In this article
Most messaging apps give you one pen, one width and a row of colours. Telegram gives you five brushes, a continuous colour spectrum, a size control that lives in the same gesture as the colour, and arrows that straighten themselves.
It is a small drawing application hidden behind the paintbrush icon, and the parts worth learning are the ones that are not obvious from looking at it.
What you will be able to do
- check_circle Change colour and brush size in one movement instead of two trips to a menu.
- check_circle Draw a straight arrow that points where you meant, without a steady hand.
- check_circle Pick the right brush for marking up a screenshot, a photo or a document.
- check_circle Hide private information in a way that actually stays hidden.
The finger never leaves the colour bar — sliding sideways changes the hue, sliding up changes the thickness.
swipe One gesture doing two jobs
Touch the colour bar and slide sideways: the colour moves continuously through the spectrum rather than jumping between a dozen presets. Keep your finger down and slide upwards from the swatch: the brush grows, from a hairline to a stroke wide enough to cover a paragraph.
Both axes are live, so you can arrive at a thin red line or a thick pale one in a single movement without ever looking for a second control. It takes about ten seconds to learn and it is the difference between annotating a screenshot in four taps and in fifteen.
Five brushes and what each is actually for
They are not five styles of the same thing. Each solves a different annotation problem, and using the wrong one is the usual reason a marked-up screenshot is hard to read.
edit Pen — circling and writing
arrow_forward Arrow — pointing at one thing
bolt Neon — drawing on a dark or busy image
format_paint Highlighter — marking text you want read
visibility_off Blur — softening a face or a background
In practice you use two: the arrow to point and the highlighter to emphasise. The others are for specific images.
settings Getting to the canvas
- Attach an image The paperclip in any chat, then pick the photo or screenshot.
- Open the editor and choose the brush icon Tap the thumbnail to go full screen, then the paintbrush in the bottom toolbar.
- Pick a brush The row of tools sits above the colour bar. Pen, arrow, neon, highlighter, blur.
- Set colour and size in one slide Sideways for hue, upwards from the swatch for thickness.
- Draw, then tap Done Undo removes the last stroke if a line goes wrong. Done returns you to the send screen with the drawing applied.
lock Blurring is not redacting
Blur and pixelation look like they destroy information, and against a casual glance they do. Against someone who wants to read what is underneath, they often do not. Both operations are reversible in principle — the original pixels are averaged rather than discarded — and text is the worst case, because a short string like a number has few possible answers and each one produces a predictable blur.
For anything that has to stay unreadable, cover it instead. Take the pen, set it wide, sample a nearby colour with the eyedropper or just use black, and paint the area out completely. An opaque stroke removes the pixels rather than smoothing them. Cropping the region away entirely is better still.
This page is the brushes. The curriculum step covers the rest of the canvas: text overlays and their styles, scrubbing to the right frame on a video before drawing, and where the editor sits in the path between choosing a file and sending it.
At a glance
- 1Brush and colour
Slide on the colour picker to change size and colour together.
- 2Straight arrows
The arrow tool snaps to a clean line.
- 3Hide it properly
Cover private details with an opaque stroke, not blur.
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