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Canvas is where your characters and backgrounds come together into finished story scenes. Instead of generating everything separately and assembling it somewhere else, you can place your characters and backgrounds on a single canvas, adjust the composition, add your story text, and export — all without leaving Neolemon.
Best for: Children's book authors building complete page illustrations, creators who want full control over where characters appear in a scene, and anyone compositing multiple elements into one image.
Why it matters: Generating a great character and a great background is only half the job. Canvas gives you the other half — the ability to put them together exactly the way you see the scene in your head.
Before You Open Canvas
Canvas works with assets you've already created in Neolemon. Before you start, generate all the backgrounds and character poses you'll need for your scene. A few things to keep in mind:
- Use the same illustration style for every asset in a scene. If your backgrounds are Pixar-inspired, your characters should be too. Mixing styles in one scene will always look off.
- Generate your backgrounds first, then your characters. If a background has something you don't want in it — an object, a figure — use the Brush Eraser to paint over it before you bring it into Canvas.
- For each character, create a full-body, front-facing anchor image first, then use the Action Editor to generate the poses you need for each scene.
Step 1: Set Your Canvas Dimensions
Open Canvas. You'll start with a blank canvas and a dimensions selector.
Choose from preset sizes for common formats (portrait document, square, social media sizes like Instagram and YouTube) or enter your own custom dimensions. For a children's book, portrait or square are the most common choices.
💡 Pro Tip: Match your Canvas dimensions to your book's trim size from the start. If you're publishing on Amazon KDP, common trim sizes are 8.5" × 8.5" (square) or 8" × 10" (portrait). Setting the right dimensions now means your exports will be correctly proportioned when you take them into layout software.
Step 2: Upload Your Background
Click Select Assets to browse all the images you've created in Neolemon. Find the background you want for this scene and upload it to the canvas.
Once the image appears, click Set as Background. The image snaps to fill the canvas instantly, perfectly aligned. You don't need to drag or resize it manually.
Step 3: Add Your Characters
Click Select Assets again and upload your first character pose.
The character will appear with its original background still attached, which won't look right against your scene background. Click the Background Remover on the character to cut it out cleanly. The background disappears and leaves only the character, ready to be placed.
Move and resize the character to where you want them in the scene. Then repeat the process for any additional characters.
💡 Pro Tip: Place and remove the background from each character one at a time. This gives you the cleanest results and lets you position each element before moving on.
Step 4: Adjust Layering
Once you have multiple elements on the canvas, use the layer controls to get the depth right.
- Send Backwards / Bring Forward — move an element one layer at a time
- Send to Back / Bring to Front — jump an element all the way to the back or front of the stack
You can also Duplicate any element to use it more than once in the same scene, or Delete it if you no longer need it.
Step 5: Add Your Story Text
Click Add Text and type your story line directly onto the canvas. Move the text block to wherever it reads best in the scene — along the bottom, above the characters, or wherever the background gives it enough contrast to be clearly visible.
You can realign the text to center it, or drag it freely to any position.
💡 Pro Tip: Place text on areas of the background with simple, even color — grass, sky, a pale wall — so it's easy to read. Avoid placing text directly over your characters' faces or over busy, detailed parts of the background.
Step 6: Export
When the scene looks right, click Export. Your finished scene saves as an image you can use in your book layout, share for feedback, or batch alongside the rest of your pages.
Canvas Controls at a Glance
Control | What it does |
Select Assets | Browse and upload your Neolemon images |
Set as Background | Fills the canvas with the selected image, perfectly aligned |
Background Remover | Removes the background from a character or object |
Send Backwards / Bring Forward | Adjust element layering one step at a time |
Send to Back / Bring to Front | Jump to the back or front of the layer stack |
Duplicate | Copy an element on the canvas |
Add Text | Add a text block anywhere on the scene |
Undo / Redo | Step back or forward through your edits |
Export | Save your finished scene as an image |
What to Read Next
- Action Editor — create the character poses you need before bringing them into Canvas
- Expression Editor — adjust emotions scene by scene while keeping your character consistent
- How to Keep Multiple Characters Consistent — the prompting and referencing workflow for two-character scenes
