Hi Alain,
Oh, that's great! With that much info (the Amazon links) I can find what I need to add those books to the list of manuals.
There are so many ways to start learning Inkscape! The first thing I looked at was Help menu > Tutorials > Basic. And there are 3 of those tutorials that I like to suggest for new users. Basic, Shapes and Advanced. And don't worry -- even though it's called "advanced", it's beginner skills. And then there are all those other tutorials.
And there's a brand new guide for beginners, that I've recently added to my "advice":
Inkscape for Noobs Part 1Inkscape for Noobs Part 2(Just in case, "noob" is a version of "newbie", which of course is a "beginner", in internet language.)
If you click on the Home tab above, you can look in the Beginner Skills block for lots of tutorials. (Click on the black text of each list item, to open a hidden list of individual tutorials. When you see the finger -- click!) For myself, I learned the fastest by following tutorials. And even after I managed to make some drawings on my own, following tutorials taught me the proper techniques that I had only hacked my way through before.
I much prefer written tutorials than videos, and the vast majority that you find here are text tutorials. A lot of people like video tutorials, but I've found very few video tutorials which are worthwhile. Too many of them are just like a movie of someone making a drawing, with music blaring. But you don't
learn anything, by just watching someone else work. You don't know why they are using this technique or that.
Besides tutorials, where you decide to start would be something that you find interesting. One of my early interests was tesselation (which is making one pattern unit which is repeated in both directions (side to side and top to bottom). It's more challenging than one might think!
I'm also fascinated in drawing things in simulated 3D. I guess in the art world it's called "realism" or "photorealism". So Inkscape is always just a 2D editor. But you can draw a circle, and add shading and highlights to make it look like a sphere. These are my best efforts in realism:
http://inkscapecommunity.com/ic_gallery/thumbnails.php?album=7All along the way, I've been interested in animation. But so far, I haven't managed to finish any animated image. Inkscape can't do animation all by itself. You can only draw images in Inkscape, that you can use in another program, to animate. Or if you know SVG/XML code and/or javascript (or other kinds of codes), you can make animations. (And there's a code named "SMIL" which may or may not be about to go extinct. I think
this image uses SMIL.
I'm not very good at it, but Inkscape is very well suited for drawing cartoons. Examples:
http://www.peppertop.com/http://jelly.haifashion.eu/On
this page you can find links to all kinds of images made with Inkscape. If nothing else does, that should spark your imagination!
Oh, and 1 more note. Recently a lot of new Inkscape extensions have been written for CNC, or laser cutters or even the home/craftwork type of paper cutters. We don't have a page for it on the website yet. But hopefully we can put one together pretty soon. But if you like to tinker in your workshop, Inkscape is ready!
