Colour-filling made-up shapes

[gbredon]

In an earlier post about arrow heads I included the following drawing which as you can see has been made up with a rectangular shape and some extra lines. I can't now remember how I arrived at a grouped/joined (?) figure but I cannot fill it with any colour. In an earlier version I was able to do so but the fill did not fill every space. So, I suppose my question has 2 parts:
1) How can you fill an object such as this one?
and 2) what is the best way to create this kind of object (i.e one that is a composite shape made up from other simple shapes)?

[Christine Farrelly]

Assuming that you drew the two shapes - it appears that you have used convert line to shape whereas you should have used join shapes or add shapes to retain the solid shape.

What you currently have is the outlines of the two shapes converted to a single shape. If you remove the black outline right click the transparent icon next to the colour palette, you will see the colour.

on the menu use Arrange - combine shapes - add shapes.

Christine