Help about filling color on the outline on a illustration

[Christophe273610959ajs]

Hello, i need help to understand a bit more about Illustrator and its use of layer and color, i'm learning Pencil tools and shapes thought the copying of image of Malika Favre.

I have the first picture and i need to fill the border/outline with the color, and i don't know how to do it.

How i made the trapeze: I made one circle and duplicate it bigger with a line on each side ; and i can't fill inside the 2 circles with lines...

I don't find any ressource whose talks about it

However, about the last picture, tips about how to do the shadow gradient would be great.

[michelew83603738]

I am sorry, but to me it isn't obvious which object you are trying to work with. Do you have a good unsderstanding of the difference between a fill and stroke? If so and you are still having trouble, you might want to turn this into a live paint object so that you can just select what you want. 

If this doesn't answer your question, maybe circle what you are referring to and also expanding and posting your layers panel with the object selected is always helpful in troubleshooting.

[Monika Gause · Accepted solution]

These artworks look like the shapebuilder tool respectively live paint could be of help.

https://helpx.adobe.com/illustrator/using/live-paint-groups.html

[Ton Frederiks]

Christophe, maybe this helps:

https://helpx.adobe.com/illustrator/tutorials.html

[Met1]

"Malika Favre" - oh I do like her art!

Probably not the most technical way of doing this, but I'd just draw each shape in the top piece then step and repeat and modify each...