Hi, i am new to inkscape and have been having lots of fun playing about with stuff.

The problem i have is to do with rubbing out a section of a drawing. I am currently saving my work, importing to paint, using rubber tool to delete parts, saving then importing back to inkscape. Surely there is an easier way.

I'm sure theres something simple i am missing here. Can anyone help me please.

I am looking to delete the lines from this image and just have the text on the forearm for the first layer.

Welcome aboard!
Is that the original material you want to work on?
That png doesn't have layers, so if you delete the lines, you will have to fill their space with something.
Paint is probably not the best tool at all for that.
Use gimp instead.

If you have two separate files for the letters and the background, you can just open the lettering,
preferably make transparency from white colour,
and use the rectangle select tool to select the lines and delete them,
then export the result as a png with transparency.

If you have only that png, with the letters flattened onto the background, you can use the clone brush tool to make the lines disappear.
Not a good thing.

If you wanted to create a higher resolution image from that lettering,
you could use a font like old london,
and redraw it inkscape.

Its two images. Here is the original image

I just put the arm in there to see what it would look like.

Anyways thanks for reply, i have used the rectangle tool before. It's just a bit clunky for small parts that need deleting, i wonder if i can use freehand tool to draw round small areas. ill give it a shot.

This could be done in a reasonable time with gimp.
It is a medium compressed jpg.
Cleaning it up, or making a good vector out of it would take hours.

Wow thanks alot, i may have to check out this gimp program.

I sometimes take a different approach (there's more than one way to do things in Inkscape).
Of course if you can turn the design into a path, then it's simple to remove whatever parts you don't want, however, not everything gets turned into a path. So another way is to turn your design into a pattern. Select your object, then click on Object / Pattern / Objects to Pattern.
Create a rectangle that is roughly the same size as your original design, select it, then go to the Fill N Stroke Box, select the pattern tab (the one with the diamonds in it), usually the latest pattern pops up first, named something like pattern1234, but you may have to try out a couple.
ok, once your rectangle is filled with the pattern, which is really your font as a pattern, you can do Add nodes, add a bunch of nodes in, then you can move the nodes to 'hide' the lines, basically the lines are still there but now hidden, so it looks like you've erased them. It actually took me longer to write this than it would have been to have done it! It is a way in which you don't have to learn GIMP. GIMP is a great program, but not the most user friendly.