Hello again, I have a question about dividing (fairly) simple objects into different colours. As before I'm still fairly new and I'm sure there's something obvious that I missed.

I've been using Inkscape for SCA heraldry, which quite often involves taking an object and making it more than one colour. For an easy, but specific example, I had one recently where I had to take an open book, with some internal detailing, and divide it into different colour quarters of yellow and blue.

I did find a way to do it by hand, but it was really tedious, so I was hoping there was a much easier way I was missing.

I tried creating a checkerboard pattern, then going Object->Pattern->object to pattern, and then selecting that pattern for the new object from the Fill and Stroke, but I get strange results that way, and the pattern is not centered in the object I'm trying to colour.
Another thing I tried was creating the checkerboard, aligning the object I'm trying to colour aligned and centered, and then tried playing with both the Object->clip and Object->mask options, but those coloured the whole object and got rid of few internal lines I was trying to keep as black lines.

The end result is basically I want a book with a quarterly pattern, with the top pages being half blue and half yellow.

Am I on the right track and just missed a step, or is there an even easier way to go about what I'm trying to accomplish?

For reference, the book file I was using is attached. I'm not sure what other information I can provide that will be handy.

One helpful tip I learned here, is to view svg files in Inkscape's outline mode, to better see their construction. Then, the image can be ungrouped, and ungrouped, and ungrouped, etc. until you reach the paths that make the image.

The method I might use to modify this image as suggested, is to find the path for the top page and duplicate it adding the color fills. The second color can be easily edited to a half page by selecting the top nodes of the path and moving them down. Then the half-page (yellow) can be placed on top of the whole blue page.



I'd group both objects and place on the original svg, duplicate and flip for the opposite side, changing the colors as needed.


P.S.
It is often helpful to download the embedded svg files like the above and open them in Inkscape to dissect.

Ok, that is a more effective way of what I ended up doing, So at least that's something!

Thanks Tylerdurden.

For quick & dirty, there is the bucket tool... it creates an object on top that can be duplicated and halved.