Aaron Elmquist wrote:
This is a newbie question.
How do most people use inkscape and other illustration programs?
Do they draw from scratch directly in the program, or do they create a rough sketch to scan and import to provide some guidance?
Greeting Aaron,
This is one of those questions that's difficult to answer. Tools like Inkscape and other vector editors have MANY uses, and with that comes many different work habits/styles. What type of work do you plan on doing? Technical, illustration, design, or something else? I'm assuming illustration based on your wording above.
For my Illustration work (and same goes for many other artists) I will generally either use a sketch or a photograph for reference. That's not to say that sometimes I don't start with just an empty canvas, but for illustration it's less common.
An example by a cartoonist was done for one of our screenshots in fact. http://inkscape.org/screenshots/gallery/inkscape-0.45-comics.png
Also for note, my design and technical work is almost always starting from scratch on an empty canvas (only brought up in case you didn't want to limit to illustration).
Hopefully that was at least a little helpful. Please feel free to ask more. :)
Cheers, Josh