So I am trying to make an .SVG drawing of a heraldic lion. I (manually) traced a bitmap, got the path looking all nice the way I want it, then tried setting the fill. The color "escaped" from all sorts of places. I found a lot of "holes" (places where two adjacent nodes needed to be combined), that fixed some of the leak, but not all. File is attached.

Is there a way to fix this easily, or do I need to keep going through node-by-node checking paths? And what about the "jaggy" bits - non-loop path segments that are needed for the detailing, but seem to throw off the fill?

Note - the claws, tongue, and pizzle (yes, that's the official heraldic term) are intended to be separate, as they can be colored separately in use.

Any help greatly appreciated.

Yeah, you're gonna have to keep messing with the nodes. But in the end, you'll never get a single closed path -- not without a LOT of work. (for reasons you've already mentioned -- "non-loop path segments") Try using the Paint Bucket tool instead. What it does is fill enclosed areas. You might need to tweak the Threshold setting here and there, but the default value should be pretty close. For Grow/Shrink, I would suggest....if you're gonna keep the stroke width at 2, I would use a Grow value of 1.0.

The Paint Bucket will automatically make closed paths for you that perfectly fill in the areas. You still might need to make a few tweaks with the Node tool, here and there. Like in very sharp corners, like the tips of the claws and tufts of fur. But that node editing is entirely do-able. After you finish, you'll have to move the new filled paths below the original red stroked paths, for the best effect. Also note that you have to have the enclosed area fully visible on the screen when you click. If a large piece is somewhere off the screen, it won't be filled. Small pieces that are off the screen are usually filled ok. So for the main body, you'll probably need to be at 100% zoom. Or at least that's what is needed on my screen.

Let us know how that works

That worked great, thank you. Threshold of 5 and Grow of 1 for the initial big fills, and then Grow of .2 to fill in the little "nooks and crannys" did the job.

Attached is the revised file. Yes, the colors are purposefully ugly, so that the user can easily see what the color regions are. In practice it would not look like this (I hope...)



Thanks again,
Juliean.