Fast fills for line art in Paint by Zaweba

Colouring a comic page or a piece of line art by hand is slow. Every shape needs a fill, every fill needs to reach right up to the line, and any little gap in the ink lets the colour spill across the page. Paint by Zaweba has three fill tools aimed squarely at that job: an improved Paint Bucket, Lasso Fill and Enclose and Fill.

The Paint Bucket

The bucket fills an area of similar colour with one click. Its extra options are what make it useful for line art.

Close gaps treats small breaks in a line as closed, so a quick sketch with an imperfect outline can still be filled without the colour leaking out into the background. Expand grows the fill slightly under the line, which removes the thin light fringe that otherwise appears between the colour and anti-aliased ink.

Line art from layer above or below means the bucket can read the lines from a different layer while it fills the current one. Keep your ink on its own layer, put a colour layer underneath, and fill on the colour layer while the bucket respects the ink above. The line art stays clean and you can recolour without touching it.

The source can also be a pattern or a gradient instead of a flat colour, which is handy for backgrounds, skies or quick texture.

Lasso Fill

Lasso Fill fills the shape you draw. Drag round an area as you would with a lasso selection, and when you let go, it is filled with the current colour. No selection is left behind and there is no separate fill step.

It is the fastest way to block in shadows, rough base colours or shapes with no outline at all. Painters use it to lay down large masses before refining with a brush, and comic colourists use it for cast shadows that follow no inked line.

Enclose and Fill

Enclose and Fill works on a whole area at once. Drag a rectangle or a lasso round part of the drawing, and it fills the regions inside according to the rule you have chosen: all regions, regions like the start colour, regions unlike the border, or transparent regions.

That turns a lot of clicking into one gesture. Circle a character's hand and fill all the small gaps between the fingers, the nails and the cuff at once. Choose transparent regions to fill only empty parts of a colour layer and leave anything you've already painted alone. Choose unlike the border to fill everything enclosed except the line itself.

A clean colouring workflow

Ink on one layer and keep it on top. Make a colour layer below it. Use Enclose and Fill or the bucket with line art from the layer above to lay flat base colours quickly, with close gaps and expand switched on. Use Lasso Fill for shadows on a clipped layer above the base colours, and Lasso Fill again, in a lighter colour, for highlights.

If your line art has many tiny regions, the Flat Colours tool can do the flat-colouring stage for you from scribbled hints, and these fill tools then handle the touch-ups.

Common snags

If a fill leaks, check whether the gap is larger than the close gaps setting allows. If fills leave a pale halo next to the ink, raise expand a little. If the bucket seems to ignore the line art, check that the reference is set to the right layer.

Fills in Paint by Zaweba follow the same gradients and patterns as the rest of the app, so a gradient you make for a shape or Layer Art can be used straight away in the bucket too. That shared library is one reason colouring stays consistent across a page.