The attached started with the floral & crown grunge designs being Adobe Illustrator files converted by a friend for me in order that I can open it Inkscape & the skull an eps file. It is my intention to come up with a design for a flower festival comming up, my theme is "Vive La Rose" .In comming up with my design, I have chosen my components in memory of the contributors to this wonderfull cultral festival who have marched on to the great beyond.
So far & on the face of it the design is starting to take some form, however if one should view this design in outline mode, one would notice lots of confusion going on to the back of the skull & crown. It is my intention to use just two colours i.e black & red on a white T-shirt using heat press vinyl & or screen printing. I have tried using a number of the "Boolean operations available in Inkscape , in an attempt to clean up the distoration going in the back of the skull & crown, I have even saved the files as SVG files to try & edit but to no avail. Can someone please explain what is going here as I would like to finish my design but would like to understand what's going on. Thanks for reading.

What you see in the outline view is just a lot of the object's contours. The pink part specially, is under the skull and that's the "noise" you see. Keep in mind that the skull is not transparent, the white parts are just one object that happens to be white, that's why you don't see anything pink behind until you go to the outline view. Try setting your document background to some other color and you'll see what I mean.

In order to have this ready for a t-shirt you'll have to, yes, use booleans... and a lot of them!

To begin with, the pink parts are below the skull and that, afaik, can't happen if you want to have it on a t-shirt. You'll need to do a boolean difference using the skull and crown shape against the pink stuff. BUT, in order to do that, you first need a single object with the shape of your skull and crown, and it has to be a little bigger than the original skull so both parts are not too close to each other.

Also, your skull is composed of several objects one on top of the other and that's also a problem. Summing up, all your problems are that you have tons of objects on top of others and the final image and the "real" image are very different.

Sorry but you'll have to go with the boolean stuff. A lot of duplicate objects, union, difference... That's all there is to it, those three operations basically. The tricky part is when you need some objects to be a little bigger so you can do a difference and have a space between two objects. I'd recommend going with setting a border to the shape prior to "booleing", then you duplicate to have a spare shape, then convert the stroke to path, and finally a union with the two shapes... and then the difference between this shape and the pink one.

btw, you don't want your text to be a text object, better convert it to path.

So having fiddled with your file, it's my opinion that the 'distortion' is the 'grunge' quality, a sort of spatter effect on the leafy motif, did you want this removed? It's certainly possible, quite easily (select all, break apart, union), but the leaves will be rough on the edges. You can try to smooth them out manually. Or do you just want the part behind the other graphic element removed? Easy enough as well.
I also layered your file as it is much easier to work this way.... and some other tweaks here and there. Turn the two leaf layers on and off in the layers dialog and delete the one you don't like.... I assume that the gray will be halftoned; if not, just one more step needs to be done to make it a custom color.
Incidentally, you probably want to correct the spelling of 'vive'. This is the embrasing kind of meistke that is easy to overlok until after the screns are made!! And the text as mentioned above should be converted to paths, since I don't have 'Adventure' on my system, and probably most printers don't either.

all i can see is the two pink leaf with holes objects sitting behind a perfectly clean skull design. i haven't done t-shirt stuff before but, if you need the leaves to stop at the skull and not go behind: make a duplicate of the skull, select the skull and one leaf object, and from the menu do object > clip > set. do same for other leaf.

My apparent silence since receiving such informative responses to my question is not one of the lack of appreciations but an eagerness to apply your advice & recommendations then say Voila` I've done it, thanks a million forum. However, I am yet to get it done how it supposed to be done but I've been at it since you guys posted. First I interprete border & stroke to mean the same, I stand corrected. Second after applying a border etc. & finally a union as suggested by Uktrunie the image disappears. It's most likely a few things I am not doing right, can it be my interpretation of the border creating such problems.
Thanks druban, you have done exactly what I want to do, although I must say at the moment not so easy for me to do as it is for you but I am still trying. Yes, I want the parts behind the skull & crown where they cross removed. Your point on re: "embarrassing kinds of mistakes that is easy to over look until after screens are made" BTW where can I find the spell check to check the spelling. Anyway, I don't mean to be a nag or to be spoon-feed but what is it I am overlooking, not doing or simply doing wrong. Later & take care.

Kento wrote:Second after applying a border etc. & finally a union as suggested by Uktrunie the image disappears.

1. Your object may still be there, just without a visible attribute. look in outline view for it.
2. Did you forget to do the stroke to path before the union?

If you group and layer things life gets easier. Trust me on this! Your skull was originally made up of one large black object in the rear + a great many gray objects in the middle + a great many black objects on top. Put all of these in their own layer. Now ungroup them all. Using ctrl-f find and select all the black objects. Carefully deselect the large black shape in the back. Now combine (path menu) all the remaining black objects. Now they are one path. Select all the grey objects. You can do this by ctrl-f OR by selecting all and deselecting the two black paths. This is why you need to put objects in their own layers! now that all the gray objects are selected, combine them into one path. Now select this path and the top black path and do a difference. This cuts holes in the grey path but you dont see them, because there's a black object behind it. Now select the grey object and duplicate it. Copy the large black shape to the clipboard - you'll use it to trim the leaves. Now select one of the grey copies and the large black object. Do a difference again. Now your skull layer has no overlapping objects.
Return to the root layer. Paste in place (edit menu). Select the leaves and combine into one path. Select this path and the black pasted object. Do a difference. Now there should be no leaves behind the skull.
All this takes way more time to type than to do!

Kento wrote:First I interprete border & stroke to mean the same

That is my fault, sorry. I didn't want to confuse you more so I used them interchangeably. AFAIK, what people would call "a border" is called "stroke" in Inkscape.

Kento wrote:Second after applying a border etc. & finally a union as suggested by Uktrunie the image disappears.

The best thing you can do I guess is to copy those two paths to a new document and play with them. Sometimes you can't see what's happening because you have many shapes and you don't want to modify something that you shouldn't, so copying to a different document takes that factor out of the equation.

Also, sometimes (I really don't know why) you get nothing out of a union, it happened to me with the eyebrows and nose of the skull and those other details, I selected several objects and then when doing a union, nothing. I had to go with few shapes at a time doing unions and that way it was ok.

Hey guys thanks very much for your responses, advise & suggestions re: my questions, your responses has been an eye opener in many ways. I have learnt much. Layers I had never used befor however after reading & viewing a few video tutorials Particularly by HeathenX I am on the move & having loads of fun . However at the moment I am lost as to the information required to utilize "Ctrl-f find & select objects i.e "Text, ID etc. despite reading on it. I have, however manually taken the skull apart applied the advise & suggestions & has been finally successful with doing the difference required. There is still lots of work to be done but I am on my way.