Krea Realtime Canvas Guide: Draw and Generate Live

Krea’s Realtime canvas is the fastest way to find a composition with an AI image model. Instead of writing a prompt, waiting, and hoping the layout lands, you draw or arrange rough shapes on the left and watch a finished image appear on the right, updating as you move things. It is a sketching tool first and a generator second. This guide covers how to set up a canvas, how to phrase prompts that work with live generation, what the strength control does, and how to take a Realtime result through to a final image.

What Realtime is for

Realtime answers a different question from normal image generation. Standard generation asks 'what should this picture contain?'. Realtime asks 'where should things go?'. That makes it useful for:

• Composition studies. Block in a horizon, a figure and a light source as coloured shapes and try twenty arrangements in a minute.
• Turning sketches into renders. A rough pencil drawing or a child’s doodle becomes a painted scene while keeping its layout.
• Product and set mock-ups. Paste a product photo, draw the table and backdrop around it, and preview staging before a shoot.
• Live performance and demos. With the webcam feed, you move and the image moves with you in a chosen style.

Because the model is working from your shapes, it is far better at placement than text alone. It is less precise at fine detail, which is why the final step is usually to leave Realtime and refine elsewhere.

Setting up your first canvas

1. Open Realtime from the Krea home screen. You will see a canvas on one side and the generated output on the other, with a prompt field and a style or strength control nearby. Labels and layout change between releases, so look for the function rather than the exact name.
2. Choose an input. Draw with the brush and shape tools, paste or upload an image, or switch to the webcam feed.
3. Block in big shapes with meaningful colours. A blue band at the top reads as sky, a green mass as foliage, a warm orange circle as a light source. The model interprets colour and position before it interprets outline.
4. Type a short prompt that says what the shapes are: 'a lighthouse on a cliff at sunset, oil painting'.
5. Adjust strength until the output follows your layout without copying your crude edges.
6. Move things and watch. Drag the lighthouse left, enlarge the sun, change the sky colour. Each change regenerates almost immediately.
7. Save frames you like. Realtime is quick to overwrite, so capture a result as soon as it works.

Writing prompts for a live canvas

Realtime prompts should be shorter and more structural than the long descriptive paragraphs that work in a standard generator. The canvas already carries the composition; the prompt supplies identity and style.

• Name the subject, the medium and the light. 'A red barn in a snowy field, watercolour, soft morning light.' Three clauses are usually enough.
• Match your shapes to your words. If the prompt says 'two figures’ and you drew one blob, the model will struggle. Draw two.
• Change one word at a time. Swapping 'watercolour' for '35 mm photograph' while leaving the canvas alone shows exactly what the prompt controls.
• Use the style selector where it exists. Krea offers preset looks; pick one before fine-tuning words, because it sets the baseline the prompt builds on.
• Avoid long negative lists. Describe what should be there. If something unwanted keeps appearing, paint over that area on the canvas instead.

If you are new to writing image prompts, the structure advice in our Midjourney image prompts guide carries over: subject first, then setting, then style and light.

Settings at a glance

The current interface keeps the controls deliberately sparse. Names may differ slightly from these.

Try it

Draw a dark blue band across the top third, a pale grey band across the bottom, a tall thin white rectangle slightly left of centre, and a small orange circle near the top right. Then use this prompt.

A white lighthouse on a rocky headland at dusk, calm sea, the last orange light on the horizon, oil painting with visible brushstrokes, cool blue shadows

Drag the orange circle lower and watch the time of day shift. Swap 'oil painting with visible brushstrokes’ for 'long-exposure photograph' and the same layout becomes a different image. Then widen the lighthouse rectangle to see how literally the model reads your shapes at the current strength.

From canvas to final image

Realtime output is a sketch, not a deliverable. Resolution is modest and small details can be mushy, because the model is optimising for speed. Once the composition is right, save the frame and take it further:

1. Run it through Enhance to raise resolution and recover detail. Our Krea Enhance guide covers the clarity and creativity trade-off.
2. Use it as an image reference in Krea’s standard Image generator with a fuller prompt, so a stronger model repaints the scene while keeping your layout.
3. Edit specifics with the Edit tool if one element needs changing without touching the rest.

Keep the original canvas file too. Being able to return to the blocks and move the sun again is the whole point of working this way.