Strokes & fills - separated or linked?

>>> How can I combine fills inside a single outline shape?

You can combine shapes by shift key selecting the areas and using the pathfinder palette, depending on your version of illustrator this will either be called the "unite" function or it will be called the "combine" function (Adobe changed the name back in time when they built the creative suite).

>>> How can I link the outline strokes and fills again?

This is slightly trickier to deal with, as a rule it is best to only ever expand a live paint group if absolutely necessary, as you have discovered, the group will expand into many, many elements.

It can be advantageous to first make a copy of the live paint group in your document so you have something to fall back on, or if you still can, undo the expand back to the live paint group and modify.

Modify is easier in most scenarios when you are working as a live paint group.

You can convert it back to live paint group at any time, but doing so does leave you with duplicated objects on top, which is annoying as you would then have to delete these duplicates on top, to then modify the original object underneath in areas. CS5 also behaves this way and I am yet to find a work around.

andrew

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