Welcome to the forum!
For some tutorials, try the Home tab (menu near the top)! All organized by general skill levels and then by tutorial author.
For inking vectors, the Paint Bucket tool was generally designed for that kind of thing. However, usually so much extra tweaking is needed, that I often advise users to learn a little bit of node editing, so that they can create the closed paths which are needed for basic fills.
In general I think if your vectors use very heavy, thick borders, the Paint Bucket tool probably is fine. But if your borders are thin, or there are no borders, I would lean towards node editing and basic fills.
Do you use a graphics tablet, with Calligraphy tool (pressure)? Or just the mouse? If your avatar is an example of your work, then I'm a fan already!
You know, I've never even seen Adobe Illustrator, except maybe in screenshots now and then. But just the knowledge that some people consider it the industry standard, and witnessing how complex Inkscape has become lately, I'm not surprised if it's hard to learn.
But I'm glad to hear you made your way back to Inkscape. And you have our friendly forums if you get stuck
I hope we (the community) can get some updated manuals put together, before too much longer.
Out of curiosity, how is your username pronounced in English? Even though I probably won't ever need to say it outloud, I like to try and "think it" properly.
