Colouring with live paint in Vectornation by Zaweba

Line art rarely comes as neat closed shapes. Strokes cross, cut through each other and stop at other lines, which is how drawings work but not how fills normally work. Live paint in Vectornation by Zaweba fills the spaces the eye sees, called faces, and lets you colour the edges between them, without you having to rebuild the paths first.

The feature is made of two tools and a menu. Region fill, on K, does the painting. Region picker, on Shift+L, selects faces or edges. Object > Live paint holds Make, Expand and Release.

Starting a live paint group

Draw or open your line art and select the paths you want to colour. Choose Region fill and click on the selection. That first click turns the selected paths into a live paint group, and from then on the tool sees every enclosed area as a face you can fill. You can also make the group from Object > Live paint > Make if you prefer to set it up before painting.

Now click a face to fill it with the current fill colour. Hold Alt and click to give a face no fill, which is how you clear an area or leave a gap in a pattern. Shift-click an edge to stroke it, so you can colour some lines and not others even though they belong to the same drawing.

Why it stays live

The group follows edits to its paths. Move a line with a selection tool and the faces either side of it change shape to match, keeping their colours. That is the big difference from cutting shapes up with the Shape builder or Pathfinder. You can colour early, keep drawing, and adjust the lines without repainting.

Live paint can also Merge, so you can bring more paths into an existing group when the drawing grows. And like the Shape builder it has gap detection, which treats small breaks between lines as closed. Sketchy line art, or drawings traced from paper, often has tiny openings that would otherwise let a fill leak into the next area or refuse to fill at all.

Selecting with the Region picker

The Region picker (Shift+L) selects faces or edges rather than whole paths. Use it when you want to change several faces at once, for instance every patch of sky in an illustration, or when you want to pick out a run of edges and give them a stroke. It is also the tidy way to check what the group considers to be one face before you paint a large area.

Expand and Release

When the colouring is finished, Object > Live paint > Expand turns the group into ordinary artwork you can edit path by path. Do this when you need plain shapes for another program, a cutter or a printer, or when you want to treat individual faces separately. Release takes the group apart and gives you the paths back, which is useful if you decide the drawing should be coloured another way altogether.

A good habit is to keep the live group as long as the artwork is still changing and only expand on a copy, ready for export. That way the editable version is always there for the next round of changes.

Jobs it handles well

Colouring scanned or traced line drawings is the classic case. So is flat illustration where many shapes share boundaries, like a scene of fields and hedges, a map with regions, or a pattern of interlocking tiles. Live paint is also a friendly way to colour a comic panel or a colouring page, because you can treat it the way you would a paint bucket in a pixel program while the result stays crisp vector artwork.

Forgetting to select the paths before the first click is the usual slip. Region fill makes the group from the selection, so a path left out won't take part. Another is expanding too early and losing the ability to adjust lines with the colour following. Keep an eye on stroke colour as well, since Shift-click strokes an edge, so check the stroke swatch first. And if a fill spills where it shouldn't, look for a gap in the lines, close it, and paint again.

With Region fill, Region picker and the Live paint menu, Vectornation gives you a relaxed way to colour drawings that are still evolving, and a clean way to turn them into plain shapes when they are done.