How to Recolor Anything in Procreate: 5 Easy Ways

Procreate gives you at least five ways to change a color after you've painted it, and each one exists because the others fail somewhere. Drag and drop is fast but misses tiny gaps. Alpha Lock is precise but works on the whole layer at once. Knowing which method fits which situation is the real skill, and it's exactly what Freya teaches in her Masterclass recoloring lesson, where you get a grayscale parrot illustration and bring it to life piece by piece.

1. Drag and Drop, Plus the Slide Most People Miss

The classic. Select the layer you want to recolor in the Layers panel, pick your new color, then drag the color swatch down from the top right corner of the screen and drop it onto the area.

That part everyone knows. Here's the part they don't: when a layer holds lots of small pieces, you don't have to fill them one at a time. Drop the color, and while your Apple Pencil is still touching the screen, slide it to the right. A ColorDrop Threshold bar appears at the top, and as it rises the fill spreads until every piece on the layer takes the new color. Slide back left if the color floods too far.

Freya uses this on the parrot's wing layer, where a dozen separate feather shapes all fill from a single drop.

2. Drag, Drop and Continue Filling

For pieces that are spread out rather than clustered, there's a second trick built into the same gesture. Drag and drop your color onto the first piece, then look at the top of the screen: a blue Continue Filling button appears.

Tap it, and now every tap of your Pencil fills another area with the same color. Freya recolors the lower wings, the tail and the claws this way, tapping her way across the layer instead of dragging a swatch to each shape. When she wants a warmer grey for the claws, she just picks the new color and keeps tapping.

3. The Selection Tool with Color Fill

This one is the most forgiving. Open the Selection tool (the S-shaped ribbon icon), choose Automatic, and turn on Color Fill at the bottom. Now every area you tap gets selected and filled in one motion.

The reason to love it: while the selection is active, you can go back to the color panel and change your mind. Pick a different color and the filled areas update. Freya fills the parrot's branch with brown this way, then recolors some of the leaves twice, a bright green first and a darker green on a second pass for variety.

4. Alpha Lock and Fill Layer

Some areas are simply too small to drop color into. The parrot's eye, a thin outline, a strand of hair. For these, stop aiming and let the layer do the work.

Tap the layer thumbnail and choose Alpha Lock, or swipe right on the layer with two fingers, which does the same thing. The thumbnail's background turns checkered. Now tap the thumbnail again and choose Fill Layer. Every painted pixel on that layer takes the new color, and nothing else does. No zooming, no hunting for a gap big enough to drop into.

Freya recolors the eye and then the entire line art this way, turning black outlines warm brown in two taps.

5. Hue, Saturation, Brightness

The last method is for when you don't know what color you want yet. Fill the area with any color at all, then go to Adjustments and choose Hue, Saturation, Brightness. Slide the Hue bar and watch the color travel through every possibility. Adjust Saturation and Brightness until it sits right, then tap the Adjustments icon to exit.

In the lesson, Freya auditions colors for the background stroke this way and lands on pink, admitting she always lands on pink. The point stands either way: this is the method for exploring, not executing.

The One Rule That Makes All Five Work

Every method above assumes your artwork is built on separate layers. Body on one layer, wings on another, line art on its own. Recoloring a flattened image is a fight; recoloring a layered one is a tap.

"By the way, to get the good results, make sure that the artwork has the original layers. Without them, it'll be tough to get the job done. So, don't forget to use different layers and avoid doing everything in one layer."

Freya, in the Masterclass lesson "5 Fun Ways to Recolor Your Artwork"

Painting So You Can Recolor Later

Freya's companion lesson on filling base colors shows what layer discipline looks like from the start. She outlines each region with a fine solid brush (her Freya Shaping Pen, though any brush with a crisp solid edge works), closes the shape completely, and only then drops color in.

Two habits from that lesson are worth stealing. First, before filling, hide your sketch layer and check the outline for gaps. One open corner and your ColorDrop floods the whole canvas. Second, if you traced a selection and forgot to switch Color Fill on, don't redo it: tap the layer thumbnail and choose Fill Layer, and the selection fills anyway.

Which One Should You Reach For?

Clustered small pieces: drag and drop with the threshold slide. Scattered pieces: Continue Filling. Still deciding on colors: the Selection tool, or fill anything and scrub the Hue slider. Tiny fiddly areas and line art: Alpha Lock plus Fill Layer.

Both lessons come from Freya's Procreate Masterclass, where recoloring sits inside a much longer path from first strokes to finished illustrations. If you want to try her teaching before committing, the free lessons from the course are the natural place to start. 🎨