You’ve been asking for it and at last, we’re excited to share with you Magma’s new Blend tool! Now you’ll be able to easily create both smooth and textured transitions in your paintings, soft gradients for your backgrounds, and more.

Our most-requested feature

This is, hands-down, the feature that our community wanted the most. One of the earliest recorded requests was back in 2022. We knew this one would take a while to develop and there were other features that our relatively small team wanted to deliver first. Since then, the feature request has received well over three thousand upvotes (3609 specifically)! A clear indication that we needed to get moving on this.

Challenges along the way

Our lead engineer on this feature, Tomek, has been hard at work building the blend tool over the last few months and it has not been without its challenges. As Magma is browser-based and used on all kinds of devices, we had to make sure that it would perform well for the widest wide range of them.

As anyone who has hung out on a busy Art Jam in Magma will know: many people drawing together on a big canvas can get laggy. With that in mind, and knowing that the blend tool could be a bit demanding, we put it through a few rounds of performance optimization so that you’d be able to use it smoothly while drawing with your friends online.

Another thing to think about was what the experience would be like for those using a drawing tablet with pressure sensitivity versus those using their finger to draw on a phone or tablet. We came up with a few presets with settings that would get the desired effects and perform well no matter what device you were using.

Many hands involved

We also called on a group of active and involved members of the Magma community to help with testing and provide valuable input on the experience of this new feature. We have to give a shoutout to our small, but awesome, beta team! The painting below is done by one of them, basalmegvinegar, while testing the first iteration of the blend tool.

Thank you also to nexus, Cybernaut, Frank.Art, Sad_Banana_ and Wynter!

Ready at last

After a lot of time researching, developing, testing, fixing, and testing some more, we are ready to release the blend tool to you. There are two settings that are unique to the Blend tool:

1. Stretch This controls how far your starting color will blend over into the next one. A higher value means that the color will be pulled over a longer distance.

   

   
   

2. Paint The Paint setting lets you add your selected color to your blend stroke. This works best for those with pressure-sensitive pens which will let you add paint as you press harder, but blend more when releasing pressure.

   

NOTE: this setting will not be available to everyone right away. We are doing a phased release of this to allow for some additional testing. So if you do not see this in your blend tool panel, don’t worry… it will be coming your way soon.

If you aren’t sure what settings to use, we have a few different presets available in the side panel: from a basic round shaped blender, to something with a bit more textural that you can paint and blend with at the same time. For more info, you can take a look at our guide in the Help Centre.

The blend tool is still in beta and we would love to hear your thoughts on it. Grab some friends and give it a try at Magma.com