. Use the smoothing slider and presets to set how much “smart” 
smoothing you’d like your line to have. Smoothing happens after you draw, 
not during - live smoothing is coming soon.  

0% smoothing gives you the raw stroke straight from your hand input, 50% 
smoothing takes many of the bumps out for a more polished stroke, and 
100% smooths the stroke into a perfectly straight line between start and end 
points, no matter how wriggly it started. 

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At the center of the tool wheel, you’ll see the current color and opacity of your 
brush. Tap this circle to reveal the COPIC color wheel, Too Corporation’s beautiful 
design and illustration spectrum. Tap a color to select it. Read more on Colors below. 

The Infinite Canvas 

Work on the bigger picture or zoom in to focus on the details. With the infinite canvas, there are no 
boundaries unless you set them yourself. 

 
Concepts is equipped with an infinite canvas, which is our way of saying you can 
extend your paper in any direction you need it, as far as you need it to go. Pan 
around using two fingers normally, or one finger while using the Pan tool. If you’re 
using a Pixelbook Pen, you can set your Finger Action to pan around as well, which 
makes navigating while drawing more convenient. 

To zoom in and out, or to rotate the canvas, use a two finger pinch / spread gesture. 
Lines stay sharp no matter how far you go - one of the many benefits of a 
vector-based platform. You'll notice there are "zoom steps" at certain zoom points 
(10%, 25%, 50%, 100%) which help you find standard sizes and rotations by feel.  

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You can also set your zoom or rotation levels manually by tapping on the zoom value 
at the top right corner of the canvas and entering it in. 

If you get lost on your canvas (infinite is very big), you can double-tap the zoom 
value field and you’ll be brought back to where you started. 

Undo / Redo 
In case you need to step back and change something, you can always use the undo 
and redo buttons on the tool wheel. 

With a two-finger tap on the canvas, you can undo your strokes in workflow. It’s 
popular to the point we’ve heard our designers wail about not having two-finger 
undo on a normal piece of paper. 

If you Undo too far, you can always Redo with a three-finger tap or use the button on 
the tool wheel. 

But you might not use Undo / Redo as much as you think. Concepts is a 
vector-based app, which means you can Select and adjust any line or delete it 
entirely whenever you want. This is a selective way to alter your sketch (no pun 
intended) without being limited to the last strokes you made. We think you'll prefer 
it. 

Layers 

Finally on the main canvas, you’ll see the Layers menu. This is also movable. Just 
tap+hold+drag the Layers button to anywhere on the canvas you’d like it. Read more 
about Layers below. 

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Using a Stylus 

Concepts is at its best with a stylus, though it works with a mouse on PCs with 
Android or Chrome OS installed. Currently Concepts is optimized for working with 
the Pixelbook Pen, a pressure and tilt-sensitive stylus for the Pixel Slate and 
Pixelbook. We do not have official support for other styli, but you may find that they 
work regardless, like the Samsung S-Pen. If you have devices you’d like us to 
optimize for, please let us know. 

Brushes and Tools 

Brush Gestures 
To use a tool, tap on it and start sketching. Tilt and pressure are supported with the 
Pixelbook Pen, and with many of the brushes (each is a bit different), and will happen 
naturally as you tilt or press on the screen. Try them out and see which you like best. 

As mentioned in the Tool Wheel section, the middle ring allows you to adjust the 
active brush’s size (how big it is), opacity (how transparent it is), and smoothing (how 
bumpy or smooth you want your line to appear once it’s drawn). Tap on one of these 
options to bring up your presets. 

To access the Brushes menu, tap again on an active tool, or double-tap on an 
inactive tool. 

   

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Brushes Menu 
 

In the Brushes menu, you can select a tool from the basic set of sketching tools or 
from the brush market. 

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Up at the top of the menu is your brush viewer, which changes to preview the brush 
you choose. 

Below the viewer you can find your basic tools, where you can select from a variety 
of organic or engineering brushes. 

Scroll down further and you’ll find the Brush Market, with different types of artistic 
brush libraries that you can unlock a-la-carte, or enjoy open access to if you’ve 
subscribed. 
 

Basic Brushes and Tools 

Pens 
Pens are most widely used in sketching when you want to make a statement or 
reflect permanence. Our Pen and Fountain Pen tools react to velocity to vary their 
line width - draw fast to get a thicker stroke. Our Dynamic Pen reacts to pressure. 
The Fixed Width Pen does what it says on the tin - it maintains a constant width 
from cap to cap. 

Soft & Hard Pencils  

Slightly different in texture and feel, these traditional sketching tools are modeled 
on real pencils. They react naturally to tilt, pressure and velocity with a supported 
active stylus like Pixelbook Pen. For great shading, tilt your stylus like you would a 
real pencil. 

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Airbrush 
The airbrush flows onto the screen with subtle texture and soft edges like the real 
medium. Popular with sketchnoters, for highlights and for painting, give your design 
some sheen. 

Filled Stroke 
Not to be confused with Bucket Fill (which we’re working on - lots of definitional bits 
to think about with the interactive parameters of vector strokes), the Filled Stroke 
tool is a brush unique to Concepts. It allows you to draw any type of shape - simple, 
wriggly, complex - with a stylus or finger, and fill the positive space inside.  

“Positive space” refers to any area inside your drawn line between start and end 
point that is original to the stroke - as in, the area hasn’t been drawn over a second 
time during the same stroke. This crossing over of filled area causes it to become 
“negative space” and remain empty. Of course, if you draw over the area a third time 
within the same stroke, it becomes positive again and is filled. 

Your resulting fill is a smooth, clean finish, customizable with opacity. Excellent for 
shadows, light, and complex figures, we think you’ll appreciate the possibilities this 
brush offers your design + art toolkit. 

Troubleshooting. Since Fill takes into account the start and end points of your line, 
make sure Line Smoothing is set below 100%. Otherwise your shape will disappear 
into a line or a point as though the rest of the stroke never happened. Also check 
that your transparency is above 0%, or like all strokes it may disappear, only to be 
found when Selecting in the area. 

Soft Eraser 
In a traditional pixel-based world, erasers delete things permanently. But vectors 
aren’t pixels, they behave and remember data differently, and if you're comfortable 

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with programs like Adobe Photoshop or Autodesk Sketchbook Pro, it may be easier 
to think of the Concepts eraser as a masking tool. It visually removes anything 
underneath it like a lovely soft eraser, but the data isn't actually gone. You can still 
retrieve old strokes later, or adjust your mask as your drawings progress. 

If you want to remove strokes completely, try selecting them with a tap+hold and 
then use Delete. 

The eraser stays the same size regardless of your zoom level. This means the 
further you zoom inward, the smaller its effects will be - very useful for working with 
the details. You can also change the size of the eraser using the Size slider, and its 
effects will scale the same way. 
 

Selection 
The Selection tool can be added to any of your tool slots and has two modes: a 
single-select Item Picker and a multi-select Lasso. Toggle between these two 
options using the popup at the bottom of your canvas, or put a second finger down 
anywhere to temporarily toggle the mode.  
 
The Selection tool can also be activated via tap+hold anywhere on the canvas - 
helpful for when you’re in sketching flow and don’t want to change tools. It can also 

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be assigned as your finger gesture in Stylus settings. To learn more more about this 
tool, see Selection. 

Pan  
Whether you want to showcase your work to your client or just pan through your 
infinite canvas, you can use the Pan tool. It allows you to pan and zoom without 
accidentally selecting or changing anything in your drawing. 

Brush Market Tools 

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The texture-rich, artistic tools in the brush market are made from image-based 
stamps created from their actual, physical counterparts. Strokes made with these 
brushes, as well as the Dynamic Pen, are movable and adjustable like all of our other 
vector-based tools, but they are limited when it comes to zoom. As they are made 
from pixel-based images, they will pixelate if you zoom in too far, depending on the 
brush. Try them out and see which ones you like best, or try changing the look of 
existing drawings by selecting your strokes and switching to a new tool. 

Colors 

The COPIC Color Wheel 

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At the center of your tool wheel is a circle representing the current color and opacity 
of your current tool. 

Tap the circle to bring up the COPIC color wheel. This wheel is a spectrum of colors 
hand-picked by Too Corporation to help artists and designers add consistency and 
beauty to their work while simplifying the matching process. These colors are 
mathematically sorted by pigment and saturation, and are represented on the wheel 
by a letter+number code. Visit here to learn more about Copic color theory. The 
values in Concepts are as similar as they can get to their real-life marker 
complements. 

The color wheel is spinnable. Drag your finger up or down to turn the wheel. 

From the inside of the wheel outward, you’ll see a tonal value spectrum along with 
true black and white, then a ring of your cool, warm, neutral and tonal grays, and 
finally the colors in their particular blending gradients. Tap on a color to set it to your 
active brush. 

Selection 
Concepts is a vector-based app, which gives you the powerful freedom to pick up 
and move, tweak or change any stroke at any time after it’s drawn. It allows you to 
make changes to your designs with minimal effort - instead of redrawing an entire 
project, you can just select what needs to be adjusted and change it. Perfect for 
design iterations, reorganizing mind-maps, or preparing materials for clients after 
feedback, Selection frees you to accomplish more. 
 
There are four ways to Select (aka pick up) a stroke or multiple strokes in your 
sketch. 

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1. Use the Selection tool. In the Brushes menu, you can choose the Selection 
tool (the arrow) and set it as a separate tool on your tool wheel or bar. Touch 
the screen to use it like you use any tool. 

2. Tap+hold anywhere on canvas to activate Selection. This is a really nice 

shortcut so you don’t have to interrupt your drawing flow by changing tools.  
3. If you’re using a Pixelbook Pen, configure your Finger Action to Select 
(Settings Workspace Stylus). Your finger will work as the Selection tool 
while the Pixelbook Pen follows your selected preset in the tool wheel. 
4. If you want to select all strokes on a single layer, you can tap on the active 
layer to open the Layer Selection pop-up. Tapping the cursor icon will select 
everything on that layer. 

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The Selection Menu 

 

 
 

Once you’ve activated selection by any of the above options, you’ll find a popup at 
the bottom of the screen. This is your Selection menu. The Selection menu helps 
you to filter the strokes you’d like to select from, so whenever you select something, 
this menu will hang around. 

● When using the Selection tool from your tool wheel, the menu will remain on 
screen as long as the brush is active. 
● When Selecting via the tap+hold, the menu will remain for as long as your 
finger rests on screen. With a second finger, you can toggle the menu buttons 
to set your filters (we’ll talk about those below). 

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Item Picker and Lasso with their respective popups. 
 

In the Selection menu, depending on which toggle you have active, you’ll find from 
left to right: 

1. A Selection Type toggle, for which selection method you’d like active. Tap it to 
toggle between Item Picker (single item selection, with the ability to add or 
subtract strokes individually), and Lasso (multi-select using drag to lasso your 
strokes). 
2. A Stroke Type toggle, allowing you to choose whether you’d like to select 
Partial or Complete strokes inside your selection. 
3. A Lock toggle, which includes or ignores any strokes you may have locked 
while drawing. 
4. A Layers toggle, so you can choose whether to select inside your Active layer 
only, or inside All layers at once. 

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Item Picker 
On the left-hand of the selection toggle is your Item Picker. This is a single item 
selection mechanism, which allows you to add and subtract individual strokes to 
your selection. 

Drag the crosshairs over a stroke. For a single selection, let go. To multi­select, tap the screen with 
another finger to select the stroke, then move to another stroke and repeat. 

 
To use Item Picker, set your finger or stylus on the screen. A small crosshairs or plus 
(+) will appear above your finger, or at the tip of your stylus. 

When you touch the crosshairs to a stroke, a circle will appear, telling you it has 
located a stroke. Tap the screen to validate the stroke, and let go of the screen. The 
stroke will be selected. 

To add strokes to your selection, just drag the crosshairs to your next stroke and tap 
the screen to select it. It doesn’t matter whether you have lifted your finger from the 
screen or not, you can select as many strokes as you’d like. 

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To subtract a stroke from your selection, drag the crosshairs to an already selected 
stroke. You’ll see the plus turn to a minus. Tap the screen to accept it. 

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Lasso 
If you tap the Selection Type toggle again, you’ll find the Lasso. This allows you to 
select multiple items by dragging your finger across or around your strokes. 
Whatever the blue lasso touches will be part of your selection. Lasso again to 
subtract from the selection. 

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If you lasso a selection and decide you want to add further individual strokes, toggle 
the button back to Item Picker via the Filters toggle, and continue making your 
selections. 

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Adjusting a Selection 
Once you’ve selected a stroke or group of strokes, you’ll notice the Selection menu 
at the bottom of the screen has shifted to give you a few more helpful toggles. 

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● Rotate. Allows you to rotate your selection. Tap it on or tap it off. 

● Scale / Stretch / Off. Toggle between these to scale strokes (grow the whole 
selection bigger or smaller, with a locked aspect ratio), stretch strokes 
(stretch strokes longer or shorter, keeps the same tool size), or lock your 
strokes from scaling or stretching. 

Use a two-finger gesture to scale and rotate the selection. 

The Selection Popup 

Above the selection box is a Selection popup. This has many useful features you 
might use to work with your strokes. 

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Lock. The Lock button locks your selection from all other selections and 
adjustments you might make in the future. You can access it again by selecting and 
unlocking it, or by changing the Lock filter on the Selection menu. 

Duplicate. Anything you select, you can also copy, as many times as you’d like. Just 
touch Duplicate and it will create an exact match for fast iterations. Drag the 
duplicate to a new layer to keep or hide your old selection, and iterate on the new. 

Delete. The best way to erase a vector stroke is to delete it. At this point, our 
erasers work as movable layer masks, so if you truly dislike a stroke and want to 
banish it to the far nethers, just delete it from your life and drawing. Of course, you 
can Undo. 

Flip and Mirror. The final two buttons allow you to flip your selection from side to 
side, or to mirror it vertically. Great for creating reflections and shadows, as well. 

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Layers 

Concepts comes equipped with a fully adjustable set of layers to help you design as 
flexibly as you need. Enjoy five layers if you’re a free user or infinite layers as a Pro. 
Some of our architects have over a hundred layers in a drawing as they create 
iterations for clients, and many of our illustrators are a close match. 

Each layer comes equipped with its own set of controls: 

● Tap on a layer to activate it for drawing. 

● Tap + New Layer to create a new layer. It will always appear directly above 
your current layer. You can also select strokes from the canvas and drag them 
to this button, where they will create a new layer just for themselves. 
● Likewise, you can make a selection from your drawing and drag it to any layer, 
where they will nestle into their new home. 

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● Tap+hold a layer to rearrange layers into your preferred order. 

● Tap the eye to the left to switch on / off the layer’s visibility. It’s still there, it 
just doesn’t show up when off. 
● Tapping an active layer brings up the layer’s command menu. From here you 
can select everything on the layer, lock the layer, duplicate it, delete it, merge 
it down into the layer beneath it, and rename it. You can also adjust the full 
layer’s opacity level by dragging your finger along the slider.  

   

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Export 

 
Once your sketch is ready to go, tap the Export button on the status bar. At this 
point in time, you can choose to export to JPG, PNG, or .concepts. We hope to have 
more file types and export options soon. 

JPG 
Standard, low-resolution 72 dpi export that’s best for quick emails or low-res 
screenshots.  

PNG 
Standard, higher-resolution 300 dpi export for pixel-perfect images that are 
viewable on nearly any device.  

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.concepts 
Our native Concepts file. You can save this file type or share it with other Concepts 
users for later in-app work, though it will only work on other Android / Chrome OS / 
Windows devices for now. 

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Settings 

 
In the Settings menu, you’ll see abilities to configure your Background, Pixelbook 
Pen and Gestures.  

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Background: You can scroll through these options and find many basic paper types 
with subtle textures, as well as plain white, transparent, blueprint and darkprint. We 
also give you the option to create a custom color background from the COPIC color 
wheel. 

Pixelbook Pen: The Pixelbook Pen can be configured for pressure and tilt, and if 
you’d like to smooth out the pressure response a bit, you can use the slider to clip 
the percentage range down on each end. Also, when using the Pen, you can set your 
finger action to something different like panning the canvas or selection (or to use 
the active tool or do nothing), so that your workflow is that much faster. 

Gestures: At this point in time we have a two-finger gesture available for moving 
(drag two fingers) and zooming (pinch or expand two fingers) about on the canvas. 
You can configure that here. Beneath the two-finger action is a slider that allows you 
to set your timing for how long you tap+hold to select objects. Some like it fast, 
others prefer it slow, choose a timing that works well for you. 

The other tabs in the Settings menu allow you to learn more about Concepts, visit 
the Pro Shop, and find help. Besides helpful links to our videos, FAQ, articles, website 
and manual, you’ll see a link to Ask Us Anything, which sends us a direct message 
about your troubles. You can expect to receive a reply in-app within 24 hours. 

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The Pro Shop 

 
Basic 
Concepts comes as a free, solid sketching app when you download it from the Play 
Store. You can enjoy it this way for as long as you’d like. We feel like everyone 
deserves a solid sketching app whether they can buy one or not, so enjoy our basic 
tools, responsive feel, colors, customizable layout, infinite canvas and JPG export 
with this free package. 

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The Essentials 
Upgrade to the Essentials and become a Pro user. A one-time only purchase, it gives 
you the powerful ability to select, move and adjust your vectors. It also gives you 
high-resolution PNG export. Other features like brush editing, object libraries and 
further export types will be added to this package soon. 

A-la-Carte 
In the Brush Market, we’ve crafted some beautiful brushes that add artistic 
elements to your drawings - brushes like pastels, chalk, paint and other dynamic 
pens and pencils. Purchase these brush packs straight from the Brush Market in the 
Brushes menu. 

Subscription Gives You Everything 

Subscription gives you everything at once, going forward. This includes every 
feature, brush and export, including every ability that will be added as we develop 
Concepts for Android over the next year and beyond. Subscribing opens up the 
ultimate in design capabilities both for you and for us — you get great tools, and we 
get to keep building them. 

Thanks for all the support. You make a world of difference to us - in fact, you are our 
entire world. We appreciate you. 

Best of successes to you, 

The Concepts Team @ TopHatch 

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Again, Help Doesn’t End Here 

While this manual has detailed information on specific features, we write and 
publish how-tos and interviews with industry experts almost weekly on Medium. If 
you’re a visual learner, you might appreciate our video tutorials and workflow videos 
on YouTube. If you still can’t find what you’re after, find us on your favorite social 
channel, email us at [email protected], or tap Ask Us Anything in app for 
some lovely, direct conversation. 

  
 

Legal Stuff 

The COPIC Color Wheel is courtesy of Too Corporation. 

Android and Chrome OS are Trademarks of Google LLC. 
 

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