If you copy what he's doing in those tutorials, you will learn something. If you just copy someone's code by typing, you will not. That's the difference.
Or are you saying you can't even follow the exact steps in that tutorial to result at a very similar image?
If you just read the tutorial, you won't learn much about drawing. He could explain all the choices he made, and you may feel better about knowing that, but the end-result will be initially about just as wonky as it would otherwise have been.
Thanks for the great comment... I couldn't have said it better myself... The tutorials are written to follow, play and then create your own variations of what you just learned.
Well, thank you for the great tutorials :) I played with Inkscape before, but before these tuts I never managed to actually produce something useful with it.
Only a week later I was making things like this: http://i.imgur.com/iluDL.jpg [1] -- I know it's nothing like your tutorials and they were indeed also partly done in GIMP, but Inkscape was incredibly useful for quickly trying out different styles when masking out the fore- and backgrounds. I only had a rough idea what I was going for at first, and trying out different variations of shading was a much quicker process than it would have been with just GIMP. Also, combining several (linear/radial) gradients so they fill the background just right like that, I wouldn't even have attempted in GIMP (and instead end up with something that only looks sorta right).
BTW do you happen to know what is the best format to save in, so that somebody with Adobe Illustrator can easily use it? A friend of mine who was doing the lettering (not shown) had some issues loading them so I ended up sending him huge rendered PNG images (which worked, but I hate it how any semi-serious graphics design project can turn into tens of megabytes just so you don't have pixels on A2 :) ). OTOH, I don't think he tried very hard, next time I'll make sure he has Inkscape installed so he can do the conversions himself.
[1] these are partial images used as posters for a party tomorrow, and yes I am aware that the maya calendar thing is a few weeks later.
Or are you saying you can't even follow the exact steps in that tutorial to result at a very similar image?
If you just read the tutorial, you won't learn much about drawing. He could explain all the choices he made, and you may feel better about knowing that, but the end-result will be initially about just as wonky as it would otherwise have been.