Hello,
I downloaded Inkscape yesterday. Its excellent but very complex. I am following this tutorial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s41_-qsmA7s and around min. 7 he does stroke to path, break apart then union and the brown color of the doughnut stays put, when i do (apparently) the same thing, the doughnut turns back (because there is a back circle underneath the brown one). could u please help me? i spent 4 hours trying to fix it, i just don't feel good about it
i looked though some tutorial here and it seems the stroke to path is meant to cut the inside. It is just the way it works. So why the man in the video i attached managed to preserve the brown inside of the doughnut ?
I am confused

thank you

Mag

As far as I can tell, he does this Stroke to Path > Break Apart > Union routine, to an object which is behind the brown one. So you can't really see what's happening.

When you do Break Apart it's normal for everything to turn black. And even after Union, it will still be black. It's only after that, when he brings up the Dropper tool, when he changes the color to brown.

I have no idea why he does it while it's behind something else.

I didn't watch through the whole tutorial. So I'm not even sure what the purpose of this routine is. It looks to me like you could just leave it as a stroke. But maybe there's a reason for it, other than just his preference?

It's common that we find there are many paths to the same goal, in Inkscape. As you learn more and more, and understand better and better, you will come to develop your own preferences, and things will be not be so confusing. I highly suggest using tutorials by different authors, so that you can learn different ways to do things.

For myself, I might leave that stroke alone. Or if there is some purpose, perhaps to have an object that's just a little bit larger than the original, I might use the Path Offset.

Or you may find, as you go further through the video, the reason for that routine might be more clear. I'm sorry, I just don't have time to watch the whole thing.

But I think you might have missed the step right before he applied the stroke, which was to move the duplicated object behind.

Despite what his channel appears, Nicks knowledge is not as great as his fanbase thinks.
In fact his workflow is quite often a bit amateurish. Keep that in mind when learning from his videos.

But then again we have Brynn who can write a full essay on why she doesnt know about a video she hasnt watched.

When it comes to the donut, you have three objects on top of each other:
the orange body
the chocolate part
and the black stroke

The tutorial duplicates the chocolate part, makes it black and puts it underneath so that you cant see it anymore, which may be confusing.
Then a Stroke of 25px is added and he performs the Stroke To Path/Break Apart/Union routine on it (which he explains in depth in another video).

Im not sure if this step is entirely necessary. As far as i can tell the tutorial would work without it.

What you need to understand about Inkscape is that often a certain look is achieved by layering objects on top of each other.
So sometimes the final result may look visually quite simple but is made of many layered objects.

For example the donut ring shape could be made of two circles on top of each other without any Boolean Operations ("Difference"), as long as the top circle has the same colour as the background.

Agree with Brynn and Raspi... Not a very good tutorial: useless and confusing processes with poor or no explanation.