Painting tools

The Painting window's toolkit

Painting tools

The Copy Paint tool is used to copy a color used to paint a region and apply it to another region. You might want to do this when painting several regions that share the same color with regions that have already been painted, or when dragging colors through from the previous drawing.

The Fill Paint tool is used to paint whole regions with the color you've chosen from the palette. When you click in a region with the Fill Paint tool, the current color is applied to that region.

To paint multiple unpainted regions the same color, draw a bounding box over the unpainted regions. When you release the mouse, all the unpainted regions enclosed by the box are painted with the currently selected color.

The Paint Toggle tool can be used to modify the way that this tool works (see below).

The Fast Paint tool is used to quickly paint a number of areas with the current color. It is especially useful when you are working with regged drawings.

To use the Fast Paint tool simply, click in a region. The current color is applied to that region.

To use the Fast Paint tool to paint a number of regions, drag the mouse over the regions to be painted. As you drag, the regions are highlighted with a tint of the current color; to deselect any regions you don't want painted with that color, press the backspace key while the cursor is over that region. When you release the mouse button, the selected regions are painted with the selected color.

The Paint Toggle tool can be used to modify the way that this tool works (see below).

The Paint Toggle tool works in a similar way to the Ink Line Toggle tool: it controls the modifications you make with the following painting tools:

Fill Paint tool

Fast Paint tool

Freehand Paintbrush tool

The tool has two modes, which you can toggle between by clicking on the icon:

When the tool is selected (i.e. is a different color to most of the other tools), you can only paint regions that are unpainted or transparent.

When the tool is not selected (i.e. is the same color as most of the other tools), you can paint regions of any color.

Note that the bounding box behavior of the Fill Paint tool and the dragging behavior of the Fast Paint tool are not affected by the setting of the Paint Toggle tool.

The Freehand Paintbrush tool creates new region boundary lines and paints them in with the currently selected color. It is especially useful when there is a poor match between the region boundary lines and the trace lines.

To change the size of the brush used by the tool, hold down the Alt key:

Drag down and to the left to make the brush smaller, or

Drag up and to the right to make the brush larger.

As you work with this tool, you'll see it 'nudges' aside the region boundaries. For this reason it's sometimes known as the Nudge Tool.

The Paint Toggle tool can be used to modify the way that this tool works (see above).

The Smart Fill tool speeds up painting of the very small regions that sometimes appear as a result of the scanning process. These regions can sometimes be so small that you will need to zoom right in, in order to see them with the naked eye.

The Smart Fill works by painting in these very small regions for you, making a 'best guess' about the intended color. It won't normally paint regions it thinks should be transparent; if you want to override this, hold the Alt key down as you use the tool, and the transparent areas will also be painted.

Use the Smart Fill tool when you have finished painting all the larger regions of a drawing; smart-filling is usually the last thing you do in a drawing to complete it before going to the next drawing.

The Painting window's toolkit

Painting tools