Pencil, Spray Can and Colour Replacement in Paint by Zaweba

Not every job wants a soft, pressure-sensitive brush. Pixel art needs hard edges, a quick graffiti effect needs a spray, and recolouring a jacket needs a tool that changes colour but keeps the folds. Paint by Zaweba keeps three specialised tools for those jobs: the Pencil, the Spray Can and Colour Replacement.

Pencil

The Pencil paints aliased strokes. Every pixel is either fully painted or left alone, with no soft edge pixels. That is exactly what you want for pixel art, icons, sprites and any image that will be enlarged without smoothing, and it is also handy for hard masks where a soft edge would be wrong.

Its auto erase option is a classic drawing shortcut. When you start a stroke on a pixel that is already the foreground colour, the Pencil paints with the background colour instead. In practice, that means you can draw a line and then go back over part of it to erase without changing tools. Pixel artists use it constantly when adjusting outlines.

Pair the Pencil with the Pixel art mode of the stroke stabiliser, which keeps lines in whole pixels and avoids doubled corners. Together they make clean one-pixel lines much easier.

Spray Can

The Spray Can lays down a scatter of dots rather than a continuous stroke. You set the radius of the spray, the density of the dots and the range of dot sizes, so the same tool can give a fine mist or a coarse spatter.

Paint keeps flowing while you hold the pen still, just as with a real can. Hold it in one place and the spot gets denser; sweep fast and you get a light trail. That makes it a natural tool for shading, starfields, snow, rust and texture.

Gradient spray takes the dot colours from a gradient rather than a single colour, so each dot can be a different shade. Load a gradient of greens and browns and a few passes give you foliage; use warm oranges for sparks and embers.

For smooth, soft shading without dots, a soft round brush with low flow from the main brush engine is the better tool. The Spray Can is for when you want the dots to show.

Colour Replacement

Colour Replacement changes the colour of what you paint over while keeping the shading underneath. Paint over a red car with blue, and the highlights and shadows stay put; only the colour changes.

It has four modes. Hue changes only the hue, keeping the original saturation and brightness, which is the most natural for most recolouring. Saturation changes only the saturation, useful for greying something out. Colour changes hue and saturation together, for a stronger change. Luminosity changes brightness only.

Sampling decides what counts as the colour to replace. Continuous keeps sampling as you move, good for objects with several shades. Once samples the colour where you first clicked and replaces only colours like it for the rest of the stroke, which stops you spilling onto neighbouring areas. Background swatch replaces colours like your background colour, so you can set it precisely before you start.

Limits control how the colour spreads. Contiguous changes only connected areas under the brush, and find edges does the same while working harder to keep sharp edges crisp. The tolerance sets how close a colour has to be to the sample.

Tips for clean recolouring

Start with a low tolerance and raise it until the colour fills the object. Too high and you will tint the background. Use Once sampling when the object sits next to something of a similar colour. For big or complicated objects, a selection plus a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer can be quicker and stays editable. Colour Replacement is best for touching up areas by hand.

For recolouring line art or flat illustrations, the Colour Changer tool, which also keeps shading, may be easier. And for wholesale changes to an image's palette, adjustment layers are the better route. These three tools fill the gaps around the main brush engine in Paint by Zaweba, and each is worth a few minutes of practice.