# Step 5: Paint Mike Ant

In this step, you are going to get to try out the powerful auto paint features.

With auto paint, you click a zone in one drawing and Toon Boom Studio automatically scrolls through the rest of the drawings in the elements to check if there is a closed zone beneath where you clicked. If there is a closed zone, Toon Boom Studio paints the zone with the same color.

Another feature you need to be aware of is auto gap closing. To fill a zone with color, it has to be completely closed. Sometimes, when you draw with the Brush tool, you may not always close zones completely. When you are painting, you can set a threshold for line gaps so that Toon Boom Studio will paint zones regardless of the size of the gap that keeps them open.

To paint Mike Ant:

1. From the Tools > Auto Gap menu, select Close Large Gap.

2. In the Exposure Sheet window, select the colorMe-1 drawing.

3. Press [X] to zoom-in on the drawing so that you can see the zones clearly.

4. Select the Paint tool from the Drawing Tools toolbar.

5. In the Color Palette tab, click the skin color swatch in the mike color palette.

6. Press [Shift]+[Option] and click Mike Ant’s body. Your pointer changes to indicate that the Paint All tool is active. It may take a couple of minutes for Toon Boom Studio to paint all of the zones.

After it is done, scroll through the drawings to see that the body on all of the drawings are painted with the skin color swatch. You may have to manually correct some drawings because of where you clicked on the drawing (it might overlap other zones, for example).

7. Continue to use the Paint All tool until all the static areas of your drawing are colored.

8. When you are finished painting the big zones, you are going to have to paint the smaller zones one at a time. Use the names of the color swatches to identify what zone they belong to on Mike Ant and just click those zones with the Paint tool.