Creating Word Art with Inkscape (Part 1)

I got a couple of emails from people looking to create WordArt for the scroll saw so I thought I put together a quick little tutorial on how to create your own work our patterns using Inkscape now word art is pretty much any kind of design or a pattern where the text is their main design elements the one that I just recently done what is this wall hanging and it includes the letters as being their main design elements as well as I also included a simple picture there's different kinds of word art depending on what you want to do with it you have something like this which is like wall hanging you could also have applications which you would glue to a either a backer or a another project and you also have shelf sitters something that sits independently on the shelf without any additional support so this tutorials can be broken up into two parts the first part we're going to deal with the basic techniques and then the second part we're going to delve into a little bit more advanced techniques but they're a little bit more difficult but you have a lot more control but first is go ahead and get started with the basic techniques a few things that you need to keep in mind when putting together word arts whether or not the letters are going to be connected now typically with scroll saw on art we prefer to have the letters connected and so when we cut it out it's all one piece but on occasion you may want the letter separate another thing that you're going to have to keep an eye out for our problem letters and these are the letters like that have tails like the Y and a me a lowercase J will also have that tail and it's not so bad when you're dealing with wall art but it might be prose a problem if you're going to do a shelf sitter another one to kind of keep an eye out for his dots so like in my name I have the I in Travis and that is a floating dot so you're going to have to kind of be conscious of how you're going to deal with that dot either remove it all cut together or you're going to have to bridge it somehow with word art the font and the text are the main design elements obviously the font choice is going to play a very major role in how your design looks and there's a number of great free font websites out there one of my favorites is dafont.com and it has a number of different categories in which you can choose what I'm going to do is look into one of these categories I'm just going to look at groovy here and it's going to list all the different fonts that they have available one of the nice things about the font is that I could type in a name to get a preview so I'm going to put in a name and I'm going to make the size large and I'm also going to display a hundred fonts at a time then click Submit and then I could start previewing how a particular name will look in a particular font and the trick is just to kind of find one that you like and you know something kind of funky like that looks kind of nice and I think that would make a really nice pattern so I'll just click download and that's going to download it to my desktop or wherever your downloads are normally saved and now it's just a matter of installing your font so this gets started into designing we're going to just do individual letters which obviously is the easiest so I'm going to go grab my text tool and I'm going to type in welcome and then I'm going to size this out so that it's a little bit larger and easy to see and we're going to come up here to the text tool and we're going to change our font to Bookman old style and we're going to put that in semi bold and click apply and we'll close that and now we have our word in that particular font let's say we want I don't know three inch letters so I'm going to switch this from pixels to inches click the little lock icon to lock our aspect ratio I'm going to type in three inches and there we have it now it's just a matter of printing those out and cutting out those individual letters our instructions on how to print oversize patterns you could check out my other video on how to print oversize patterns using Inkscape and I'll put a link to that below one of the easiest ways to connect the letters is to simply add a base to it so that's what we're going to do on this one and I'm going to come over here and grab my text tool I'm going to type in a name Colleen and I'm going to select that and I'm going to get it to the right size and in this case I want the letters two inches tall hit return and now is time to change our font so I'm going to collect the text tool and I'm going to change the font to Jack's candlestick right there and I'm going to click apply and I change the font I'm going to close this window and now I'm going to zoom in a little bit just so it's a little bit easier to see and to add the base I'm going to grab the rectangle tool and I'm going to just create a simple rectangle and I'm going to move it up so that it connects the bottoms to all of those letters and then I simply hold down my shift key and select the name and the base or we could even just do a marquee and select them both and then we'll just come up here to object I'm sorry path and union and when that's going to do is it's going to weld those things together so it's all one object now and now we could change our colors to a gray color with a black stroke or a black outline and that's usually how I like to make my patterns I have a more in-depth tutorial on how to do this in another video called designing nameplates in Inkscape and I'll put a link to that below so in order to connect the letters without using a base you need the letters to actually touch each other and the easiest way to make the letters touch each other is using a technique called kerning so I'm going to go to my text tool I'm going to type in a name some Mara and I'm going to select that name - make it two inches tall and we're also going to change the font so I'm going to click this T up here and what we're going to use is a font called joint and then click apply and then I'll close that and then I'm going to zoom in just so I could kind of see what I'm doing a little bit better kerning is the removal or add addition of space between letters so I'm going to just double click into this and that's going to put the cursor between each one of these letters now all you have to simply do is hold down the Alt key and use your arrow keys to nudge those letters closer together once you once the letters are touching release the Alt key move on to the next space with your arrow key and then hold down the Alt key again and start nudging those letters together until they touch and we just kind of do the same process for each one of these letters on some systems you could also use you can nudge the letters up or down for subscripts or superscript the technique is the same hold down the Alt key and instead of doing left or right you do up or down so in this case so I'm going to touch these up and I'm basically bringing the whole set up and down and then I could also do individual letters by using up or down now that we have what we want how we want it to look I'm going to select it and I like my letters to be gray with a black outline so I set my stroke as black but these are still individual letters and you can kind of see where there is a line between each one of these letters and that's not really a big deal as long as you remember not to cut those lines but if you want to remove those lines we're going to have to do a little extra work first we select our design we're going to come up to a path object to path and now it's no longer letters and they're actually individual shapes it doesn't look like it because their letters are currently or these objects are currently grouped so in order to ungroup then we come up to object ungroup and now you can see that we have control over each one of those letters and we could actually move those around we're going to select all the letters and we're going to come up here to path and Union and what that's going to do is weld all those letters together and you can kind of see right here that those lines that were there previously are no longer there because now it is one object instead of six individual objects okay I think this is a good stopping point be sure to check out my next video where I cover more advanced techniques of creating word art it will give you a lot more flexibility when creating your design

Channel: Scroll Saw Village

Views: 30,607

Keywords: inkscape, scroll saw, pattern, pattern making, tutorial, scroll saw patterns, word art, how to

Id: jVYLAOoOG_o

Length: 9min 40sec (580 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 04 2014