Drawing Tools

Paint Bucket, Fill Transform and Ink Tools

When you drew an oval or rectangle it was filled automatically. However, you also can manually fill up the closed shape.

Draw closed contour line on the stage using Pencil or Line tool. After that depress the Paint Bucket tool button on the Tool panel (it has a pictogram of the canister or bucket). Your cursor on the stage also changes to bucket shape. Now if you click inside the contour line you will fill it up with the paint.

Any color may be selected for this tool from the color palette which has opened when you click on color picker in the Properties Inspector or on Tools panel. We didn’t stop before on this topic and now will discuss it. Color could be simply picked up from the palette. Also (if you are familiar with hexadecimal color notation you may type color number into textbox at the top of the palette (for example FF0000 for bright red). If you click on small rainbow circle at the top right corner of the palette (only on Tools panel color picker) you may invoke another color picker with capability to adjust color more precisely.

Also you may open Menu – Windows –Color Mixer and Color Swatches – it will port color picker panels permanently to the screen, which is convenient if you change colors often.

At Color Mixer panel you will see an additional choice box where you can select in addition to solid colors such options as linear gradient or radial gradient colors which are combined from two or more different colors. Gradient colors are used very extensively in vector graphics – they also are described with equations and don’t consume much space when applied. It gives a chance to fill contours with very fine and attractive color combinations. You also even can pick up a bitmap image to serve as a background to your fill.

Sometime you are clicking Paint Bucket cursor inside the shape but nothing happen – it doesn’t want to be filled. The common reason is that contour lines are not closely connected – it may be if you use hand-drawing. You may try change a Gap size option at the Panel (when Paint Bucked button is depressed) – it’s possible to adjust a sensitivity of filling process.

Fill Transform tool is similar to the transform tool for the shape, but it allows to rotate or scale the fill leaving the contour as is. Of course it’s meaningless for solid fills – they will look the same even if you rotate them. But for gradient fills it may be convenient. Pictogram for this tool is like gradient colored bar with small arrows nearby.

Ink Tool will repaint the lines in chosen colors. By using it make sure that your cursor is pointed exactly to the line.

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