The Book of Inkscape

14.4 The Paint Bucket Tool

The concept of a “paint bucket” or “flood fill” tool is probably familiar to you from bitmap editors. In Inkscape, the Paint bucket tool works exactly as you would expect: Click in any area bounded on all sides, and it will fill the area with color. Being a vector tool, however, Inkscape’s Paint bucket just creates a new path that “fills in” the area in which you have clicked:

Figure 14-22. The Paint bucket filling a bounded area

It is important to remember that the Paint bucket tool is perceptual, not geometric. That is, when looking for the boundaries around the point you clicked, it identifies as boundaries any visible ...