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Description
This is a quick & dirty tutorial explaining how I personally do my shading. It's a rather simple technique, but it's super effective!

Important! This technique will bring Inkscape to it's knees when draw very complex scenes with a lot of shading. If you are going to use this technique it's important to create as many separate layers as possible so you can hide layers to keep Inkscape responsive. It's also useful to know about the different display modes available in Inkscape, you can find them under "View > Display mode", "No filters" is very useful.

Step 1 - Draw your piece and cell shade it

The first step is to draw your object normally, I've chosen to draw a circle, it's the lightest grey figure on the image above. Then I cell shaded it using various darker grey colors. I recommend to check out one of DeviantArts many cell shading tutorials .

Steps of darker color usually works (lowering the L in HSL), though it's not your only option, e.g. for skin I usually use a more reddish color than the original color being shaded.

Step 2 - Masking/Clipping

Now we are going to mask out shading objects so they remain neatly within the bounds of our circle.

Create a copy of the base shape, in our case the circle, by pressing CTRL+D and move it to the top (Home button). Our new circle is going to act like a mask for our first shading layer. Now select both the circle and a shading object and go to "Object > Mask > Set". Our shading object will now remain neatly within the bounds of the mask.

More detailed tutorials are available at FLOSS Manuals and Tuts+ .

Step 3 - Blurring

Now it's just a matter of playing with the blur of the object until it looks how you want it to. Note that you can also still manipulate the shading with the node editing tool, the mask will stay where it's supposed to be. You can remove the mask by clicking on Release instead of set.

Description
This is a quick & dirty tutorial explaining how I personally do my shading. It's a rather simple technique, but it's super effective!

Important! This technique will bring Inkscape to it's knees when draw very complex scenes with a lot of shading. If you are going to use this technique it's important to create as many separate layers as possible so you can hide layers to keep Inkscape responsive. It's also useful to know about the different display modes available in Inkscape, you can find them under "View > Display mode", "No filters" is very useful.

Step 1 - Draw your piece and cell shade it

The first step is to draw your object normally, I've chosen to draw a circle, it's the lightest grey figure on the image above. Then I cell shaded it using various darker grey colors. I recommend to check out one of DeviantArts many cell shading tutorials .

Steps of darker color usually works (lowering the L in HSL), though it's not your only option, e.g. for skin I usually use a more reddish color than the original color being shaded.

Step 2 - Masking/Clipping

Now we are going to mask out shading objects so they remain neatly within the bounds of our circle.

Create a copy of the base shape, in our case the circle, by pressing CTRL+D and move it to the top (Home button). Our new circle is going to act like a mask for our first shading layer. Now select both the circle and a shading object and go to "Object > Mask > Set". Our shading object will now remain neatly within the bounds of the mask.

More detailed tutorials are available at FLOSS Manuals and Tuts+ .

Step 3 - Blurring

Now it's just a matter of playing with the blur of the object until it looks how you want it to. Note that you can also still manipulate the shading with the node editing tool, the mask will stay where it's supposed to be. You can remove the mask by clicking on Release instead of set.