Have you ever doodled concept art silhouettes? Ever needed a quick way to block in your line art, or carve out crisp and clean shapes? Follow along to learn a few tips and tricks using Fill Brushes to accomplish a wide variety of goals and artistic styles. From drawing shapes in perspective, to textile design, to concept art, fill brushes have it covered!

Solid Fill Brush

Fill brushes are a powerful way to quickly cover a lot of canvas. Like a lasso tool, fill brushes draw with a closed loop, meaning the front and the tail end of your stroke will connect automatically, flooding the center with your choice of color. This is great for filling in large portions of your composition, carving bold shapes in your concept art, or blocking in your line art layers when preparing for the color phase.

• From the brush menu, find the “Fills” folder. Select Solid Fill and choose your desired color.
• Notice how when you draw, the center of your stroke fills in with solid color.
• Choose Solid Fill as your eraser to cut into your shape with the same lasso style functionality!

The Lazy Guide

Sometimes you want your shapes to be smoother, simplified and easier to control. It no longer takes a stable wrist to achieve stylized precision. Give the Lazy Guide a try, it’ll help guide your brush!

• From the Create tool panel, activate the Lazy guide.
• Your strokes now have an error radius to smooth out jitter and wobble in your wrist.
• Make long smooth curves, or razor sharp turns.
• Adjust the Lazy radius with the gear icon, or switch to elastic mode for a more springy Lazy guide.

Solid Shapes

Combine fill brushes with shapes to create solid circles and rectangles on the fly. Adjust the rotation, skew and stretch the shape, and move it into place.

• Open the Create tool panel and select your desired shape.
• Drag out your first shape and use the floating nodes to adjust the rotation, scale and skew.
• The shape is active until you tap away. While it’s live, you can change the color, or even switch to the eraser in real-time!

Pattern Projects

Fill brushes are perfect for textile and pattern design, especially when combined with Shape tools and the Lazy Guide.

• When starting a new project, choose the Pattern option.
• Your drawing will repeat itself seamlessly across the infinite canvas.
• Draw within the safe zone to create your repeating design!
• Pro tip: Use the Pattern paint bucket to fill your projects with seamless patterns! Export your pattern image, then import it into your Pattern Fill texture library.

Texture Fill Brushes

As if the Solid Fill brush wasn’t cool enough, it’s time to take things to the next level with textures! Check out the special effects you can achieve with texture fill brushes like Grunge or Screentone.

• Add a new layer above your silhouetted shape.
• Tap the new layer and select “Clip” from the layer options pop up menu. Clipping the new layer means that any brushwork you add to it will stick to the silhouette below.
• Pick a texture fill brush and add your effects!
• Pro tip: In the brush editor, head over to the Texture tab. If you’ve saved your custom pattern image, import it as a texture for a fill brush that paints with the pattern!

Blur the Edges

Using the Blend tool, (found under the brush icon) you can use custom brushes to smudge the pixels on the canvas. In this example, the blend brush is the Cloth Shader from the Pencil folder.

• Select the Blend tool and choose a brush to smudge with.
• Using light pressure, you can gently soften some of the harsh transitions caused by the lasso fill, or blend some of the details seen in your texture brushes.
• Some Blend brushes soften and blur the pixels, some are great for dragging pixels across the canvas like a pallet knife!

The Final Artwork

Now that you’ve discovered the power of Fill Brushes, what will you do with them first? A great way to start would be to make your own repeating pattern, textile or texture, then importing that pattern into the texture source of a fill brush. Do you have a cool new texture brush? Share it with the community so we can play with your custom tool!