It places the rendered path onto the current layer, so you can have a layer on top (for example, "Inks") and select the layer below ("Colors") and do the fills so that they always appear below the Inks.īecause the tool operates in this way, you can, for example, scan a pencil sketch, import the bitmap into Inkscape, and quickly fill all its cells with colors without tracing the bitmap first. Internally, the tool works by performing a bitmap-based flood fill on a rendered version of the visible canvas, then tracing the resulting fill using potrace and placing the traced path into the document. In short, it will work exactly as if you were filling a rasterized version of your image in a bitmap editor like Photoshop or GIMP - but will give you a vector object to work with. This means that filling will stop at gradients, blurs, and even the color boundaries in imported bitmaps, but will ignore any paths or other objects that are fully (or almost fully) transparent or for any other reason do not stand out from the background. That is, when looking for the boundaries around the point you clicked, it takes for such boundaries any visible color changes. It is important to note that the tool's operation perceptual, not geometric. Being a vector tool, however, Inkscape's Paint Bucket actually creates a new path that "fills in" the area in which you clicked. The Bucket Fill Tool is simple - it fills in unfilled areas with color.