How can you put a stroke around a drawing made up of many paths or shapes? I want to outline my drawing in Inkscape, so it looks like it is separated from the background. See attachment. I want to outline the ark without outlining the individual shapes.

I'm not sure I'm seeing your entire image. I get that "Linked image not found" text. But I do see the ark. There are probably a couple of ways to do what you want. But I have a question 1st. Where the ark meets the water, you realize that doing what you describe will make it look like the ark isn't "in" the water...probably will look more like it's "on" the water. Anyway, just a thought.

I think the easiest way might be to create a new layer, at 1st above the finished image. Then just trace around the ark, set the stroke a little wider, then move the layer under the ark -- but between the ark and the background. It might take adding some other layers and shuffle parts of your image between layers. Unless you're really very, very careful with the tracing. Then you could just put it right on top.

The other way would involve a bucket load of node editing, and would be very tedious. But depending on how you created the image in the first place, you might be able to just duplicate certain paths and join them. For example, I'm guessing the bottom and side of the ark are all one stroke, or close to it. But I haven't really "taken apart" your image to see if that will work. I'm not sure if I can with that "Linked image" thing.

But I think just manually tracing the outline, maybe on a separate layer would be the best way.

The way I've been able to do it is to duplicate the ark; fill it with a dark color, like black; enlarge it slightly; then move it behind the original drawing of the ark; then tweak to make it look right. That works.

I forgot to attach my final image, so here it is. (A slightly different drawing.) Oh yes. I grouped all the paths before I started the sequence above.

Thanks brynn. The first image I posted was a drawing of a composition for a painting requested by my granddaughter in Florida. She's expecting a little girl in June and wants to hang the painting in the baby's room.

I finally decided not to make the stroke around the ark part of that composition. But thanks for your help anyway. It was a good exercise in thinking in Inkscape.