ToonSquid 2.0.17
20 December 2025
The ToonSquid 2.0.17 update overhauls the fill tool for pixel layers with lots of new powerful settings you can use to achieve the perfect fill in all situations.
Fill Expand#
The new Expand setting makes it easy to get rid of gaps between the fill and your line art, even if you use a low fill threshold.
Fill Blend Modes#
You can now choose different blend modes for how the fill region should be combined with the existing layer contents. Use the Automatic, In Front, or Behind modes to control whether the fill should blend on top of underneath the layer contents.
Erase Fill#
Use the Erase fill blend mode to erase entire color regions at once using the fill tool.
Fill Anti-Aliasing#
The new Anti-Aliasing setting allows you to control whether you want the edge of the fill region to be hard and pixelated or smooth and anti-aliased.
Fill Blur#
If a thin anti-aliased edge is not enough, you can instead choose to apply a wider blur to the fill region using the new Blur setting.
Smart Recolor#
The new Smart Recolor option makes it easy to change the color of filled regions while preserving the existing opacity and smoothly transitioning into surrounding colors.
Other Improvements#
- Adding a new group layer while having multiple layers selected now automatically moves the selected layers into the new group.
- Auto fill brushes have been fixed to respect selection regions.
Notes on Vector Filling With Stroked Paths#
If you tend to work a lot with vector stroke brushes in combination with the fill tool, then you might have noticed a change in behaviour after the previous update (2.0.16). By default, ToonSquid no longer attempts to automatically close hidden gaps between stroked vector paths when filling.
This latest update (2.0.17) now introduces an experimental setting with which you can choose to opt in to the old behaviour again. You can find this setting in the iPad settings app under Apps > ToonSquid > Experimental > Vector Fill Stroke Gap Closing. Please make sure to read the following explanation as to why this change was made and why enabling that setting is therefore not generally recommended.
How does filling work with vector contents?#
When filling vectors, the fill region is defined by the vector path that goes through the individual vector control points. For vector shape brushes, the vector path goes around the outside of the brush stroke. For vector stroke brushes, it’s the open centerline of the brush stroke. It is that line which must be closed. The stroke thickness does not affect whether the line is considered to be closed or not. (This has always been the case in ToonSquid.)
This also means that there is an inherent complexity and trade off that comes with the choice of working with vector stroke brushes, since they make it very easy to accidentally end up creating drawings with lots of unconnected vector paths. These gaps are hidden by the stroke widths of the paths and it's hard to see where exactly the centerline of a stroked path begins and ends. When it comes to shapes drawn with vector shape brushes however, what you see is what you get, since their outer edge defines the fill region.
What was the old behaviour of the fill tool and why did it change?#
ToonSquid used to try to hide this complexity of vector stroke brushes - but only with mixed success. Prior to the 2.0.16 update, ToonSquid would silently attempt to automatically close such hidden gaps between stroked vector paths by temporarily adding in connection lines during the fill process. There were some cases - mostly in simple drawings - where this would work well, which allowed the fill to succeed even though the region was not closed. However, this automated gap closing was never guaranteed to work under all circumstances, which meant that there were plenty of situations where it wouldn’t make a difference and you were still faced with a “Region is not closed” message even though you couldn’t visually tell much of a difference between the current case and another one that worked.
But more importantly, there was a small percentage (but still a large total number) of scenarios where the complexity of this automated gap closing procedure would result in long freezes of the app which were naturally highly disruptive to the workflow and could even prevent you completely from filling certain vector layers at all once you got into such a state with your drawings. The ways in which the automated gap closing had to work also resulted in progressively more complex vector shapes as you would fill more and more regions in the layer, which itself worsened the performance impact of this process as time went on.
Even with the ability to now opt back into the old behaviour, over-reliance on the app's limited ability to attempt to close such gaps automatically will too often result in you eventually ending up with a drawing that has so many vector gaps that the automatic gap closing becomes too slow and unreliable and you are forced to turn it off and are back to the current state of having to manually deal with all the gaps.
It is ultimately more valuable to be aware of this complexity and the trade offs of vector stroke brushes from the start in order to be able to make the best choice of tool for what you are trying to achieve and to have a more reliable long-term experience.
For this reason, the change was made with the 2.0.16 update for the app to stop trying to silently help close gaps between stroked vector paths and to return to the consistent and predictable core premise that applies to all fill regions: If the region is not closed, it can’t be filled.
Manually closing vector stroke gaps#
Most importantly, make sure that you are only choosing to draw with vector stroke brushes when you really need the specific benefits that they provide (e.g. the fact that their strokes are guaranteed to have a consistent width). Otherwise, vector shape brushes are often a better choice since their fill behaviour is more obvious up front.
To manually close hidden gaps between stroked vector paths, add new connection lines that visibly intersect the existing stroke centerlines, rather than lines that just appear to be touching each other. When hand-drawn vector paths only appear to be touching each other, they very often actually still have a tiny gap between them. It is important to keep in mind that vector paths have a significantly higher precision than pixel layers, down to a tiny fraction of a single pixel, so even the temporary pink highlights showing the potentially unconnected vector paths can only try to guide you towards where the gaps might be, but since those visualization lines themselves are still hundreds of times thicker than the smallest possible vector gaps, just because the pink lines are barely touching on the canvas doesn't mean that the gap is actually gone.
One of the easiest ways to manually close vector stroke gaps is to use a vector stroke brush with the opacity lowered to zero in order to add invisible vector lines into your drawing to close the gaps without having to worry about those lines changing the visuals of your drawing.