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Glite Dictionary
🗣️ To inform 👤 To substitute 📝 To complete forms 🎨 To shade artwork
to fill in

to fill in

4 4.2
Add shade to a drawing to show light and shadow
  • phrasal verb
  • /fɪl ɪn/
  • Specialized
translation icon : sombrear
  • And then I would take the brown ochre and fill in the space.
  • fill in the shadows
  • fill in the background
  • fill in shadow areas

Adding some mascara, lip gloss, and of course filling in my brows.

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Examples

  • And I would take my Nick's Lift and Snatch in the shade Espresso to kind of fill in and give more dimension to my brows.

  • She drew a large circle above each cheekbone, then filled them in.

    Fiction book (1992)

  • Next I'm going to take the powder and just fill it in lightly right here.

  • But notice using the flex fill, I can fill in the shadows.

  • Photographers who work outdoors often have problems with harsh lighting, and most use some kind of reflector to fill in shadow areas for a natural effect.

    Academic text (1995)

  • After the artist completed the outline, she used a fine brush to fill in the details with vibrant colors.

  • He carefully filled in the shadows on the portrait to give it a more realistic appearance.

  • The designer chose to fill in the dark areas of the drawing with charcoal for depth.

Synonyms

to shade
vsto fill in
8 4.3

To draw dark areas to show light and shadow

emphasizes using lines tones or darker marks as the method
to color in
vsto fill in
  • US
7 1.4

To fill parts of a picture with crayons or paint

aims to show shadow effects rather than just applying paint

Antonyms

to erase
144 1.6

Remove marks, writing, or digital files so they are no longer visible

How Shaded

to blacken
19 3.4
to darken
63 3.3
to fill in
  • Specialized
4 4.2
to shade
8 4.3

Surface Forms

fill in infinitive
filled in past
filled in past participle
filling in present participle
fills in third person singular

Morphology

fill + in

The sense of adding shading is a literal instantiation of 'fill' (to make something full by adding contents) combined with 'in' (into/inside), so the meaning of putting color or lines into areas is directly derivable from the constituents. This is a common, compositional phrasal-verb pattern and is cross-linguistically transparent, so a B1 learner who knows both words would likely understand it.

Etymology

Fill in when drawing comes from filling empty areas of a picture with lines, color, or shading so the image looks complete. So, to 'fill in' in art means 'to add shade or color to parts of a drawing'.