problem with the paint bucket

OK so here's my problem. I was trying to go through the blue metal shpere tutorial and I got stuck. I drew mt circle with the marqee tool and then I tried to fill it with a different color. The paint bucket did put the other color in but it didn't fill it all the way. It was a solid color in the center of the sphere but it started to fade out the further out you went. I just want it to fill in solid not fade. What is the problem here??

sounds like the feather value of the selection you made was set to a number higher than 0.

When you have one of the selection tools, you should see that there is an option to set a feather value, change that to 0 and then make your selection and fill it.