I'm having a problem filling my drawing to the edges.. anyone have an ideas on what I may have done wrong or any suggestions on how to fix? (see attached)

http://picasaweb.google.com/vbtalent/Pictures?authkey=Gv1sRgCJf4352gsY6XYA#5540496690004537922

Thanks for your help.

Welcome to InkscapeForum!

I see that you are using the paint bucket tool.

How you color an ojbect depends on how you draw your image. The bucket tool is typically a raster graphics feature, which has been made to work with Inkscape as a vector tool. Inkscape's native coloring tool is Fill (Object menu > Fill and Stroke), and will techically fill an object completely, if the object is a closed path or one of the Shapes. But it will also attempt to fill even just a curved path.

However, there are always instances where fill just isn't possible, and for which the bucket tool was designed. If you look in the bucket tool control bar, there a setting to automatically grow or shrink the path which is created by the bucket tool, to color the area. I find that 0.5 px is a good value for a stroke width of 1 px, but it depends on your image and your personal preference. If you grow it by too high of a value, it will cover up the stroke, and could even fall outside the stroke. If it just covers part of the stroke, you can fix it by moving the new path below the original stroked path in z-order. If it falls outside the stroke, you would need to reduce your grow value.

Note that this is not the perfect solution that is Filling, and that even using grow, you may still have to do some node editing. The bucket tool actually creates a new path following the outline of the closed area, that is automatically closed, filled and not stroked. So you can just grab a node and drag it, or snap it to the path. Snap works great in this situation. But then even so, you still might need to drag a handle here and there.

Also, please see the links in my signature, to access some excellent instructional material

Brynn,

Thanks for the reply.

I don't see the "bucket tool control bar"?

I'm pretty green to drawing in raster format so nodes, etc. are still a little foreign to me.

I thought even about drawing using the Beizer tool and encompassing the area that I wanted to color then filling that area but I ran into a layering issue where the color sat on top of my image,etc.

Thanks,

I don't see the "bucket tool control bar"?

With the Node tool activated, it's the bar of icons the 2nd below the menu bar.

And again, please check out the various instructional material in my signature

Thanks Brynn got it working with Fill.

VB,