How can I combine and fill these lines In Sketch?

Question

I have a few orange lines that I have drawn in sketch. I would like to combine them into one shape and use something like a "paint bucket" tool to fill the whole object with the light sand color.

I saw this question (Sketch: Adding color fill between connected objects.) with a similar issue, but the solution of using Union + Flatten doesn't work for me. When I try to combine the lines with the Union tool it creates all these extra unwanted lines:

Does anyone know why it is adding all these additional lines and how I can simply combine the lines into one shape and fill it?

Answer 1

high level steps

1. duplicate your linework group to create the fill layer (make sure all paths overlap)
2. to create fill layer - convert to outlines > union > flatten > ungroup > union > flatten
3. overlay your linework over the fill layer

Answer 2

All those extra lines are coming from Sketch closing the paths. All those shapes are just paths which are "open" because they don't complete.

This is a good round up of what paths look like and how they act in Sketch:

• What’s Up With Sketch’s Scissors Tool?
  • I know the name is not directly associated to Paths, but still it's a great summary

One way you could solve this without trying to flatten and combine all your paths is:

• Group them
• Create a style that uses the appropriate fill (and border if necessary)
• Apply that style to the paths

This might not be the result you're looking for, but hopefully it's a shortcut to what you want.