Shell panic

>Ok, I’ve got this really cool Wacom tablet as a gift and I’ve been playing for a while with it. Lately, I was trying to draw manga style characters so I thought of making this tutorial about manga, Inkscape and Blender. I see you coming: Why Blender? Because if you’re as dissatisfied with your character poses and proportions as I am, you’ll see Blender as a blessing. So let’s start shall we?

First fire inkscape and get those Layers and Fill&Stroke dialogs (under layer and object menus) either on the side of your screen or on your second monitor. Add a layer and draw a stick representation of your character’s pose.
Not bad for a quick sketch, but not what I would call satisfying. I could work on the proportions or use the easy way. If you’re satisfied with your sketch skip ahead, else start blender (available from http://www.blender.org/).

Here, I’ll assume you have already played a bit with blender. It can be quite complex to use and I’ll stick to the main steps. So start by adding an armature (spacebar->add->armature). Select it, go into edit mode (tab) and add bones (spacebar) so you have half a skeleton. Select two bones (shift+right Click) and make them parent (ctrl-p) with offsets when needed. Select one side, duplicate it and mirror it. You should get a skeleton similar to this.
Go back to object mode (Tab) and switch the view to pose (using the combobox). Now rotate those bones to work on your character’s pose. I find it easier to do so by dragging bones with the Inverse Kinematics (Auto IK button at the bottom).
After you’re satisfied with the pose rotate the viewport to the right angle and export the view with file->Screenshot Subwindow. That’s it, you’ve got your perfect pose, with perfect perspective and perfect proportions (assuming your skeleton was perfect). Now go back to Inskscape and import your image in a background layer. On a sketch layer, sketch your character over the skeleton.
Now get rid of the back layer with the capture and add a clothing layer. Draw the shape of clothing and hair. Then add another layer and make it translucent while you work on it. On this layer I draw color filled shapes of each portion of the characters. This could have been done instead of the last step. However, I don’t alway add color with the exact same shape as the clothing sketch. So you should have something similar to this. Notice that small details like eyes and objects are kept until the end to be overlayed on top of the rest.
Then I add two layers on top of the colors, one for darkening and the other for lighting. When darkening, I mainly use gray. However, you’ll notice that light colors like the skin tend to get too much gray, so sometimes I add a slight tint to the shading color, like grayish brown. The same goes for the lighting layer.
Then goes the part the part that makes manga characters what they are: outlines. This really depends on the style you want. I get interesting results by exporting the outline of my character, reimporting it and using the “Trace Bitmap” feature of inkscape, which makes a large trace with varying width. Feel free to try it. However since the coloring of this one doesn’t fit the outline, I’ll retrace it by hand. The line width I chose for internal lines is such that at 100% zoom the lines are so thin they appear to be colored. Although this is my preference,
use what feels best on your character.
When this is done, select all objects from all layers and copy them. Add another layer under all and paste (ctrl-alt-v). Then while everything is still selected, merge (ctrl++). Remove the filling color of what’s selected and set stroke paint to black. Voila! your character is now outlined. I like to set the outline of a character darker than the interior lines to make it stand from the background. Add eyes, items details and a nice decor and you’re done