Stroke Stylus
Brushes, tapers and texture for your paths
Stroke Stylus dresses vector outlines the way Illustrator's brushes do – without leaving Canva. Bring in a shape from your page or upload an SVG, then style its outline: taper it from thick to thin, wrap it in hand-made texture, break it into dots and dashes, or explode it into architectural sketch lines. Every brush is non-destructive – the source path is never touched, and every change re-renders live – so a letterform can wear dry media one minute and a clean taper the next.
Intro and tutorial video
Key Features
Five brushes, one non-destructive model
Taper sculpts the line's width along its length, with start, mid and end weights and a movable peak. Texture warps authored artwork along the path. Dashes builds dotted, dashed and dash-dot lines as real geometry. Overshoot explodes a shape into its edges and extends every line past every corner – uniform for technical drawings, randomised for hand-sketch character, with parallel clones for that blueprint feel. Roughen gives any outline a hand-drawn wobble. Seeded randomness means a look you like stays exactly as it is until you choose to re-roll it.
A hand-made texture library
More than thirty texture strips, drawn in Illustrator and warped along your path point by point – wet paint, dry marks, marker pens, ink splatter, stitches and more, organised by family in the picker. Trim the texture to a section, repeat it along the path with adjustable spacing, slide it around a closed shape, and flip it along or across the line. Short textures tile at their natural proportions instead of stretching.
Interiors stay yours
The brush owns the outline; the fill stays a first-class Canva citizen. In Both mode the shape's interior exports as its own native, recolourable, drop-fillable Canva shape underneath the brushed line work – tapers, textures and dashes export as native shapes too where the geometry allows, with a full-fidelity image fallback for the most complex results. Line colour and fill colour are independent, in the panel and on the page.
How it works
Import a shape – From page for anything already in your design, Upload SVG for a file. Select it, pick a brush, and shape the look with the sliders; everything renders live. Save a preset to reapply the same look to other shapes this session. When it's right, press
Add to design
Stroke Stylus runs entirely in the Canva panel – no account, no sign-up, nothing leaves your browser. It is part of the SSH Creative suite of Canva apps, alongside Pen Pal, Boolean Boutique, Pattern Party, Warp Wonder, Filter FX, Spectrum Supreme, Guide Guru, Shadow Studio and Mix Maestro. Draw in Pen Pal, combine in Boolean Boutique, dress in Stroke Stylus.