How to skip quickly from a messy sketch to a finished drawing in KaleidoPaint
Sometimes, I find it difficult to spend hours tweaking a single outline for a tessellation. I’d rather sketch freely to come up with some ideas. This was the only way to do it, before the edit line/fill function came along in KaleidoPaint. My drawings were messy and close to impossible to change without adding more of a mess on top. Sometimes it was easier just to start over on a blank page. The trick I had found was to use a text editor to remove unwanted sketch code in the KaleidoPaint text file. If you are interested in learning this trick, read on.
This was the original messy sketch, knowing it has potential, I had not deleted it.

Are You Talkin’ to Me? tessellation by Francine Champagne © 2013

Are You Talkin’ to Me? tessellation by Francine Champagne © 2013
Create a duplicate of your file and work on this new copy.
The first thing to do is to drop big dots of each of the colours you have used in your drawing, all the same size, all in the same location, choose some blank space in the drawing, it will become clear later why we are doing this.
Next, draw a clean outline over-top of the sketch, with a weird colour that hasn’t been used yet in your file. I used a bright red for the outline in the example below. And those dots I mentioned above, you can see them in the throat area.

Are You Talkin’ to Me? tessellation by Francine Champagne © 2013
Once you have your KaleidoPaint text file on your computer, open it using a text editor, something like MS Word. You will be faced with a list of curves with nodes, fills and dots. It can be a huge file, dozens of pages. Don’t be intimidated. In the file, there is a header area followed by all of the different “elements” in the file; curves, dots and fills. Each curve has many nodes, telling it which direction to take at which point. Each time you add a line in your drawing, it gets added as the next element in the text file.

KaleidoPaint text file, header area

KaleidoPaint text file, footer area
Now the trick is to scroll up from this point, noticing the same colour code as you move up in the file, till you reach those dots I made you put in the file.

KaleidoPaint text file showing those series of different colour dots
Now comes the boring, but extremely rewarding part of the operation. Place your cursor above these dots. Select all of the elements from here up to the top of the file, making sure to leave the header elements intact, as shown in the image below. Then press DELETE! You have now cleaned up your sketch in a matter of minutes, rather than hours.

KaleidoPaint text file, leave the header intact!
The text file should now be much shorter, with the dot details now as the first elements to show up, as seen in the image below. Followed by the series of bright red lines.

KaleidoPaint text file, showing element dots only

Are You Talkin’ to Me? tessellation by Francine Champagne © 2013
Cheers,
Feene
*You may need to power off your tablet then on again, for the new file to show up.