Paint Bucket and Paint not working together for closing shapes

[spencerm73887068]

Im working on a roto animation in Afte rEffects that is using the paint effect and brush tool to close shapes so that the paint bucket with reverse fill will fill in the closed shapes. I'm going frame by frame draing in lines to close the shapes but it seems like every new set of lines I draw dont work in a weay completely different from the last.

Sometimes the draw lines only show up on the layer view when I'm drawing them but not in the composition so the bucket doesnt work. Sometimes I need to adust (what seems like) literally any stroke or transform option on each brush stroke to have it pop in. Some pen strokes will stop working in the middle of their duration for one frame or so. I could honestly go on and it's all over the place and driving me crazy.

So far the only solution I know is to draw 4 lines at a time, adjust them to their right duration, then mess with a few random setting by a fraction and hope they will show up in the composition for the paint fill to recognize the closed shape. Plus sometmes when I open the project again previous lines wont be working again. 

My footage is only 10 seconds long but this process is taking ages cause none of my solutions are working for the next step or have sense stopped working. I thought it would be super easy to just use the brush to draw lines to close this shape but I'm running into new problems constantly. 

Here are a couple screenshots to show what I'm working on. 

A sucessfull fill effect, then one frame over, using the exact same lines and footage...

here the fill effect is no longer working. 

I would scroll through the footage, draw the lines needed to close the shape, adjust the duration of the lines to fit with the footage, then repeate. 

I tried using the rotobrush before any of this but I guess my footage wasnt good enough cause the roto cant pick up any of it so I need to try to find a way to do this manually that also isnt tracing out the whole shape with a mask all over again. 

If I could just get these shapes to close easily and properly I would be able to fly through this project but I seem to be doing something wrong. If more information or screenshots are needed I can do my best to explain more. 

THANK YOU! 

[Rick Gerard]

You need to apply a new paint bucket for each closed shape in your drawing. 

I think you would be a lot better off using a shape layer.

[spencerm73887068]

I will look into shape layers thank you!