Bucket Fill Tool
The Bucket Fill tool in Inkscape is easy to use: it fills unfilled areas with color. If you are familiar with MS Paint, this should be no problem to use. However, being a vector tool, Inkscape’s paint bucket fill tool creates a new path that “fills” the area you clicked on.
Internally, the tool works by performing a bitmap-based fill on a rendered version of the visible canvas, tracing the resulting fill with potrace, and placing the traced path in the document.
It puts the displayed path on the current layer, so you can have a layer on top (eg “Inks”) and select the layer below (“Colors”) and make the fills so that they always appear below the inks.
Because the tool works this way, you can, for example, digitize a pencil sketch, import the bitmap into Inkscape, and quickly fill all your cells with color without tracing the bitmap first. This is a very convenient and interactive way to digitize your paper drawings, making traditional bitmap tracing obsolete in many cases.
The resolution of the bitmap image used to perform tracing depends on your current zoom level – the more “zoomed” an area is, the higher the resolution of the bitmap fill. So if you have a very inaccurate fill, with rough corners, or that doesn’t go where it should, just undo it (CTRL + Z), zoom in closer, and repeat the fill from the same point. On the other hand, if the filling leaks through a small gap, zoom out to make the gap less visible and fill it up.
Table of Contents
How to fill color in Inkscape using the Bucket Fill Tool?
This is the simplest method to fill an area defined by two different objects. Select the Bucket Fill tool (just press Shift+F7) on your keyboard or choose from the Toolbox and click on the overlapping area. A new object will be created with the current fill color.
The paint bucket fill tool is quite intuitive: click on an area bound on all sides and it will fill it with color – or even a path that can be filled and modified like any path.
Style
Like all object creation tools, the Bucket Fill tool can use the last style defined for the objects it creates (which is the default) or it can use its fixed style. You can switch between modes on this tool’s page in Inkscape’s preferences by pressing (Ctrl+Shift+P). As with all the other tools, the style swatch on the far right of the control bar indicates the style that will be used for the next fill object you will create.
RELATED: How to make a triangle in Inkscape?
Checks
On the tool control bar: The Bucket Fill tool can use all visible colors or specific color channels. Using the Fill by drop-down list, you can limit the fill algorithm to one of the following channels:
- Red
- Green
- Blue
- Hue
- Saturation
- Lightness
- Alpha
The threshold (in percent) determines the size of the color difference at a point (compared to the first click point) to stop the fill. ‘Zero Tolerance means that only an area of strictly the same color is filled; the greater the tolerance, the easier it is for the filling to leak into adjacent areas of different colors. The default value is 10%.
By using the Grow/Shrink, you can determine how much inset/outset to apply to the created fill. Setting a positive start makes the padding paths longer than the filled bitmap area (good for eliminating anti-aliasing errors) while setting a negative start makes the path shorter. It works the same way as to launch and inserts path commands, except it runs automatically after each fill.
The Close Holes parameter allows the Bucket Fill tool to ignore any gaps on area boundaries that would normally cause the fill to leave the desired area. There are four auto range settings:
- None
- Small (close small holes up to 2 pixels in size)
- Average (4 pixels)
- Large (6 pixels)
Note: If you set this parameter to anything but nothing, Inkscape can become noticeably slow when filling large areas.
Bucket Fill tool Shortcut keys
The shortcuts for the tool are:
- The single-click fills from the clicked point.
- Shift + click fill from where you clicked and then connect the resulting path to the selected path. That way, if your first attempt didn’t fill all the areas you want, you can Shift+click the remaining corner to fill it individually and combine the result with the result of the previous fill.
- Ctrl + click on an object change the fill of the object to the tool’s current fill color, and Shift + Ctrl + click changes the stroke to the current stroke color.
- Click + drag fill all the points you pass while dragging (you will see your path visualized by a red line). From any point, the fill spreads out to its neighbors with similar colors to that point – in other words, it’s like clicking any point in the drag path with this tool and merging the results. This makes it easy to fill an occupied area with a gradient or blur, just drag from the darker points to the lighter points of the area you want to fill.
- Alt+click and drag work the same as regular dragging, except that from any point on the drag path, the fill spreads out to neighbors (if any) with similar colors to the starting point (the point where you started the drag). Let’s you fill a range of areas with similar but distinct colors (for example, multiple cells in a cartoon) by dragging in one of those areas and dragging Alt+the tool over all the other areas.
Inkscape Bucket Fill Tool Not Working
You may be trying to draw/paint on an inactive layer, you can quickly check this by looking at the Layer drop-down menu at the bottom of the window. It should show the layer you are trying to draw/paint. Otherwise, select the correct layer and you should be back to work.
It’s also possible that you accidentally double-click a group, which allows you to join a group without ungrouping. In this case, you’ll have something like “#gXXXX” in the Low drop-down list. Again, just select the right layer to fix it.
Inkscape Close Gaps
Select the path, duplicate it (Ctrl-D) and slide the duplicate a few pixels down (or down and to the right if you have vertical scratches). Double compensation can be done with Alt + arrows.
Now select the original and the duplicate, and do Path -> Union.
Your holes will shrink a bit, your strokes will grow a few pixels and you may have some of the scratches left behind, but most of it should be gone.
Conclusion: Bucket Fill Tool
With all the above mentioned I hope you will be able to use the Bucket Fill tool in Inkscape, if this helps, see you next time! Please try to support vdtips by sharing this post thanks.
