Visual Basic® Programmer's Guide to the .NET Framework Class Library

Filling Shapes

So far, we've dealt with the outline of a shape. Now we will focus on the interior, or fill area, of a shape. GDI+ gives us the concept of a brush to indicate how a shape is filled. Brushes are useful when blending colors for a desired effect like a fade or indicating a shape's texture like sand, stone, or brick. Brushes can be a single solid color, a blend of colors, a texture, a bitmap, or a hatched pattern.

To create brush objects in our code, we use a derivative of the Brush class. Brush is an abstract base class. Classes that derive from Brush are as follows: SolidBrush, TextureBrush, RectangleGradientBrush, LinearGradientBrush, and HatchBrush. This section discusses the various Brush derivatives.

SolidBrush

The SolidBrush ...