Filling a shape made of shapes. Or just a different process?

[#1]

Hi all, 

I will be most appreciative of a little guidance with this.  I am building a somewhat complicated shape for a logo for printing on business cards, signs, car decals, and so on.  I started by just drawing line strokes with the pencil tool for the overall shape.  I would like it to be one shape that I can fill with a slightly lighter color.  I found that you can't join the strokes at intersections, only end to end.  So I converted all the strokes to "shape outline" and used the anchor points to clean up the intersections and make everything smooth.  I then made all the intersecting shapes a compound shape so I am able to move all intersecting parts as 1 shape.  However, I cannot fill the inside of the shape as it doesn't recognize the inside negative space as being the inside of a shape.  

I could also be going about this the wrong way altogether.  Learning as I go!  I hope someone can enlighten me.  Image attached.  

Also, the floating parts in the middle act as separate shapes.  So I would need the same process but would want the background to show through the negative space as opposed to being filled with a lighter color.  I worry that just bringing them to the front would still show the fill color of the larger overall shape....

Thanks in advance!

Westart

[#2]

Hi all, 

I will be most appreciative of a little guidance with this.  I am building a somewhat complicated shape for a logo for printing on business cards, signs, car decals, and so on.  I started by just drawing line strokes with the pencil tool for the overall shape.  I would like it to be one shape that I can fill with a slightly lighter color.  I found that you can't join the strokes at intersections, only end to end.  So I converted all the strokes to "shape outline" and used the anchor points to clean up the intersections and make everything smooth.  I then made all the intersecting shapes a compound shape so I am able to move all intersecting parts as 1 shape.  However, I cannot fill the inside of the shape as it doesn't recognize the inside negative space as being the inside of a shape.  

I could also be going about this the wrong way altogether.  Learning as I go!  I hope someone can enlighten me.  Image attached.  

Also, the floating parts in the middle act as separate shapes.  So I would need the same process but would want the background to show through the negative space as opposed to being filled with a lighter color.  I worry that just bringing them to the front would still show the fill color of the larger overall shape....

Thanks in advance!

Westart

[#3 · Accepted solution]

Not sure how exactly you want this to look. But it sounds like the live paint tool might help you: https://helpx.adobe.com/illustrator/using/live-paint-groups.html