DadakiLive Paint: colour the gaps, not the shapes
Draw a few overlapping circles. The eye sees a dozen regions; a vector editor sees three shapes and no regions at all. Live Paint closes that gap.
Open the editorNo sign-up, no download. It opens on a blank canvas.
What it does
A Live Paint group reads a set of paths as a map of enclosed areas — the regions their crossings carve out — and lets you fill each one independently, the way you would in a colouring book. Those regions are not shapes you drew and would be tedious to construct by hand.
The 'live' part is the point: move one of the underlying lines and the regions recompute, keeping the colours you already assigned. Sketch the structure, colour it, then keep adjusting the structure.
Using it
- Draw the linesAny paths that cross each other — pen, pencil, shapes, or all three.
- Make a Live Paint groupSelect them and press ⌥⌘X.
- Pick up the bucketPress B. While the bucket is armed the keyboard belongs to painting.
- Click a regionIt fills. Shift-click to paint the line under the cursor instead of the area.
- Sample a colour⌥-click picks up the colour under the cursor as the fill, ⇧⌥-click as the edge colour — reading what is actually on screen, including a point partway along a gradient.
- FinishPress Enter. Double-click the group later to get back into it.
When it is the right tool
Flat-colour illustration
Ink the linework first, then colour underneath it, without building a closed shape for every coloured area by hand.
Maps and diagrams
Borders drawn as lines; territories filled as regions. Move a border and the fills follow.
Geometric pattern work
Overlap a grid or a set of arcs and colour the resulting cells — the interesting shapes are the intersections, which nothing else gives you directly.
Anything you would have flattened
It is the alternative to committing to boolean geometry before you know what the picture wants to be.
Dadaki is free and the editor is open source under the MIT licence — the whole thing is on GitHub. There is no watermark, no export limit and no paid tier gating the drawing tools. An optional account adds cloud sync and shared team files; everything else works signed out.
Open the editorNo sign-up, no download. It opens on a blank canvas.
Questions
What is Live Paint?
A mode that treats a set of overlapping paths as a map of enclosed regions you can fill individually, like colouring in. The regions recompute when you move the underlying lines, keeping the colours you assigned.
How is it different from a normal fill?
A normal fill colours a shape you actually drew. Live Paint colours the areas formed where several shapes cross — areas that exist visually but are not objects in the document.
Can I edit the lines after painting?
Yes, that is the point. Double-click back into the group and move a path; the regions are recalculated and the existing colours carry over.