Learning Inkscape - An Order of the Stick Avatar Guide

Making the body

The basic male body in Order of the Stick is based around a rectangle. That's also a tool in Inkscape, accessable from the left toolbar or by pressing F4.

Creating the body shape is similar to that as the head:

• Find a suitable character to measure against. Elan is okay, but remember he's wearing a jacket that bulks a bit over the basic shape. A better example might be one of the Sapphire Guard, but pick someone standing upright.
• Draw a rectangle using the rectangle tool. Since we aren't making a square we don't need to hold down Control as we drag; just click and drag. The rectangle should be drawn with the same colours and stroke width as the circle - if not, I'll explain how to fix that below this list.
• Resize the rectangle to roughly fit your example case. Since you can't see the top edge as it'll be under the head don't worry too much about the height, but get the width looking good.
• Then drag the rectangle back to the circle we just drew.

If the rectangle doesn't look the same as the circle, you may need to change the tool settings. Double click on the rectangle tool to open the preferences for the rectangle tool, and select "last used style", and try again.

Alternatively, you can change any shape to have the same fill and stroke as another using the copy and paste tools. Select the circle and press Control+C to copy. Then select the object you wish to change and press Shift+Control+V to paste the style of the copied object. Instead of pasting another circle, it will set the style of the selected object to match the circle.

Drag the rectangle back over the circle and you'll see that it's on the top. That's not what we want - we need the body underneath the head. What we need to do is reorder the two objects.

Like with the layers, all the objects in Inkscape have an ordering from top to bottom. It is like they are printed on plastic sheets which you can rearrange in whatever order you wish. What we want to do is move the rectangle object to be underneath the circle object.

These actions are under the Object menu, but you'll be using them enough that it's worth memorising the keyboard shortcuts. Page Up moves it in front of one object, Page Down moves it back one. Home moves it all the way to the front, while End moves it all the way back. Hopefully the choice of these keys make sense!

To move the rectangle behind the circle, select it and press Page Down. Or End in this case, as there's only two objects. When there's lots of objects you can just mash Page Up and Down to cycle through the order until it's just right.

Now we've got a naked guy with no face or limbs! You can drag the rectangle around a bit until you think it's in the right position, but don't sweat it - we'll be making lots of minor adjustments later. Save your work (Control+S) and we're ready to move on.