Colour Changer and Flat Colours in Paint by Zaweba

Comic colourists call the first stage of colouring flatting: filling every region of the line art with a flat base colour so later shading and selection are easy. It is essential and tedious work, and Paint by Zaweba has a tool that makes it much quicker. Its neighbour on the toolbar, the Colour Changer, handles the later job of changing colours you have already painted without losing the shading.

Flat Colours

Flat Colours works from hints. With your line art in place, scribble a stroke of colour inside each area: skin colour on the face, blue on the shirt, brown on the hair. You don't need to fill anything or stay neatly inside the lines; a rough scribble is enough. The tool then fills each region on a Flat colours layer, using your hints to decide which colour goes where.

Hold Alt to paint eraser hints, which mark areas that should be left empty. That is useful for the background around a character, or for gaps you plan to fill later with a pattern or a gradient.

Because the result goes onto its own Flat colours layer, the line art is untouched and you can hide, lock or reorder the flats like any other layer.

Getting good flats

Clean line art helps. Closed shapes give the most predictable results, though small gaps are often fine. Put a hint in every region you care about, especially small ones such as eyes, buttons and fingernails, since a region without a hint takes its colour from a neighbour.

Choose clearly different colours for neighbouring regions, even if they are not your final colours. Flats are mainly a selection tool: once each region has its own colour, you can select it in one click on the flats layer and shade or recolour it freely. Distinct colours make those clicks reliable.

After filling, zoom in on tight corners and thin areas. Touch up any mistakes with the bucket or a hard brush on the flats layer.

Colour Changer

The Colour Changer recolours areas while keeping their shading. Paint over a red jacket with blue and the folds, highlights and shadows stay put; only the colour changes.

It is the tool for second thoughts. A client wants the car in green, the character's hair should be darker, the sky in a finished painting needs to be warmer. Rather than repainting, you brush over the area with the new colour.

Colour Changer works well alongside the flats. Select a region using the Flat colours layer, then use the Colour Changer inside the selection on the painted layer. The selection stops the change spilling over the edges, and the tool keeps the shading.

Which tool when

For flatting fresh line art, use Flat Colours. For individual leaks or small regions, the Paint Bucket with close gaps, or Enclose and Fill, is faster. For recolouring painted areas with shading, use the Colour Changer. For changing a colour across the whole image, an adjustment layer may be simpler, and it stays editable.

The Colour Replacement brush is a near relation of the Colour Changer, with more options for sampling and modes. If you need to recolour by hue only, or limit the change to contiguous areas, reach for that one.

Fitting into a colouring workflow

A tidy page looks like this: line art on top, Flat colours layer underneath, shading and highlights on clipped layers above the flats, and effects at the top. Flat Colours builds that middle layer in minutes. The Colour Changer means the whole page can still be adjusted late in the job without repainting. Between them, they take the drudgery out of colouring in Paint by Zaweba and leave you more time for the parts that need an artist's eye.