Illustrator

Paint with the Live Paint Bucket tool

The Live Paint Bucket tool lets you paint faces and edges of Live Paint groups with the current fill and stroke attributes. The tool pointer displays as either one or three color squares, which represent the selected fill or stroke color and, if your using colors from a swatch library, the two colors adjacent to the selected color in the library. You can access the adjacent colors, as well as the colors next to those, and so on, by pressing the left or right arrow key.

  1. Select the Live Paint Bucket tool .
  2. Specify the fill color or stroke color and size you want.
    Note: If you select a color from a the Swatches panel, the pointer changes to display three colors . The selected color is in the middle, and the two adjacent colors are on either side. To use an adjacent color, click the left or right arrow key.
  3. To paint a face, do any of the following:

    • Click a face to fill it. (When the pointer is over a face, it changes to a half-filled paint bucket  and highlight lines surround the inside of the fill.)

    • Drag across multiple faces to paint more than one face at a time.

    • Double-click a face to fill across unstroked edges into adjacent faces (flood fill).

    • Triple-click a face to fill all faces that currently have the same fill.

      To switch to the Eyedropper tool and sample fills or strokes, Alt‑click (Windows) or Option-click (Mac OS) the fill or stroke you want.
  4. To paint an edge, double-click the Live Paint Bucket tool and select Paint Strokes, or temporarily toggle to the Paint Strokes option, by pressing Shift; and then do any of the following:

    • Click an edge to stroke it. (When the pointer is over an edge, it changes to a paint brush  and the edge is highlighted.)

    • Drag across multiple edges to stroke more than one edge at a time.

    • Double-click an edge to stroke all connected edges of the same color (flood stroke).

    • Triple-click an edge to stroke all edges of the same stroke.

      Note: Pressing Shift lets you quickly toggle between painting only strokes and only fills. You can also specify these changes in the Live Paint Bucket Options dialog box. If you currently have both the Paint Fills option and the Paint Strokes option selected, pressing Shift switches to Paint Fills only. (This can be helpful when you are trying to fill a small face surrounded by stroked edges.)

Live Paint Bucket options

The Live Paint Bucket options let you specify how the Live Paint Bucket tool works, choosing whether to paint just fills, just strokes, or both, as well as how to highlight faces and edges as you move the tool over them. You can see these options by double-clicking the Live Paint Bucket tool.

Paint Fills
Paints the faces of Live Paint groups.

Paint Strokes
Paints the edges of Live Paint groups.

Cursor Swatch Preview
Displays when you choose a color from the Swatches panel. The Live Paint Bucket tool pointer appears as three color swatches: the selected fill or stroke color plus the color directly to the left and right of it in the Swatches panel.

Highlight
Outlines the face or edge the cursor is currently over. Faces are highlighted with a thick line and edges are highlighted with a thin line.

Color
Sets the color for the highlight. You can choose a color from the menu or click the paint swatch to specify a custom color.

Width
Specifies how thick to make the highlight.