Hi all,

Inkscape newbie here so please be gentle.

I'm kind of asking about two unrelated topics here in one post. I hope that's ok..

Tablet
I've been gettng to grips with my new tablet (Bamboo pen & touch). I had a few teething issues and had to drop to the prev version of Inkscape due to pressure tablet not working but that's sorted now.

My first question is, does anyone know how to stop it zooming in when I move my pen onto my tablet? i.e. when it detects pen is in range of tablet. It's very annoying!

My second question is, is it "ok" to use calligraphy as a standard drawing pen? I started getting severe performance issues doing this, and I'm on a very powerful machine (i7 with GF580 & 6gb ram). But I like the fact the pen is pressure sensitive so.. :/

Fill / Shading

I really was banging my head against a wall.

I have drawn freehand using calligraphy, a bulldog head. Due to aformentioned performance issues and the fact flood fill just doesnt' work half the time, I have run into a brick wall so now I must ask the obvious question: "am I doing it wrong?"

I have never done vector drawing before, and am pretty much drawing like I would in any art package. i.e. Sketch many lines then make sure they overlap each other can thus can be filled. I've used CTRL+L (simplify) on some lines but not all. And then once I am happy with the drawing I select all objects and group them.

Once I've done this I get stuck. How do I now fill in parts of the dog head in different ways? Some brown there, some white in the middle, etc. If I just use a paintbrush it obviously will overlap the black lines I've drawn and not look great. Even if I send the painted area to the back, it will still show, underlapping said outlines. So I would imagine i have to use fill, but as mentioned before I can't get it to work - I'm fairly certain there are no gaps but I gave up as it was just hanging my machine, or doing nothing.

The first thing I want to do is detect the outer outline (if that makes sense) of the dogs head. Duplicate just that shape, and fill it all in white and send to back - that's my base colour. Then I want to shade some jagged areas to the left and right, and the ears, with different colour. Not sure how to do this as there is no defined shape to fill and see above for my thoughts on freehand painting..

Unless there's a way to trim all areas outside the aformentioned dog head shape, which I guess would mean it doesn't matter if my freehand painting was a bit off. But that's assuming I can even make the underlying shape in the first place so argh! You see why I'm going in circles here?

I hope somoene can help, all the tutorials I've watched are basic shapes rather than freehand drawing.

You have a lot of questions and I am just gioing to address one issue that might help you - you said you draw lots of lines anf then group them for your outline? When you do this in a paint/raster program there is no performance hit, but doing this with a vector program means that you have a lot of unnecessary vector info bogging things down. when you select all instead of grouping them yu might try the union function (under paths menu) this makes the paths into one and eliminates the underlying areas for more efficient drawing. You might find that filling is easier too

Hhhhm, well I can't answer anything about the tablet, because I don't use one. But I can offer some comments about the filling and shading.
And no worries, we're always friendly here

It sounds like you have the basic idea about sending the white to the background. Usually, although not always, one would put the main color, or the color which takes up the most space, on the bottom. To create shaded areas, you have to draw either a closed shape (and use Fill), or a line that creates an enclosed area with 1 or more other paths (and use Paint Bucket tool). Then you might or might not remove the strokes, depending on your wishes.

Then you basically stack up the shading and highlights shapes like that. If you need to use a blur in a place where you don't want the blur to fall outside a path or border, you can use clipping, or maybe masking (http://screencasters.heathenx.org/ There should be one, or even some there, that cover the basic steps for shading, as well as clipping/masking. There are also some great tutorials here: http://tavmjong.free.fr/INKSCAPE/MANUAL ... Start.html. Oh, and I just thought of a great one for shading.....well, there are several on this page that might help: http://inkscapetutorials.wordpress.com/category/shadow/

Hi byrnn,

Thanks for the tips!

I finally got what I wanted. I used a pencil to draw temporary "block areas" to control where I wanted to fill, then removed them later. I mainly used the paintcan to fill, not sure if this is the best way but honestly couldn't think of another.

I will definitely try using "combine" next time. Presumably one just uses it on the "outer" outlines before filling, and it creates a single object which can then be filled using the standard fill/line dialog?

Here is my first work. I traced it by hand from a bitmap, using the drawing tablet & pen. Then I deleted some bits and cartoonified them like the eyes and mouth. I used the mouse to do most of the shading, using the technique mentioned above.

As for the tablet zooming in, was nothing to do with inkskape, was some silly program setting on the tablet that I've changed. Next picture should be much easier now..

Awesome work!