Panel Layouts

Comic panels in Varve are ordinary frames that clip their contents and have a solid border and a white interior. You can draw them one at a time with the Panel tool, or divide a page frame into a grid of panels in one step. There is no separate Comic workspace: the Panel tool is in the Design, Print, and Drawing toolbars.

Open the Panel tool

Press Shift+F, or
click Panel in the toolbar, next to Frame, or
choose Arrange › Align › Panel Layouts…. This switches to the Panel tool and opens the Inspector's Properties tab.

The Comic (print) and Webtoon (vertical) workspace layouts start with the Panel tool already selected.

Draw a panel

Drag on the canvas to draw a panel. Hold Shift for a square, or Alt to draw from the centre.
Click without dragging to place a 400 × 300 panel.
Artwork that the new panel fully covers is moved inside it, so you can sketch first and box it in afterwards.

Divide a page into panels

With the Panel tool active, select one frame, such as your page.
In the Inspector, open Panel Layouts and choose a template.

Splash: one full-page panel.
Two-up: two panels side by side.
Three-tier: three stacked rows.
Four-panel: a 2 × 2 grid.
Six-panel: three rows of two.
Nine-panel: a 3 × 3 grid.
Webtoon stack: four stacked panels with a much larger vertical gap for phone scrolling.

Gutters are even: each gutter, and the outer margin, is 4% of the frame's width. You can't set the gutter size in the template yet. Move or resize the panels afterwards if you need different spacing. If the frame already has artwork, each new panel gets its own copy of it. When that would use extra memory for raster layers, Varve shows an estimate first and asks you to choose Divide anyway or Cancel.

Join panels and set reading order

Select two or more panels and choose Join selected panels in the Inspector or Arrange › Align › Join Panels. The artwork inside them is kept in place.
Arrange › Align › Renumber Panels (Left to Right) or (Right to Left) renames the panels in a frame in reading order. Use right to left for manga.

Panels are still frames. Move, resize, restyle, and export them the way you would any frame. Page and strip sizes come from Frame or New Document presets, not from panel templates.

Current limits

Templates are even grids only. There are no slanted or irregular borders, no adjustable gutter control, and no knife-style panel splitting. Templates are starting points, not publisher-specific guarantees. See Comic Letteringfor balloons and captions.