For iPad & macOS
Zen Brush is built for ink. PaintBlock is built for selection painting — hard edges, soft gradients, color laid down in blocks. Every tool here is shaped around that one thing, and nothing else.
01 — The idea
Draw a shape. Lock it. Now it's a surface.
Rectangle, lasso or wand — however you'd normally select.
The outline is now fixed. It's the one decision you make deliberately.
Scrub straight past the edge. Nothing crosses it.
Inside a block you can be as loose as you like — scrub, scribble, run the brush well past the outline. The edge holds. That changes how you paint: you stop steering around a silhouette and start filling one.
Alpha lock itself isn't new — it's been in every serious painting app for years. What's different here is that PaintBlock treats the locked shape as the unit you work in, and arranges the rest of the app around it.
02 — The style
The edge comes from the block. The modelling comes from the brush. That's the whole grammar.
Graphic and posterish. Cel, illustration, UI art.
One more block inside the block. Light and shade, still flat.
Push the gradients and the same block turns into form.
Selection painting isn't one look. Keep the insides flat and you get graphic work. Push the gradients and the same shape reads as solid form, with real light and shadow. Both are the same move.
What they share is the order of thinking: color blocks first, detail second. Big shapes, right colors, then modelling inside them. That's the order PaintBlock is arranged in.
03 — The shortcut
Two buttons, actually. They do the thing you were going to do anyway.
Select an area, tap once. You get a new layer, filled with your current color, alpha already locked, selection already cleared — ready to paint into.
Instead of: New layer → Fill → Lock transparency → Deselect
Same tap, but it lifts what's already on the canvas — the composited result under your selection — into its own locked block. For carving a finished area back out and reworking it.
Instead of: Stamp visible → Paste as layer → Lock transparency → Deselect
Neither is a new capability. It's four gestures you stop repeating — a few hundred times per painting.
04 — Price
iPadOS 17 or later · macOS 14 or later