Colouring In Various Sections - Help Needed!

Question

Hello everyone,
I have drawn a simple one-lined knot with "No fill" enabled. I want to try filling in the circle section of the knot, but it ends up filling in the entire area covered by the line.
Is there any way to just select the circle part to colour, or is there an easier way? Could you also explain how I would go about in choosing a particular section of an image to colour (rather than the ENTIRE image)?
Thanks for your assistance.

Answer 1

Joel,
I would concur with Ian's recommendation that you study some how-to guide such as the
Classroom in a Book or a third-party basics book such as
Teach Yourself Illustrator N in 24 Hours or
Illustrator N for Dummies or
Teach Yourself Visually Illustrator N. ("N" here stands for an Illustrator version, like 9, 10 or CS.) There is just too much you need to learn to try to get it across in a few forum posts.
For newbies, I think the last book above is the best, but if you want to get a better idea of the strengths of each series before you buy one, go to Amazon and search on "Adobe Illustrator teach", then read the reviews.
But I will take a stab at getting you started on the underlying concept of Illustrator's painting model.
Color in Illustrator is attached to paths, not to regions or areas. Paths are the things you draw with the pen, pencil, rectangle, ellipse, etc. tools. Each path has a fill color and/or a stroke color. (As a start, that is. With the Appearance palette you can attach multiple fills or strokes to a single path, but that's for advanced users.) Then these paths are stacked up to form an illustration.
Think of it as being like building up a picture out of little pieces of cut-out paper, where the paths are the lines that the scissor cuts along. Each piece is separately colorable, but the spaces
between pieces
aren't colorable, even if it is a space that is entirely enclosed by parts of other "paper pieces".
A compound path is a path that is formed out of several subpaths. Paths or parts of paths that are "inside" other paths in the same compound act like "holes" or "cut-outs" that you can see through, like cutting out a donut shape or a letter like A or B out of paper. The whole compound path is the same color. To create a compound path, you first draw the pieces, then select them all and use Object>Compound Path>Make [Ctrl-8 ].
There are also more flexible Compound Shapes made with the Pathfinder palette, but again, that is a more advanced feature and you should become familiar with the basics before you go there.
The selection tools let you select paths, parts of paths, or groups of paths. When a path is selected, clicking on a swatch or adjusting the color in the Colors palette or clicking the eyedropper tool on something else changes the color of the whole selected path(s), even the parts that are behind other unselected paths. Selecting the paths first and then adjusting their color is the usual way of working in Illustrator, since you get selection highlighting to give you feedback on what's going to be affected before you apply the color.
The Paintbucket tool, which doesn't require selecting the objects first, is less often used. But supposing you do want to use the Paintbucket tool for some reason, here is how it works.
When you click with the Paintbucket tool, you are assigning both the current fill and the current stroke (as shown at the bottom of the toolbox) to any path that happens to be visible where you click. Again, the color gets applied to the whole path that you click on, even the parts of it you can't see because they are behind other paths. But if you click on a background area that is between paths, nothing happens! (This is in contrast to what happens in a program like Photoshop, which pours paint into a region of contiguous same-color pixels.)
So if you want to paint an area that isn't enclosed by a path, you must first construct one. Sometimes, depending on what other objects are around, it may be most convenient to make a shape that is really bigger than the area you need to color, and put it behind some of the other objects that surround that area. For example, if you had already made the iris and pupil part of an eye, and you now wanted to make the white part, it would probably be easier to make one oval shape and put it behind the iris/pupil objects, instead of trying to make a shape that corresponded only to the white parts that you could see. Again, thinking of how you would construct it from paper cutouts can be a good way of envisioning the most efficient way to get the results you want.
Hope this helps get you started. Now go read. :)