About Live Paint

Converting your artwork to Live Paint groups allows you to color them freely, as you would draw on canvas or paper. You can stroke each path segment with a different color. You can also fill each enclosed path with a different color, pattern, or gradient, even if it isn’t a fully closed path.

Live Paint

Live Paint is an intuitive way to create colored drawings. It lets you use the full range of Adobe Illustrator’s vector drawing tools, but treats all the paths you draw as though they are on the same flat surface. So, no part of the drawing is in front of or behind another. The paths you draw divide the drawing surface into areas that can be colored, regardless of whether the area is bounded by a single path or by segments of multiple paths. Painting objects is like filling a coloring book or painting with watercolors after sketching with a pencil.

Live Paint takes advantage of multiprocessors, which help Illustrator perform the operations more quickly.

Path editing within Live Paint groups

Each path within a Live Paint group remains fully editable. When you move or adjust a path’s shape, the colors you had previously applied don’t stay where they were, like in natural media paintings or image editing programs. Instead, Illustrator automatically reapplies them to the new regions formed by the edited paths.

Edges and faces of Live Paint groups

The paintable parts of Live Paint groups are called edges and faces. An edge is the part of a path between the points where it intersects with other paths. A face is the area enclosed by one or more edges. You can stroke edges and fill faces.

For example, if you convert a circle with a line drawn across it into a Live Paint group, the line becomes an edge that divides the circle into two separate faces. You can use the Live Paint Bucket tool to fill each face and stroke each edge with a different color.