Filling a shape made out of lines in illustrator

[Keiti.co]

I have made this shape and would like to fill it with blue, but it keeps filling these external shapes instead. Why is it doing that??

[Geobop]

Sorry to hijack your question, but it sounds like exactly the question I was going to ask.

I downloaded the free icon above and discovered that changing either the fill or stroke to blue changes the black "border" to blue, but the center of the image remains unchanged.

I imagine I could just use my paintrbush to paint a background for this example, but is there a quicker, more efficient way to do it?

Thanks.

[Ton Frederiks · Accepted solution]

Try Live Paint.

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

[Geobop]

Awesome. I won't mark it as the correct answer, since this is someone else's question, but it works for me. 😉

[Ton Frederiks]

Good to hear that helped.

[Keiti.co]

Thank you this worked great

[Ton Frederiks]

Good to hear that worked.

What you were showing was made out of lines that were not connected and each line had its own fill.

Joining the line ends to create a single closed path would also have been an option.