prevent keynote from merging drawings.

I am using my apple pencil to draw in keynote. I often make several drawings on the same slide and I want to be able to edit and animate separately. However, keynote often decides to merge them into one drawing arbitrarily. I know I can separate them afterwords but that becomes tedious and annoying repeatedly, and impossible if the drawings overlap. Anyway I can inhibit keynotes eagerness for "efficiency "? I am running on iPadOS 17.2, with the default installed Keynote.