How to Use the Grease Pencil Tint Tool in Blender

The Grease Pencil Tint tool in Blender is a specialized brush feature that allows 2D artists and animators to interactively recolor existing strokes and fills using vertex colors without altering the underlying materials. This guide explains what the Tint tool is, how it functions within the 2D animation pipeline, and the exact steps required to dynamically paint, shade, and adjust stroke colors directly on your canvas.

What is the Grease Pencil Tint Tool?

The Tint tool modifies the vertex color data of Grease Pencil strokes. Instead of creating a new material for every color variation, the Tint tool acts like a traditional digital painting brush, applying a color overlay directly onto targeted strokes. It supports various blend modes (such as Mix, Multiply, and Add) and pressure sensitivity, making it ideal for adding highlights, shadows, soft gradients, and subtle color variations across complex drawings.

How to Recolor Strokes Interactively

To interactively recolor your Grease Pencil strokes using the Tint tool, follow these steps:

1. Enter Vertex Paint Mode

  1. Select your Grease Pencil object in the 3D Viewport.
  2. Open the Mode dropdown menu in the top-left corner of the viewport and switch from Object Mode or Draw Mode to Vertex Paint Mode.

2. Select the Tint Tool

  1. In the left-hand toolbar (press T if hidden), select the Tint brush tool.
  2. In the top Header bar or the Tool Settings panel on the right, pick the color you want to apply using the color wheel.

3. Adjust Brush Settings

  • Radius (F): Sets the size of the brush influence area.
  • Strength (Shift + F): Controls the opacity and intensity of the applied color per stroke.
  • Blend Mode: Choose how the new color interacts with existing stroke colors. Mix replaces the color, while Multiply is ideal for shading and Add is ideal for lighting effects.
  • Falloff: Adjust the curve profile to achieve either hard-edged color applications or smooth, airbrushed transitions.

4. Paint Directly Over Strokes

Click and drag across your Grease Pencil strokes in the viewport. The brush will interactively apply the tint only where the brush cursor intersects stroke vertices. Because the tint operates on vertex colors, your original vector line geometry remains fully intact and editable.

Restricting the Tint Area

To avoid accidentally tinting neighboring strokes, use Grease Pencil masks:

  • Material Masking: Enable the Material lock icon in the brush settings to restrict color changes to strokes that share a specific material.
  • Layer Masking: Lock layers in the Grease Pencil Layer panel to prevent the Tint tool from affecting background or foreground elements.
  • Selection Masking: Switch to edit selection mode within Vertex Paint to tint only specifically selected points or stroke segments.