a triangle, ellipse or custom from clipboard.) This lets you draw your lines straight in inkscape and then tweak afterwards by pushing them around but the result has a bit more of 'cheap flash animation' look to it, and it doesn't look like high quality line-art until you then spend a substantial amount of time tweaking. If good line-quality is not that important, you can just use pattern-along-path (when using the freehand-tool you can set a shape to stretch along the path in the options e.g. Some minor cleanup is sometimes required.

If you use black on white at a good resolution, this will give excellent quality results, and all the nuances in the linework carry over.

There are basically three solutions I've used in the past to get around this if you insist on good line-quality, you need to do your lineart in a raster program like krita, mypaint or whatnot, and then you can auto-vectorize it in inkscape. ), support for good-quality lines (lineweight) is poor, eraser works unreliably, calligraphy brush presets are bad, create too many vectors that are hard to manipulate a posteri and react poorly to tablet, et cetera. Support for smoothing/stabilization is poor, tablet support is poor (only every other stroke is registered when using a wacom tablet UI breaks or becomes unresponsive when switching between mouse and tablet. Unfortunately inkscape just isn't any good at lineart/freehand drawing, as you said.

Inkscape free hand paint