Select the Live Paint Bucket tool from the toolbar (grouped under the Shape Builder tool) or press K to activate it.
Last updated on
Sep 11, 2025
Learn how to use the Live Paint Bucket tool to paint and customize fills and strokes.
The Live Paint Bucket tool allows you to paint the faces and edges of Live Paint groups with the current fill and stroke colors. The tool pointer shows either one or three color squares, which represent the selected color and two adjacent colors from the Color dialog box swatch library or the Swatches panel. Press the left or right arrow keys to scroll through the adjacent colors.
Specify the Fill color or Stroke color and size you want.
To paint a face, do one of the following:
- Select a face to fill it. The pointer changes to a half-filled paint bucket , and highlight lines appear inside the fill.
- Drag across faces to fill multiple areas at once.
- Double-click a face to flood fill across unstroked edges into adjacent faces.
- Triple-click a face to fill all faces with the same Fill color.
Tip
To switch to the Eyedropper tool and sample fills or strokes, Alt ‑ click (Windows) or option - click (macOS) the fill or stroke you want.
To paint an edge, double-click the Live Paint Bucket tool, select Paint Strokes, and then do any of the following:
- Select an edge to stroke it. The pointer changes to a paintbrush , and the edge is highlighted.
- Drag across multiple edges to stroke more than one edge at a time.
- Double-click an edge to flood stroke across unstroked edges into adjacent faces.
- 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.
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