Hello everyone.

I'm trying to make an image that's basically conjoined spirals with bezier curves to look like a coloumn of wind.
I created 5 spirals of various sizes, then added some bezier curves to make it a contained object, and then I selected everything and conjoined the paths with a solid thick stroke.

When I put my image over a solid colour background, not all the areas are filled in with colour, and I also have two extra areas of fill outside my outline. But on those areas, there's no nodes to select and modify, so I don't know where they're coming from... What did I do wrong, and how can I fix it? Was my initial approach to this wrong in the first place?

I -think- those outside areas are trying to fill the space between the ends of my bezier curve....but it's still not letting me add nodes so I can tweak the curve.

The attached file is below

Hi.

You could improve on the approach.
Usually "outlined" illustrations have an object on top with strokes and no fill,
and one below for the fill with no strokes.

I tried doing that by just deleting the inner nodes and it started breaking my spirals up.

Is there an easier way to just get an outline rather than exporting it to bitmap, then re-tracing that bitmap and editing those nodes?

Use the fill and stroke panel (Shift+Ctrl+F) to remove the white fill, then

duplicate the path (Ctrl+D),
set a thinner stroke -larger than 0 px-,
convert stroke to path (Ctrl+Alt+D),
break it apart (Ctrl+Shift+K),
Shift+Click the largest path to deselect it and delete the rest selected (Del).

Then, set a white fill for that path, and move it below the outlines (PgDown).

In a nutshell.
Personally I would focus a little more on the basic path instead, cleaning up the shape for nice curves.

Awesome. I -was- doing it wrong. Thanks Lazur.

The step where you set a thin stroke, then convert Stroke to path - Does that just make sure that everything is a path of nodes then?

What I noticed when I convert to/from a bitmap is that, esp on thick lines, I get a set of nodes on the inside of the line and on the outside. and doing it the hard way the way I was meant that I was deleting all those nodes on the "inside" of the stroke.

The thinner stroke is just a trick to make sure that the outlines above hide the edge of the fill correctly.
If it wasn't shrinked a bit, the rendering would produce some rendering issue, showing a bit of both colour at the anti-aliased edges.


Inkscape is not capable for centerline tracing, thus some manual editing will always be necessary for such result.
With a bit of experience it takes less work to trace manually than to edit an auto-traced image (and the result is more appealing).
Here is a topic on a semi-automated solution to get to centerlines.