Paint brush and fill

The paint brush is a three-phase tool: paint a stroke, trace it into a selection, then convert that selection into a permanent vector shape, all without leaving the canvas. The fill bucket sits alongside it as a one-click flat-color tool for objects and the page background.

Quick overview

1. Activate the paint brush from the left toolbar.
2. Pick a brush type: Normal, Oil, or Watercolor.
3. Adjust size, hardness, opacity, flow, spacing, smoothing, and color in the floating bar.
4. Paint on the canvas. Each stroke bakes onto a shared paint layer and can be undone on its own.
5. Click To Selection to trace the paint into a frame outline, or Save to keep the raw paint as an image.
6. Click To Shape to turn that outline into a permanent vector path you can style like any other object.

Detailed reference

Brush types

Type	Rendering	Best for
Normal	A solid circle at 95% hardness or higher; below that, a radial gradient fades from full opacity to transparent at the edge	Clean strokes, solid fills, precise edges
Oil	A 4-stop radial gradient with a slightly over-bright center, plus random per-pixel noise (up to about 15 RGB values per channel) added after every stamp	Textured, painterly strokes
Watercolor	3 overlapping translucent circles per stamp, each offset by up to 1.5 px and growing slightly in radius, for a soft bleeding look	Tonal washes, soft backgrounds

Brush settings

Setting	Range	Default	Description
Size	1 to 200 px	20	Diameter of the brush tip
Hardness	0 to 100%	80	Edge softness; 100 is a razor edge, lower values fade out
Opacity	1 to 100%	100	Ceiling transparency for the whole stroke
Flow	1 to 100%	60	Alpha of each individual stamp; how quickly the opacity ceiling is reached
Spacing	1 to 100% of size	25	Distance between stamps as you drag
Smoothing	1 to 100%	40	Blends recent pointer positions to reduce jitter; below 5 it has no effect
Color	any	white	Set from the inline swatch in the floating bar

The floating bar exposes Size, Hardness, Opacity, and Flow as sliders plus the color swatch. Spacing and Smoothing use their defaults above and shape how a stroke lays down under the hood.

Flow vs. opacity

Opacity is the ceiling for the whole stroke. Flow is how fast a single pass reaches it. Low flow with high opacity builds up gradually over repeated strokes across the same area; high flow reaches full coverage in one pass.

The paint-to-shape pipeline

Paint. Strokes accumulate on a shared paint layer that sits over the canvas until you convert or clear it.

To Selection. The painted layer is thresholded to a mask, small interior gaps are closed, and the outline is traced and smoothed into a dashed preview. That preview is itself a real object: drag, scale, or reshape it before finalizing.

To Shape. The current preview outline, including any adjustments you made to it, is simplified and turned into a filled, stroked vector path. It behaves like a Selection Tools frame too, so you can still drop an image onto it. A toast offers Save to My Shapes, and disappears after about 6 seconds if you don't click it.

Save. Keeps the raw paint as a cropped image, trimmed to what you painted with a little padding, instead of tracing it into a shape. Like the To Shape output, it's frame-capable, so an image can be dropped onto it later.

Clear. Wipes the paint layer. This step is itself undoable.

Floating bar

Control	Action
Normal / Oil / Water	Switch brush type
Size, Hardness, Opacity, Flow sliders	Adjust the current stroke
Color swatch	Pick the brush color
To Selection	Trace the paint into a frame outline
To Shape	Convert the current selection outline into a vector shape
Save	Keep the raw paint as a cropped image
Clear	Erase all unconverted paint
Exit (✕)	Leave paint mode

Undo

Paint strokes keep their own undo and redo stack, up to 25 steps, separate from the canvas's main history. Ctrl + Z and Ctrl + Y undo and redo one stroke at a time while the brush is active, before falling back to the regular object history once the paint stack is empty.

Fill bucket

A one-click flat-fill tool. Click any fillable object to flat-fill it with the current color, or click empty canvas to set the page background color. Clicking a group fills each fillable child inside it individually rather than the group as a whole.

Fillable	Not fillable
Text, rectangles, circles, ellipses, triangles, polygons, paths, lines, polylines	Images, frame outlines, and any tool's in-progress handles or preview overlays

The color swatch in the fill bucket's bar opens the same right-panel color manager used everywhere else in the editor, so it shares your document, photo, and default palettes. Activating the fill bucket, or any other drawing tool, automatically exits whichever one was active before it: only one canvas tool runs at a time.

Step by step

Hand-draw a highlight and save it as a reusable shape

1. Activate the paint brush and pick the Normal brush. Set a bold Size and pick a color from the swatch.
2. Draw the mark you want, for example an underline swoosh or a circled highlight. Paint over the same area a second time if you want it fuller.
3. Click To Selection. The paint is traced into a dashed outline you can nudge, scale, or reshape.
4. Click To Shape to bake that outline into a real vector path. It drops onto the canvas selected, styled with fill and stroke.
5. When the toast appears, click Save to My Shapes to keep the mark in your library (My shapes) for reuse across designs.

Build up a soft textured wash

1. Pick the Oil or Watercolor brush and lower Flow to around 20 to 30 percent.
2. Pass the brush over the same area a few times. Each pass layers a little more color, so the texture builds gradually instead of flooding to full opacity at once.
3. When the wash looks right, click Save to keep it as an image on the canvas (trimmed to what you painted), or To Shape if you want a flat vector version instead.

Recolor a flat vector illustration

1. Activate the fill bucket and set its color from the swatch (it opens the shared color manager).
2. Click a vector object, such as a shape, path, or text block, to flood it with that color in one click.
3. For an imported multi-part graphic, click a group to recolor every fillable child at once, or ungroup it first (see Grouping and layers) to fill each region separately.
4. Click empty canvas to paint the page background instead of an object.

Common tasks

Goal	Recipe
Reuse a painted mark	Paint it, To Selection, To Shape, then Save to My Shapes
Keep a textured brush stroke as-is	Paint it, then Save to drop it as a trimmed image
Drop a photo inside a painted shape	Both To Shape and Save outputs are frames; drag an image onto them
Recolor one region of a grouped graphic	Ungroup, then fill that path with the bucket
Set the page background color fast	Activate the fill bucket and click empty canvas
Undo a single brush stroke	Ctrl + Z while the brush is still active

Troubleshooting

To Selection and Save stay greyed out

Those buttons need real paint on the layer. Very faint paint does not count: a single low-flow pass can leave every pixel under the alpha threshold, so the tool reads it as empty. Raise Flow or Opacity, or pass over the area again, then the buttons enable.

"Paint region too small to select"

A thin stroke traces to too few contour points to form a shape. Paint a thicker or looser blob before clicking To Selection.

The eraser will not erase brush strokes

The live paint layer and the vector shapes you convert paint into are not raster images, and the manual eraser in Image editing only works on a selected image. To erase painted content, use Ctrl + Z or Clear while painting, or Save the paint as an image first and then erase that image.

Other things to watch for:

• To Shape is disabled. It only enables in the selection phase. Click To Selection first, then To Shape.
• Paint vanished when you left the tool. The paint layer does not export and is discarded when you exit paint mode. Run To Shape or Save to commit it before pressing Esc or the ✕.
• The bucket does nothing on a photo. Images are not fillable. The bucket sets a solid fill on vector objects, text, or the page background; it does not flood-fill pixels inside a photo by color or tolerance.
• The bucket recolored a whole group. Clicking a group fills every fillable child at once. Ungroup for per-region control.
• Ctrl + Z stopped undoing strokes. The paint stack holds 25 steps and is separate from the main history. Once it empties, undo falls through to normal object history.

Keyboard shortcuts

Shortcut	Action
Esc	Exit the paint brush or fill bucket, discarding any unsaved paint
Ctrl + Z / Ctrl + Y	Undo or redo one stroke while the brush is active

Both tools are activated from the left toolbar rather than a letter key.

Tips

A frame in disguise

Both the Save and To Shape outputs double as frames, so a saved brush shape or a raw paint image can have another image dropped onto it, exactly like a Selection Tools frame.

Build up texture gradually

Set Flow low, around 20 to 30%, and pass over the same area a few times with Oil or Watercolor. It builds up more naturally than one pass at high flow.

Related

• Selection tools for other ways to create a frame
• Image editing for reshaping a frame's outline after conversion
• My shapes for saving and reusing a converted shape
• Pen tools for precise vector paths instead of freehand painting