Table of Contents
Paint with the Paint tool
Pixelmator Pro includes a number of different painting tools that you can use to create digital or traditional paintings, draw, sketch, illustrate, paint on your photos, and more. There's a number of different brushes for you to paint with — some of these brushes emulate traditional drawing and painting tools while others are digital brushes. These brushes are fully customizable and you can even create your own brushes from scratch.
Along with the Paint tool, the other painting tools are the Quick Fill, Color Fill and Gradient Fill tools, the Pixel tool, the Erase, and the Smart Erase tools.
Paint with the Paint tool
The Paint tool is a versatile painting tool — it can be used to paint traditional or fully digital paintings, create effects in your photos or designs, or just add a touch of artistic flair to an image.
Choose the Paint tool by doing one of the following:
- Click
in the
Tools sidebar or choose if from the
grouped tools. - Choose Tools > Paint (from the Tools menu at the top of your screen).
- Press the key on your keyboard.
- Click
In the Tool Options pane, click the Brush Browser to select a brush.
In the Brush Browser, you can choose a brush from the collections on the left or search for brushes by name using the search field at the top. Learn more about using the Brush Browser — creating, deleting, renaming brush collections, and more — below.
Customize the Paint tool:
Color: In the Tool Options pane, click the color well to choose a color or click
to pick a color from the image.Brush Size: Drag the Brush Size slider to adjust the size of the Paint tool brush. Press and hold the key to extend the range of the Brush Size slider beyond 500 pixels. You can also manually enter a value from 1 px to 5000 px.
Softness: Drag the Softness slider to adjust the softness of the edges of the Paint tool brush.
Blend Mode: Click the Blend Mode pop-up menu to choose a blend mode.
Opacity: Drag the Opacity slider to adjust the transparency of the Paint tool.
Smoothing: Smoothing automatically smooths out brush strokes as you paint allowing for straighter, more stable lines. You can turn on Smoothing at the bottom of the Paint tool options pane and choose the strength of smoothing from the pop-up menu, 10% giving you minimal smoothing and 100% — maximum smoothing.
Tip: – click the canvas to bring up a shortcut menu with Brush Size and Softness slider to adjust the settings of your brush more quickly. You can also use the and keys on your keyboard to change the size of the Paint tool brush.
Drag on the canvas to paint using your selected brush. You can temporarily switch from painting to erasing by holding down or on your keyboard.
Tip: Use the Brush Browser
The Brush Browser is where you find and choose brushes, create and customize brush collections, and more.
Search for a brush: Use the search field at the top of the Brushes Browser to search for specific brushes by name.
Create a new brush: Click 
in the top-right corner of the Brushes Browser.
Move or rearrange brushes: Drag and drop the brush to a new place within a collection or to any other collection in the sidebar on the left.
Favorite, rename, duplicate, reset or remove a brush: Hover your pointer over the brush you'd like to edit and click the arrow that appears. Then, choose an option from the menu.
Manage brush collections: Hover your pointer over the brush collection and click 
. You can then choose to create a new brush collection or delete a current one, rename and duplicate collections, import or export collections.
Rearrange brush collections: Drag and drop the brush collection to the position you want it in the collections sidebar.
