Filling drawing

Question

I'm having a little trouble I hope it's easily solvable in Inkscape... Sorry if it's something simple I'm missing, I'm relatively new to it, and google/searching here hasn't done quite the trick.

I have a couple of drawings saved up that I'd like to do several different versions. This one is the most simple, but what works for it should work for the rest.

Is there any fast way to auto join everything to make the fill option work? Some parts even give me "not a closed area" when I try to use bucket fill on it... I've gone as far as to export it as bitmap so I could vectorize it, but I still need to use bucket fill on top of that since auto-vectorization creates 2 line-less paths filled with black as a "line".

Thanks for your time!

Answer 1

Unfortunately you'll have to rethink how your drawings connect in order to solve this problem. This means taking a look at what you're trying to represent and then understanding how vector graphics draw connecting lines that form fillable shapes.

Most vector apps do this in a kind of similar way, but it's very confusing (at first) because your preconceived notions of how drawing software might (or could or should) work are going to be different from the way they actually do.

Unfortunately this problem is for everyone coming to vector illustration from a creative perspective because it's essentially a collection of mathematical equations that define these curves, rather than some consideration for how end users actually think of lines.

There are a couple of applications that think more along the lines of end users illustration (real world) techniques, but InkScape is not one of them.

Inkscape uses what's considered the classical vector style of "drawing" in which lines are essentially just primitive exposure to the underlying mathematics that defines where those lines go, how they curve and who and what they're connected to.

In order to best understand this, I'd strongly suggest taking the time to watch a few videos on vector drawing in Inkscape so you can thoroughly perceive the nature of vector illustration in this "classic" methodology. It's kind of clunky, and will seem very odd, at first, and won't be anything like how you imagined drawing on a compute might actually be.

This guy doesn't mess around, and gets right to the meat and potatoes, watch his two videos and you should be almost set:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAgWhnf_p3k

Then, if you really don't like that approach, have a look at this, and feel sad, because this wonderful app has been abandoned:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYENrzdpIF0

However its inferior cousin lives on:

http://www.autodesk.com/products/sketchbook-pro/features/all/gallery-view

Answer 2

How to Bucket Fill an object with gaps in it's path

Usually we can "fill" an object even if the path has gaps simply by changing it's Object > Fill and Stroke properties. The area within any selected object will then be painted with a selected fill pattern, leaving the gaps in the stroke open.

But whenever we have overlapping line art objects where we only want to fill those parts outlined we may find the bucket fill tool convenient.

If our object's border had gaps this tool will not work:

Let's therefore select one object after the other to then apply the Path > Union tool. This will close any gaps in each object:

Now the bucket fill tool will work as expected to fill an area surrounded by any of the object's outlines:

Different to bitmap graphics the bucket fill tool in Inksape will have created a new object which can be moved around, altered in shape, or filled with another color or pattern.