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).
Let’s get back to our outline (hide the coloring layer for now). It can be made much smoother and more attractive if you select all the strokes of some part of the figure (such as a leg or the head), union them (
), and simplify the result by pressing 
a few times. This melts the sharp corners and welds the joints for a much more natural and integral look. Another very useful trick is making all strokes thicker by outsetting them (
) or thinner by insetting (
, 12.4 Offsetting). Multiple insets and outsets on a path have an effect similar to simplification. Too much insetting may make some parts of a stroke disappear altogether, but this is not necessarily bad—trust the overall impression and your artistic sense. Of course, the Node tool (12.5 The Node Tool) can also be used for manual editing of strokes.
