How to fill overlapping areas in a polygon?

Question

I am creating a polygon animation from lotus shapes. The lotus shapes are crossing each other in circles, so sometimes the resulting polygon is overlapping itself. This causes the overlapped areas to not get painted at all. Look at this screenshot of the polygon to see what I mean:
http://www.astralvisuals.com/polyLotus.jpg
Here you can see that there are small black areas, where the lotus shapes intersect. It should be blue instead here. What can I do to get these overlapping areas painted?
It says on the fillPolygon description:
"The area inside the polygon is defined using an even-odd fill rule". Is it this rule that causes the overlapping areas to not get painted?

Answer 1

fillColor works the same for paths or for text,
to get to the text fillColor property use
textRef.textRange.characterAttributes.fillColor
Creating and applying a gradient, from the Scripting Reference, page 63
// Creates a new gradient in current document then
// applies the gradient to the frontmost path item
if ( app.documents.length > 0 ) {
// Create a color for both ends of the gradient
var startColor = new RGBColor();
var endColor = new RGBColor();
startColor.red = 0;
startColor.green = 100;
startColor.blue = 255;
endColor.red = 220;
endColor.green = 0;
endColor.blue = 100;
// Create a new gradient
// A new gradient always has 2 stops
var newGradient = app.activeDocument.gradients.add();
newGradient.name = "NewGradient";
newGradient.type = GradientType.LINEAR;
// Modify the first gradient stop
newGradient.gradientStops[0].rampPoint = 30;
newGradient.gradientStops[0].midPoint = 60;
newGradient.gradientStops[0].color = startColor;
// Modify the last gradient stop
newGradient.gradientStops[1].rampPoint = 80;
newGradient.gradientStops[1].color = endColor;
// construct an Illustrator.GradientColor object referring to the
// newly created gradient
var colorOfGradient = new GradientColor();
colorOfGradient.gradient = newGradient;
// get first path item, apply new gradient as its fill
var topPath = app.activeDocument.pathItems[0];
topPath.filled = true;
topPath.fillColor = colorOfGradient;