1.1
September 2026
Two new ways to draw, something to watch, and a lot of quiet repair.
New ways to draw
The drawing room is now split into Free Hand and Guided Drawing, so you can choose between an empty page and one that already has something on it. Not knowing what to draw is one of the most common reasons people put the pencil down, and it shouldn't be the end of the session.
- Color a Mandala — six designs, printed line art, and the color is yours to choose.
- Color a Tile Panel — repeating tiles inside borders, drawn from ceramic and encaustic traditions.
- Draw Your Own Pattern — a bounded shape with a few faint dividing lines, and every mark inside it is yours.
Each one lets you pick a design once you're inside, and starts you with the right tool — markers for coloring, pencil for pattern work.
Kaleidoscopes
Six of them, in the sensory room. Colored glass, mirrored and turning slowly. There's nothing to make and nothing to get right, the only thing asked of you is to look at it.
They turn slowly on purpose. Anything that moves quickly enough to flicker can be genuinely unsafe for people with photosensitive epilepsy, so these are held far below that threshold, and they hold still entirely if you have Reduce Motion switched on.
Music
Held Ground is a new exercise where a drone or a slow drum plays underneath while you improvise, so keeping time or finding a rhythm isn't your job. It comes from group music therapy, where the rest of the group holds a steady beat for whoever is playing. Here the app takes the group's part, so somebody on their own at two in the morning still gets that support.
Sleep
A Walk at Night — a forest after dark. Owls, crickets, leaves underfoot, a branch cracking somewhere, and a river a long way off.
Gentler touches
An optional question at the start of the day about what you want today to ask of you, which changes what exercise gets suggested. And an optional one at the end of a session about how you're leaving it. Both are skippable, and neither is graded. The app will never tell you that your sessions are going badly.
Fixed
- Bi-weekly goals crashed the app. If you chose "Bi-Weekly" during setup, Velarium could close itself when it tried to work out where you were in the fortnight. Fixed, and now covered by tests so it can't come back. If this was happening to you, I'm sorry! It took too long for me to find.
- The sensory room's visualizations never loaded. They showed a spinner that never finished. They've been replaced by the kaleidoscopes, which are drawn by the app itself and always work because they don't rely on pre-recorded footage.
- The five instruments all sounded the same. The picker changed the label and nothing else. Piano, bells, pad, strings and marimba now genuinely sound different from each other.
- The ambient layers in the music room were silent. Rain, ocean, forest and the rest now actually play.
- Colors came out wrong in dark mode. Black would disappear entirely against the page, and everything else drew washed out. What you pick is now what you get, in both drawing and painting.
- Journaling asked how you were feeling three times in a single sitting. Once is enough.
- Text and buttons were hard to read in light mode in several rooms: guidance you couldn't see, and exit buttons that faded into their backgrounds.
- The daily suggestion keyed off the light/dark toggle, which is about your eyes, not your mood - so anyone using dark mode all the time was never offered a blank canvas.
Everything you've already made is untouched by this update.