Let’s apply what we have learned so far to a slightly more complex illustration: a silly, South Park–style boy’s face. This isn’t much of a challenge, of course, but it should be useful for shaking down all the new knowledge you’ve acquired.
To start, run a new Inkscape instance, or press 
to create a new empty document if you’re already running Inkscape.
Choose the Ellipse tool and draw an ellipse (Figure 2-18). That will be the boy’s head. Scroll the palette at the bottom, choose a suitable body color, and click it to assign it to the ellipse. (You can try several colors until you find the best one.) If the ellipse came up with a stroke, middle-click the Stroke swatch in the lower-left corner of the status bar to remove it.
Draw a smaller ellipse on top of the head ellipse. What’s going on—is it invisible?! No. Ellipse (like most other tools) simply remembered the color you assigned to the head and now used the same color for the new ellipse, so it appears merged into the background of the larger head ellipse (although you can still see the selection frame around it). Scroll the palette back to the left and click the white color swatch to see the smaller ellipse:
This smaller ellipse is supposed to be the white of the boy’s eye. It’s probably not exactly the size you want the eye to be and is in a funny place for an eye. Switch to the Selector tool and drag the small ellipse to approximately where you want it. Then drag one of the arrow marks at the corners to make it approximately the right size, as shown in Figure 2-20.
Now we need yet another ellipse for the pupil of the eye. Instead of going back to the Ellipse tool, however, we will use duplication. With the white ellipse still selected, press 
. Nothing visibly changed, but we know that we now have two ellipses there, the new one being selected. Click the black color swatch, then drag the arrow marks again to make the pupil smaller and drag it into place:
The eye is ready—but we need two identical eyes. Let’s duplicate the entire eye we created. The eye consists of two separate objects, so before duplicating we need to select them both. You can do this either by dragging a rubber band around the eye (but make sure to start dragging from an empty space and not from the head ellipse, otherwise you’ll be dragging the head, which is not what you want!), or just click the pupil and then 
-click the white. Press and drag the second eye sideways (both objects move when you drag any of them).
Now, to finish the drawing, choose the Calligraphic pen tool and draw the nose, mouth, ear, and some hair (Figure 2-23). If the paths appear in some wrong color, click black on the palette; after that, all new calligraphic paths will be black too. If the pen draws too wide or too thin, adjust the Width value on the tool’s controls bar above the canvas. If something turns out wrong, undo by pressing 
.
The image is ready, but we’re not finished yet with all the possibilities it offers. What you have done so far would be just as easy to do in a raster editor. But we’re in vector, so let’s use the specific vector advantages to play with the result. Using Selector, select both eyes’ whites and scale them up or down. Or move the pupils around. Or scale, rotate, and move the mouth. All of this creates a wide range of facial expressions. You can also select, duplicate, and drag away the entire drawing to present several examples side by side:
Save or export the result. That’s all!