No Colour Fill

**TheFreespirit** · 12 January 2012, 05:46 PM

Hi again

I'm back I'm afraid with another question. I cannot find this answer in the manual or in the help menu, unfortunately.

I was putting some shapes together. I like to draw my cartoon characters unfilled, then fill them at a later stage, its easier for me to see the shape emerge that way. So I set the background to 'no fill'.

My problem is I don't seem to be able to change that attribute once set.

I've never come across this behaviour before - in my other packages I can swap between the two.

Please, can anyone enlighten me?

**handrawn** · 12 January 2012, 06:03 PM

what you have there is not an unfilled shape - you have made the outline a shape in its own right - go to arrange menu and click break shapes, that should give you two filled shapes which correspond to the inner and outer boundaries of your original

**TheFreespirit** · 12 January 2012, 06:09 PM

I realise I must have changed this shape in some way, but it was quite unintentional, so if anyone can see what I've done, it'd be great to know for future refernce.

I've redrawn the shape and can easily fill and unfill with the newer shape.

**TheFreespirit** · 12 January 2012, 06:10 PM

Thank you thank you! You rock, you're quite correct, still have no idea how I did it but the original shape is back to its orginal form, thanks again.

**handrawn** · 12 January 2012, 07:42 PM

pleasure

you may have clicked 'convert line to shape' on the arrange menu -this converts a line [or a shape outline] itself into a shape

to make a 'normal' shape with a line you simply close the line when drawing the shape and it fills automatically

to toggle no-fill use the 'set no-colour' icon left of the colour bar at the bottom

**TheFreespirit** · 13 January 2012, 12:37 PM

you may have clicked 'convert line to shape' on the arrange menu -this converts a line [or a shape outline] itself into a shape

I believe that is what I may have done. If I did it again

is there any way to revert or do I just put it down to experience?

FSxx

**jclements** · 13 January 2012, 03:29 PM

You can always always do "undo's", but you have to be aware that you made a mistake in order to do take advantage of undoing. If you don't catch the mistake right away any actions taken or objects you created in the interim will also be undone.

In that instance you could copy and paste your objects to another file, then perform your undo's.

Note: once you save and close a file, then the undo's are lost. If you haven't closed the file then undo's are still possible after saving.

**handrawn** · 14 January 2012, 04:47 PM

save to a new file name as a backup is what I do before undo of this kind

undo does not always do what you expect - eg you can end up with the 'wrong' layer in focus