The Book of Inkscape

22.4 Coloring and Smoothing

Now that the outline is almost done, it’s time to start thinking about coloring the drawing. Inkscape can emulate many different styles of coloring. For example, you can imitate a painting by overlying many random calligraphic strokes and painting each one with a different color and opacity (you can use the Tweak tool for that, 8.7.1 Color Paint). Let’s try a more traditional, smooth coloring, consisting of a flat color fill with some lighting and shading (white and black ellipses with elliptic opacity gradients, 10.1.2 Elliptic Gradients). Use the Paint bucket tool (14.4 The Paint Bucket Tool) to create the interior shape; you can apply a little blur to it (about 2 percent) for extra smoothness (Figure 22-7).

Figure 22-7. Coloring ...