What you are looking at

The toolbox runs down the left edge; the tool you pick changes the controls bar along the top. Dialogs dock on the right — Fill & Stroke, Objects, Layers — and the status bar at the bottom tells you what is selected and what the current tool will do next. That status bar is the most under-used part of the interface: read it when something behaves unexpectedly.

Set up the page

File → Document Properties. Choose a unit you think in (inches for print and craft work in the US, pixels for screen graphics) and a page size. Doing this first means every measurement afterwards is meaningful.

Draw something

  1. Press R and drag a rectangle. Hold Ctrl to keep it square.
  2. Press E and drag an ellipse; Ctrl gives a circle.
  3. Press S to switch to the selector. Click once for move and scale handles, click again for rotate handles.
  4. Open Fill & Stroke with Ctrl+Shift+F. Set a fill color, then a stroke color and width.

Two habits from the start: Ctrl+Z is generous, and objects have a stacking order you control with Home, End, Page Up and Page Down.

Curves

Press B for the Bezier pen. Click to place corner nodes, click-and-drag to pull a curve, press Enter to finish or Escape to cancel. Then press N for the node editor and drag nodes and their handles to refine the shape. This is the heart of vector drawing, and the paths guide goes further with simplification and boolean operations.

Combining shapes

Select two overlapping objects and try Path → Union (Ctrl++), then undo and try Difference (Ctrl+-). Most icons and letterforms are built this way rather than drawn in one stroke. Grouping (Ctrl+G) keeps related pieces together without merging them.

Text

Press T, click, type. Set the font and size in the tool controls bar. When the file leaves your computer, select the text and use Path → Object to Path so the letters no longer depend on the font being installed — details in text and typography.

Staying organized

Even a first project benefits from layers: background, artwork, guides. Layer visibility toggles make it easy to work on one part without selecting the rest by accident.

Saving and exporting

Ctrl+S saves an Inkscape SVG — that is your editable master, keep it. Ctrl+Shift+E opens the export dialog for PNG; set 300 DPI for print, or an exact pixel width for the web. For a print shop, export PDF. The reasoning behind each choice is in the export guide.

What to learn next

Work through the toolbox one tool at a time on real projects, memorize a dozen shortcuts, and if you own a cutting machine go straight to Cricut or Glowforge — a first project with a real deadline teaches faster than any tutorial.