Abstract Colorization refers to the process of adding color to black & white images or videos. This paper extends the term to handle surfaces in three dimensions. This is important for applications in which the colors of an object need to be restored and no relevant image exists for texturing it We focus on surfaces with patterns and propose a novel algorithm for adding colors to these surfaces. The user needs only to scribble a few color strokes on one instance of each pattern, and the system proceeds to automatically colorize the whole surface. For this scheme to work, we address not only the problem of colorization, but also the problem of pattern detection on surfaces.