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

Aaron Elmquist <ironranger@...125...> writes:

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?

Both methods are used, depending on what you want to do. Most of what I do with Inkscape is drawing icons, and I never scan artwork for that - at most, I doodle on a piece o paper and then rebuild it on the screen from scratch. But in the few times I did actual illustration works, I used scanned art, downloaded pictures and even a freehand drawing I made in Photoshop. I still remember "fondly" the time I spent vectorizing artwork in Adobe Illustrator, back in 2002. These were two rather complicated cartoons meant to be printed on T-shirts, and doing it was hell on earth. If only I had Inkscape at the time.