Document authoring that involves illustrating pen input in an authoring environment is herein improved to provide greater control of colors and patterns for representing the pen input in a graphical user interface. Colors and patterns are provided as effects that are applied to the illustrated pen input so that multiple textures or colors may be applied to the illustrated pen input without requiring the user to manually signal a switch in texture or colors or using multiple objects to represent the pen input. In various aspects, effects may be layered on top of each other, and the effects may be stretched or tiled depending on the size of the illustrated pen input.