To color with a swatch in Procreate, open the Colors panel, tap a swatch in the active palette at the bottom, and paint with it. To flood-fill a shape, drag the swatch from the palette onto the artwork and release (SwatchDrop). To save a new swatch, pick a color and tap an empty square in the palette. Press and hold an existing swatch and tap Set to replace it.

What "color swatch" means in Procreate

Procreate treats a swatch as one saved color, shown as a colored square inside a palette. A palette is a named set of swatches, and the active palette appears at the bottom of every tab in the Colors panel. Those tabs are Disc, Classic, Harmony, Value, and Palettes.

"Coloring a swatch" can mean three different things:

1. Saving a color into a palette so you can reuse it.
2. Painting with a swatch, which means making it your current color and drawing.
3. Filling an area with a swatch, which means dragging it onto the canvas.

Motion designers and animators usually need all three. Production art such as style frames, character color keys, and background paints depends on a limited palette that stays consistent across dozens of files. This guide covers each step, plus how to carry those colors into After Effects, Nuke, or a 3D package.

How to save a color as a swatch

1. Tap the Colors icon to open the panel.
2. Choose your color on any tab. Disc gives fast touch control with a Hue ring around a zoomable Saturation disc. Classic gives Hue, Saturation, and Brightness sliders. Value gives precision sliders with numeric and hexadecimal readouts.
3. Tap an empty square in the active palette at the bottom of the panel. The current color is stored as a new swatch.
4. Tap outside the panel to close it and go back to painting.

If the palette is full, press and hold the swatch you want to overwrite and tap Set. The current color replaces it. If you need more room, create a new palette on the Palettes tab and make it your default instead of cramming everything into one.

Use the Value tab when the color has to match something

If you are matching a brand color, a client style guide, or a value from an After Effects comp, type the hex code on the Value tab instead of eyeballing it on the disc. Then save it as a swatch. That gives you a repeatable starting point and avoids the small drift that comes from re-picking colors by hand.

How to paint with a swatch

Tap any swatch in the active palette and it becomes your current color. The Active Color indicator shows what you have selected, and a brush stroke lays it down immediately.

Some habits that help:

• Check History. The panel keeps your last ten colors. Drag the swipe handle up (Pocket) or use the History area to get a recently used color back, then save it as a swatch if it's worth keeping.
• Compare as you pick. While you drag the reticle, the split circle shows the new color against the last color you painted with. This is useful for judging small value shifts.
• Swap between two colors. Press and hold the Active Color to switch between the current and previous color without reopening the panel.

How to fill an area with a swatch (SwatchDrop)

SwatchDrop is the fastest way to color large flat areas.

1. Open your palette so the swatches are visible.
2. Press and drag a swatch out of the palette onto the shape you want to fill.
3. Release your finger. The color floods the area and spreads outward until it hits a boundary, such as an outline or an area of different color.

ColorDrop works the same way but starts from the Active Color instead of a palette swatch. Drag the Active Color onto the canvas and release.

Fixing fills that leak or look rough

Flood fills behave according to the pixels underneath, so most problems come from the linework:

• Leaks: A tiny gap in an outline lets the color escape into the neighboring region. Close the gap with a small brush stroke, or undo and retry.
• Fringing at edges: Anti-aliased line edges can leave a thin halo of the old color. Cleaning up the soft edge pixels of the linework can help.
• Wrong layer: If your linework sits on a separate layer, the fill may not behave the way you expect, so check which layer is active. Keep color on its own layer under the linework if you plan to animate it later.

Build a palette from a reference image

You don't have to pick every swatch manually. Procreate can generate a palette from an image:

1. Open the Colors panel and go to the Palettes tab.
2. Tap the + icon at the top right.
3. Choose New from Photos or New from File, depending on where the image is stored.
4. Select the image. Procreate extracts its main colors into a new palette, which appears near the top of your palette list.

You don't need a high-resolution image for this. A small, compressed reference will still produce a usable palette. It works well with:

• A frame grab from a shot you're matching
• A mood-board image or a photograph of a location
• A rendered still from Cinema 4D or Blender
• A client-approved style frame

Treat the generated palette as a starting point. Trim colors that don't serve the piece, rename the ones you keep, and add a few of your own for accents and shadows.

Organize swatches so they stay usable

Compact vs. Cards view

The Palettes tab offers two layouts. Compact is the default, with small squares and ten swatches per row, so more palettes fit on screen. Cards shows larger squares, three per row, and each swatch gets an approximate color name such as Blue Green.

Rename and reorder

• In Cards view, tap a swatch's name and type something more descriptive, such as "Sea Green" or "Skin Shadow." Names help when several people share a palette.
• To reorder swatches, tap and drag one to a new position. Putting colors next to each other is a quick way to see whether they work together.
• Press and hold a swatch and choose Set current color if you need to select it without painting.

Name palettes by job, not by mood

One palette per project, scene, or character keeps things clean. A name like "Spot_03_Night" is more useful than "Blues" when you return to the file in three months. Palettes can also be saved, shared, and organized in the Palette Library.

Extend a palette with Harmony, tints, and shades

If a limited palette feels flat, you can expand it without leaving the Colors panel:

• Harmony tab: Choose a mode such as Complementary, Split Complementary, Analogous, Triadic, or Tetradic. The wheel shows related colors based on your selected shade, and you can tap one to use it and save it.
• Tints and shades: Adjust brightness and saturation to create lighter or darker versions of a swatch for highlights and shadows. Save the useful ones as their own swatches so lighting stays consistent.
• Recolor: If you've already painted an area and want to change its color, the Recolor tool can swap colors in a layer without repainting.

A good working set for a style frame might be a handful of base colors plus a light and dark variant of each, which is enough to define form without making the image muddy.

Take Procreate swatches into your motion pipeline

A Procreate palette only helps your animation work if the colors survive the trip into compositing. A few practical points:

• Record the hex values. Open each key swatch on the Value tab and note its hex code in your project documentation. You can then use those codes as a reference in After Effects, Nuke, or a 3D package.
• Check your color management. If a color looks different in your compositing app, a mismatch between display profiles and project color management is the usual cause. Make sure your export and your comp settings agree.
• Export a flat reference. Save a PNG of the final palette, or a swatch chart layer, alongside the artwork. Artists downstream can sample from it with an eyedropper.
• Keep color on separate layers. If the artwork will be cut up for animation, layered exports preserve flexibility.

Quick reference

Common questions

Why won't a swatch fill my whole shape? There is likely a gap in the outline, or the fill is sampling a different layer than you expect. Close gaps and check which layer is active.

Can I change a swatch after I've used it? Replacing a swatch changes the palette, but it does not recolor artwork you've already painted. Use Recolor on the layer if you need to update existing work.

How many swatches should a palette have? There is no fixed rule. Compact view shows ten swatches per row, which is a convenient size for a scene or character palette. Keeping sets small makes consistency easier.

Do swatches carry over between canvases? Palettes can be saved and organized in your Palette Library, so you can reuse them across projects. That is why per-project naming matters.

To color with a swatch in Procreate, open the Colors panel, tap a swatch in the active palette at the bottom, and paint with it. To flood-fill a shape, drag the swatch from the palette onto the artwork and release (SwatchDrop). To save a new swatch, pick a color and tap an empty square in the palette. Press and hold an existing swatch and tap Set to replace it.

What "color swatch" means in Procreate

Procreate treats a swatch as one saved color, shown as a colored square inside a palette. A palette is a named set of swatches, and the active palette appears at the bottom of every tab in the Colors panel. Those tabs are Disc, Classic, Harmony, Value, and Palettes.

"Coloring a swatch" can mean three different things:

1. Saving a color into a palette so you can reuse it.
2. Painting with a swatch, which means making it your current color and drawing.
3. Filling an area with a swatch, which means dragging it onto the canvas.

Motion designers and animators usually need all three. Production art such as style frames, character color keys, and background paints depends on a limited palette that stays consistent across dozens of files. This guide covers each step, plus how to carry those colors into After Effects, Nuke, or a 3D package.

How to save a color as a swatch

1. Tap the Colors icon to open the panel.
2. Choose your color on any tab. Disc gives fast touch control with a Hue ring around a zoomable Saturation disc. Classic gives Hue, Saturation, and Brightness sliders. Value gives precision sliders with numeric and hexadecimal readouts.
3. Tap an empty square in the active palette at the bottom of the panel. The current color is stored as a new swatch.
4. Tap outside the panel to close it and go back to painting.

If the palette is full, press and hold the swatch you want to overwrite and tap Set. The current color replaces it. If you need more room, create a new palette on the Palettes tab and make it your default instead of cramming everything into one.

Use the Value tab when the color has to match something

If you are matching a brand color, a client style guide, or a value from an After Effects comp, type the hex code on the Value tab instead of eyeballing it on the disc. Then save it as a swatch. That gives you a repeatable starting point and avoids the small drift that comes from re-picking colors by hand.

How to paint with a swatch

Tap any swatch in the active palette and it becomes your current color. The Active Color indicator shows what you have selected, and a brush stroke lays it down immediately.

Some habits that help:

• Check History. The panel keeps your last ten colors. Drag the swipe handle up (Pocket) or use the History area to get a recently used color back, then save it as a swatch if it's worth keeping.
• Compare as you pick. While you drag the reticle, the split circle shows the new color against the last color you painted with. This is useful for judging small value shifts.
• Swap between two colors. Press and hold the Active Color to switch between the current and previous color without reopening the panel.

How to fill an area with a swatch (SwatchDrop)

SwatchDrop is the fastest way to color large flat areas.

1. Open your palette so the swatches are visible.
2. Press and drag a swatch out of the palette onto the shape you want to fill.
3. Release your finger. The color floods the area and spreads outward until it hits a boundary, such as an outline or an area of different color.

ColorDrop works the same way but starts from the Active Color instead of a palette swatch. Drag the Active Color onto the canvas and release.

Fixing fills that leak or look rough

Flood fills behave according to the pixels underneath, so most problems come from the linework:

• Leaks: A tiny gap in an outline lets the color escape into the neighboring region. Close the gap with a small brush stroke, or undo and retry.
• Fringing at edges: Anti-aliased line edges can leave a thin halo of the old color. Cleaning up the soft edge pixels of the linework can help.
• Wrong layer: If your linework sits on a separate layer, the fill may not behave the way you expect, so check which layer is active. Keep color on its own layer under the linework if you plan to animate it later.

Build a palette from a reference image

You don't have to pick every swatch manually. Procreate can generate a palette from an image:

1. Open the Colors panel and go to the Palettes tab.
2. Tap the + icon at the top right.
3. Choose New from Photos or New from File, depending on where the image is stored.
4. Select the image. Procreate extracts its main colors into a new palette, which appears near the top of your palette list.

You don't need a high-resolution image for this. A small, compressed reference will still produce a usable palette. It works well with:

• A frame grab from a shot you're matching
• A mood-board image or a photograph of a location
• A rendered still from Cinema 4D or Blender
• A client-approved style frame

Treat the generated palette as a starting point. Trim colors that don't serve the piece, rename the ones you keep, and add a few of your own for accents and shadows.

Organize swatches so they stay usable

Compact vs. Cards view

The Palettes tab offers two layouts. Compact is the default, with small squares and ten swatches per row, so more palettes fit on screen. Cards shows larger squares, three per row, and each swatch gets an approximate color name such as Blue Green.

Rename and reorder

• In Cards view, tap a swatch's name and type something more descriptive, such as "Sea Green" or "Skin Shadow." Names help when several people share a palette.
• To reorder swatches, tap and drag one to a new position. Putting colors next to each other is a quick way to see whether they work together.
• Press and hold a swatch and choose Set current color if you need to select it without painting.

Name palettes by job, not by mood

One palette per project, scene, or character keeps things clean. A name like "Spot_03_Night" is more useful than "Blues" when you return to the file in three months. Palettes can also be saved, shared, and organized in the Palette Library.

Extend a palette with Harmony, tints, and shades

If a limited palette feels flat, you can expand it without leaving the Colors panel:

• Harmony tab: Choose a mode such as Complementary, Split Complementary, Analogous, Triadic, or Tetradic. The wheel shows related colors based on your selected shade, and you can tap one to use it and save it.
• Tints and shades: Adjust brightness and saturation to create lighter or darker versions of a swatch for highlights and shadows. Save the useful ones as their own swatches so lighting stays consistent.
• Recolor: If you've already painted an area and want to change its color, the Recolor tool can swap colors in a layer without repainting.

A good working set for a style frame might be a handful of base colors plus a light and dark variant of each, which is enough to define form without making the image muddy.

Take Procreate swatches into your motion pipeline

A Procreate palette only helps your animation work if the colors survive the trip into compositing. A few practical points:

• Record the hex values. Open each key swatch on the Value tab and note its hex code in your project documentation. You can then use those codes as a reference in After Effects, Nuke, or a 3D package.
• Check your color management. If a color looks different in your compositing app, a mismatch between display profiles and project color management is the usual cause. Make sure your export and your comp settings agree.
• Export a flat reference. Save a PNG of the final palette, or a swatch chart layer, alongside the artwork. Artists downstream can sample from it with an eyedropper.
• Keep color on separate layers. If the artwork will be cut up for animation, layered exports preserve flexibility.

Quick reference

Common questions

Why won't a swatch fill my whole shape? There is likely a gap in the outline, or the fill is sampling a different layer than you expect. Close gaps and check which layer is active.

Can I change a swatch after I've used it? Replacing a swatch changes the palette, but it does not recolor artwork you've already painted. Use Recolor on the layer if you need to update existing work.

How many swatches should a palette have? There is no fixed rule. Compact view shows ten swatches per row, which is a convenient size for a scene or character palette. Keeping sets small makes consistency easier.

Do swatches carry over between canvases? Palettes can be saved and organized in your Palette Library, so you can reuse them across projects. That is why per-project naming matters.