FREE Inkscape for Beginners Class - Originally Aired 4/27/2017

hey good evening everyone thank you for joining me hopefully you can hear me okay so I'm going to keep talking and this couple people could tell me in the chat box you can hear me loud and clear or if there's any kind of problems I would appreciate it excuse me so first of all I will call if everyone Elenin during this class I been battling allergies for about the past two months so springtime here in Louisville Kentucky and just trying to get through it and we'll get through this all just fine this evening if you and I will address you know things in the chat as much as I can however the class is you know it's probably going to last a couple of hours I think the last time I did this ended up running like 2:45 or something like that I probably won't go that long tonight but we'll be covering a lot of information if any of you have a blurry video right now if it's not good and crisp and sharp up down in the corner of your screen there's a little gear that you can click on and you can adjust your quality up to like 720p or maybe even 1080p or something so as people come into the chat they'll probably be saying things like you know my screens blurry or something like that so if you guys could watch out for them and let them know and just help out a little bit I would appreciate it and I have made Rhonda Mobley a moderator in the chat this evening so if we get anybody in there you know down then we get somebody interposing spam links and things like that she can move them out for me if if we run in there that kind of stuff so if you don't hear me turn up your sound and turn up your sound on your video there's two two volumes you need to turn up one is on your video one is on your computer so we're going to be talking about Inkscape tonight and before we get started I've got a few things I'm going to go over with you and I'm going to switch over and show you my monitor real quick and if you see me looking away from the camera burn out any and things like that because I have four monitors here so bear with me as I do all that stuff here here we go alright so many of you know and some of you may not know that we have a website at 651 vinyl comm so we sell vinyl adhesive vinyl and HTV weeding tools all those kind of things and you can find our business page on facebook 651 vinyl and so if you go to our actual website if you go to any of these articles in here under the learn section you'll also find the link to our Facebook group so if you're not in that group come and join us you happy to have you in there lots of helpful people in our group and then if you're not subscribed to my youtube channel you can go to youtube and search on youtube and find my channel and subscribe to it you'll get all my videos and things I also have a website true young calm that has almost a filly it links in here where you can shop on Amazon go to mighty deals and buy the Samantha font you can mush your cuts a lot make the cut or you can flip me a little donation and give me a tip if you like the free classes that I do all this kind of stuff all I really like when people use these links to shop and buy things because does it cost you a penny more and it helps support the channel on what I do and then if in case you don't know a few weeks ago I launched a website called Troy Graham and here you can go create monograms 3 letter for letter monograms you can do shadow fonts and you can curve your text real easy and you just pull this up and you can make adjustments to your text and whatever you want to do to it make sure if you do this you go to this how to use link and read the instructions and watch the videos all the information is there and if anyone can go to sign this little petition for me I'd appreciate it I'm trying to I'm going to send it another audition video for Survivor and I'm trying to get 5000 signatures so if anyone can sign that for me and help me out I would appreciate it so um let me switch back to my camera here we'll go down a few things here also under the chat box there's a little dollar sign icon it's a super chat and you can make a little tips or Nate ancients - there - if you if you enjoy this video we're going to be covering a lot of information tonight I mean a lot of information and the you know a lot of times when I do this class or do these videos a lot of people say I'm just over point you know about halfway through so take your time watch I try to do things slow yes I do have a patreon page at patreon.com slash troy young don't like to push it too much it's out there and and people who donated I appreciate it but I like the when people shop and things better because if you go through amazon.com and go through my store I get commission off of things and you don't pay a penny more this is what works out a lot better for everybody so we're going to be covering a lot of information don't let it overwhelm you I try to go slow I try to repeat things and you know make sure everyone understands what I'm doing and why I'm doing it so just bear with me as I have to take lots of sips of water and pick cough drops in night to get through this so what I one of the one thing I'd like to tell people is that I have limited resources available as far as my schedule and I get tons and tons of requests emails to help people with images and SVG files join our group and go post your questions or ask for help in the group a lot of times I can do it Rhonda cayhall you know a lot of people in our group Lee everybody helps everyone in there and I work a lot so I just don't have time most of the time to get you know do that one-on-one help with people like I used to be able to so tonight we're going to be talking about Inkscape and SVG files I do have a link and an article on our website at 651 vinyl comm if you go into that learn section you'll find an Inkscape section and there's a link in there that shows you tells you how to install Inkscape on Windows and on Mac and there are links in there to version 0.91 so 0.92 has some bugs in it and some other things that I don't like to deal with so if you have that I would advise uninstalling it installing point 91 but that's ultimately up to you and you can do that if you want so what is an SVG file SVG files are scalable vector graphics there's two types of files most people deal with when it comes to crafting working with crickets or silhouettes or anything and Inkscape kind of bridges the gap between the two in most cases and those are what I call flat files they're JPEGs or PNG files and those are raster images that are made up of pixels and shading and things and as you adjust the size of those files they get blurry if you make them larger if they're really resolution and you try to make them larger they're so blurry you can't use them for anything and an SVG file is a text file that actually just contains a lot of math in it so it has all these equations built into it for the arcs and curves the lines and you can adjust an SVG file larger or smaller without affecting quality so you know what we're going to do tonight is learn how to make SVG files we're going to learn how to do some simple conversions from flat files to SVG files and we're going to be I'm going to take you through Inkscape and teach you the tools that I use to do these things and I'm not going to be covering everything in Inkscape it's almost impossible to do and you can tell what version of Inkscape you have by going to the help and about menu so I'm going to be covering the things that I do the tools that I use the tools that I feel are useful for crafting and all those kind of things and try to teach you all these basics and foundations now I do have a series of videos on my channel that are that I call challenges and those challenges will take you through learning all these things and you can practice using these all those tools over and over again - you understand it you get it right and so a lot of people have other programs like Photoshop you know paint.net things like that and those are all raster editing programs for the most part now Photoshop can save as SVG files but it's very limited capability the newest version can anyway and so those are not the same things as having Inkscape or Adobe Illustrator Adobe Illustrator is the Adobe you know I could say that's the Adobe version is an equivalent it's the commercial professional software and I'd say the majority of people who are you know really true commercial graphic designers you know use Adobe Illustrator and that's what people like to have on the resume the Inkscape is a an open source it's a free program it's one of the best most incredible free software packages I've ever seen I've been in computers for a long time but you know Inkscape they do a wonderful job with and it's a very powerful software if you learn how to use it the problem with the Inkscape for a lot of people is they open it up they don't know where to go after they open it up it's empty it's blank they don't like what the tools do you know all those things so we're going to talk about that go over Inkscape and and just jump right in and start showing you the tools and covering what each of them do and I'm gonna switch over again to my desktop so we can get started okay so I am in Inkscape right now and if you shooting I will start at the top left so when you open it up you will see your document window here in the center of the screen this is like document border sets like a special paper it's eight-and-a-half by eleven and so over on the left hand side down the left is a toolbar and these have most of the tools that you're going to use to edit the program and then of course you have your tours across the top and those toolbars across the top will often change depending on what tool you are using so I'm going to go down the list of these tools and go across the menus and we'll talk about what each of these things do and how they affect what you're doing and you know we'll show you how to use them and basically what they do for you and then we'll get into doing some things like curving some text and tracing and their basic image and things like that and by the time we get done the night if you were able to follow along okay and pick this up you'll really be kind of primed to go through those challenges to really learn how each of them work and it'll come back to you after you do them a few times but this is a really get started and understand what we're doing this class is going to be very very similar to the class that I did back on February 15th there probably be some changes just cause a lot of this I do live and kind of off the top of my head and and not you know too scripted as far as what I do with it and so over here on the left hand side we'll start with this toolbar and the the first tool is the selector tool it's just the one that looks like a cursor and from when you have objects on your screen you when you're on that that means you're going to be clicking and moving and rotating items long a lot of times through tonight's class I'll be making references to things that are like design space I know a lot of your design space and Cricut users a lot of you may not be but the majority of my viewers are Cricut users so I try to relate some of the commands and things to them as much as I can and so this next tool down is called the node editor now this node editor is used to make changes to pads okay so you see it says edit paths by nodes and what is a path a path is a line in an cut file so when you have an image on your screen whether you're in design space or silhouette studio or anything in order for the machine to know where to cut it has to have a path to follow along so in other words if you were to take a coloring book page and put it on top of a light box and lay a sheet of paper over top it and start tracing it your pencil is open or whatever you're tracing with is following the path of that image that's showing through and that's what the blade does as the machine cuts now a node is a point where I the blade reaches that node and it must decide what to do what action to take being whether it's going to turn left right go straight ahead or make it an angle you know how it's going to continue moving on and nodes can be found anywhere along a path in a basic form let's say if you're in a square and it's a perfect square you will have four nodes there'll be one on each corner however you can have more nodes than that that they can be along the path in between those two corners too if it's not a simple object so we'll be getting into that and I'll show you how that works here in just a little while now you're going to notice I'm going to skip some of these tools and that's just because I don't use them a lot excuse me the route the measurement tool I don't really use a lot but it does come in handy you could use it to simply click and drag across your screen it will give you a measurement depending on what unit you're in so you can use it to measure your designs and things like that I'd really don't use it too much because I do my designs and just kind of estimate the size and you know of the design and when I import it into design space or whatever we want to use you can adjust the size it's an SVG file so I don't use that tool very much the next tool down is the rectangle and square tool so when I click on that like I mentioned earlier you'll notice that as I click on tools you see different settings up here that change and become available to you and so with the square tool I'm going to point out several things as we go through tonight's class that also pertain to you know kind of fixing things because a lot of people will do things in Inkscape and they'll say well my Square has rounded corners it's not square and the reason is some of these settings get changed up here and I'm not really sure if people change these settings or maybe something or something in Inkscape changes those settings for them so I you know I've kind of had some little ghosts of the machine and Inkscape changed some settings for me before that I know I didn't change so minor issue but these are the things that you want to watch for the next two I use is the circle tool or the ellipse tool so you when you click one of these shapes it should show you this with the square but you just drag and draw your your images and one of the things to note is if when you're drawing a shape I'll go back to the square tool for this one if you hold down ctrl shift when you create your shape it makes it proportional so it keeps that width and height even as long as I'm dragging my corner at a 45 degree angle okay so if I try to drag my cursor down the screen you see it starts to go in increments or if I drag it across like that but if you get a nice proportional object and you drag at a 45 degree angle or keep it proportional the same thing happens with the circle so if I drag it at a 45 degree angle it will make a perfect circle for me and bear with me just a moment here probably make some adjustments oh so we can create those shapes in either and you can when you create those shapes if you don't make them proportional you can change your settings up here at the top - once you change back to your selector tool so now I'm working with the object and when I'm clicking on it I can do things up here like here's my width and my height so I can set that with even numbers and it will take care of that for me - and then you also have a lock up here where you can lock the proportions and where if you adjust it it just keeps the proportions just like design space does with that little lock and likewise if you hold ctrl shift if it's not lock if you hold ctrl shift it does the same thing just like when you're creating it and keeps it proportional now I don't use this lock a lot I'm just used to using control ships keyboard shortcut but that's kind of your own preference the next tool down is the shapes tool so you can do kind of the polygons or the stars with this and you can make adjustments to it - so if I create a star and you see that that is a real perfect star so from this point to this point is a straight line so that's all symmetrical all the way around and so if I wanted to adjust what that shape looks like one I can change the number of corners so if I move that to seven it makes a seven pointed star and here this spoke ratio can adjust the shape of your star so if I increase that you see it starts to make the star kind of fat or skinny so these settings up here you know you want to get familiar with these because they will do some different things for you and help you correct some shapes or make adjustments to the shapes that you we're going to want to understand and know how to edit the next tool down is the Bezier tool I probably won't cover this a lot tonight just because it's a little bit more advanced than what we're going to cover but I'll show it to you real quick the Bezier tool lets you draw lines or paths from straight lines like this if I want to draw it I just draw around and click in various places where I want my lines at and then my last one when I click on it it will close that loop for me so I have a shape now so I'll get into some of that a little bit later one with the node editor and how to adjust some of this but we won't talk about that too much tonight next is the text tool of course and we just click and type our text and when we go back to our selector tool here control shift and we adjust it and/or keep its proportions or if you don't you can adjust it and do whatever you want with it now when you create text we're going to I'm going to finish the tools first and then go back and do these things for you but the text tool you have to everything has to be converted to a path before you can put it in a darkening software to really use it to cut with so text as it is created is just like in the design space or so what's to do is text so you can click on it you can double click you can edit that text and make changes to it you can highlight it and then you can change your font and do whatever you want now here a little bit I'm going to show you how we turn this into a path then once we do that it's not editable from a typing or font standpoint it becomes a shape at that point so we'll do that in just a little bit the there is an eraser tool in here I don't really use this much I find it easier to edit with nodes for everything I do so show you if I make a circle here and if I use the eraser tool there's two ways you can use it one is it will delete any object that touches the eraser so if I draw a line through here like this with the eraser as soon as I let it off my mouse it deletes that entire object this one is more of an eraser line so if I want to say that's 20 pixels wide and drag my eraser through there it erases that portion again I don't really use the eraser tool that much and I may not even cover it again the night but some people like to use it and I'll show you later on why I don't use it the paint bucket tool is of course to fill areas with paint and we do that generally in combination with the color palette that's down here across the bottom of the screen so we can grab the scroll scroll bar and move it back and forth and we'll see what were what colors we have available to us now the there's also a couple things down here at the bottom you'll want to pay attention to and that is the fill here where it says n/a so we don't have any objects so we're not going to we can't fill anything right now then there's the stroke which is the outline that you can put around it so you can have two different colors for a fill and a stroke and then the opacity setting so many of you may didn't know might have noticed when I drew a shape earlier you can see through it you see that document border property and that's because the opacity is not at a hundred percent it's turned down so if I run this up to a hundred now I have a solid shape and you cannot see through it now the opacity setting is very useful for things I use it most of the time if I'm having to put one object over top of another and I need to do some alignment or see how much of a space there is around the edges between the two or something like that and it makes it easier to see objects on top of each other where they're positioned up by turning the opacity down the eyedropper tools the last tool over here will go over and the eyedropper tool is used to get a sample of an exact color so it's really useful if you import an image and trace it you don't you don't know what color something is then you just want to make another part a different color so I will draw two squares here and I'm just going to click on a color here and change one of them okay so I have two squares and two different colors now if I want this square to be red exactly the same as this square I'll select it go to my eyedropper tool and then go grab a sample of the color I want and it will change it to the exact same color so makes it real easy to match things up and get your pieces coordinated and you know avoid having too many different colors or just you know if if it's even just one shade different it's going to be considered a different color so that's a real handy tool to use there now I'll go across the the menus and cover these lightly here because we're going to make use of some of these menus and some of them we won't under the file menu of course just like any software you have your file open import save and all these things and then one thing I like to point out to everyone is this document properties box now I mentioned earlier that we have this page border here and this is just like a document pages that eight-and-a-half by eleven sheet of papers is you can consider it and in this document properties box we can make changes to this so we right now it's working in pixels so I can change it to inches and then down here I can change the size of that box so if I want to work on a twelve inch by 12 inch space which most of your crafting software is set to to be laid out - I can do that now this if you're creating SVG files this box does not necessarily have to be here but it's better to have it on and head your SVG file inside of it when you save it again it's not necessary but it's it's kind of I think it's called a viewport what most people call it in if you don't have your SVG inside of that box if you open it in another software to view a preview like if you open it with Internet Explorer just to see what the file looks like you may not see your file if it's not positioned correctly so the best thing to do is just leave this on and work within this box and if you don't want it you can turn it off or you can turn it off and do your work and then come back and turn it on and get things placed if it annoys you I know it took me a while to get used to it it doesn't bother me anymore I used to turn it off all times it just really annoyed me and then the other setting down here that I like to show people is the background color right now the background color is white and a lot of times we're working with white pieces and it's very difficult to tell where they're at on the screen so you may want to come in here and what it's usually on RGB I tell that the easiest way to do this is to go to the wheel and then you can come down here on this triangle and just click a color and drag it around or where you want it and usually something like a really light gray is good to adjust that setting to that way your you're going to see you know any white objects and everything else that's going on your screen you're not likely to have a great object that's exactly the same color as the background but you know that just makes a little bit easier for you now of course on the Edit menu we have all the standard edit functions cut copy paste and all these things those are pretty much standard and then down here is another semi important setting there's some preferences in here as you get better with Inkscape you may want to go through some of these preferences and change them but I've maybe changed a few of these not too many on my system you know the snapping a lot of people if you have that version 9 - there's a feature called snapping and I will tell you something about custom to know when you're trying to put two objects together or layer them and get them positioned just right it's real frustrating but some of these settings you know like I said as you go through and escape and learn it more you may go in and change some of those preferences to tweak things the way you like them under the View mode there is a couple things here one end of the display mode you can go from usually people go from normal to outline mode and when you put it in outline mode I'll show you this in a little bit it will show you your pals so you can see your paths and and be able to check to see if all your objects are set to a path before you save your file that way you avoid you know importing it into design space or something else and then nothing shows up because it wasn't a path you can turn all the page grid if you like I don't use it because it just kind of gets in my way of designing I like this blank canvas look but some people may like that grid one of the things you can do is if you turn your page grid on in that Preferences I just showed you you can make some adjustments to that grid under the interface you can you know to just how you want your major and minor grid lines to show and then you can adjust the transparency of those two so that they're not quite as dark as what I have them on the screen right now and under the we I don't really use anything than the layers menu in design space each object is considered a layer each separate object so in Inked space objects or what relate to layers in design space so we'll be working a lot with in this menu where we do we'll be using some of these panels and the fill and Stroke panel group ungroup all these commands should be very familiar to you you know if you've been using design space or other design software you know these things you know they raise lower objects rotates all those things you're generally are what you're using most of the time anyway and that's what a lot of people don't understand or it doesn't it takes a while for it to click with them is that the you know commands and things that you were doing in Inkscape are very similar to what you do in design space or silhouette studio or whatever else you're going to use you just have to figure out which what they mean you know group and ungroup zob vyas but there are other commands that we're going to talk about in a minute under the path menu that are very similar to others but they're just called something else so I have a question there what is the difference between major and minor gridlines so if I turn on my page grid right now I have my major gridlines set at one inch so that's the bolder lines there and then the modern gridlines is how it's going to divide up those one inches so if I go to that preference box and look at the grid settings it's set for major grid line every five spaces okay and then the minor grid lotzie spacing is one so you just put it on inches here and then we can adjust the color of those grid lines too so your major grid lines are the one-inch marks the minor ones are how you are going to subdivide those with the smaller grid marks okay so the path menu is where we're going to spend quite a bit of time tonight the path menu is where you're working with your shapes and objects and really doing your editing you know in design space you and the other software's you're doing things like welding slicing and all that and those commands are what you're going to be doing with this path command one thing we do a lot you're going hear me say the word path a lot tonight because our goal is to get everything to a path where we can work with it in any n so object path converts objects to a path so earlier i mentioned that when you type some text that text is a font it's a text box or a text object and then if you want to really edit that and get it ready to put into the design space or something like that you want to change it to a path first and there are more steps beyond changing it to a path but just make sure you understand that those you know commands or to change it to a path so that you could what I call really work with it okay trace bitmap is where we trace images so if we have you know we bring in an image that maybe a logo file or something like that that someone gives us and we want to be able to cut it out but they gave us a JPEG so we'll trace that image and turn it into a path where we can work with it edit it make it scalable the commands down here that we use Union is like weld in design space and again I'm looking I'm probably going to skip over a couple of these but I'll cover most of Union is like weld so it takes two objects and makes it one so if I have a square and a circle so now I have two objects okay and I'm going to make this one object now some things don't the it's kind of hard to explain the when you have an object on your screen that you've just made like a square or a circle like I have here those are objects but they're not necessarily paths yet and when you do certain commands it kind of converts it to a path for you in that command okay now I'm in the habit of just converting things to a path before I do anything so if I select this too and I do object to path when I go to my node editor you'll see earlier I mentioned if you have a square on the screen you have four nodes one on each corner and same thing with the circle I have four nodes there that's the minimum required to make those shapes okay so if I overlap these two let me make these a different color so you can see them a little better if I overlap those two and then I go to path Union it makes them one object and if I go to my node editor now I see that my nodes are all the way around the outside and we lost the one on the corner and we don't have anything on this curve here it's no longer present those are one object now now you'll see me do a lot of things like that where I jump right back to where I was I'm hitting ctrl Z as in zebra that's the standard undo key for most Windows applications so control Z just takes you backwards and you'll learn that really well because you'll make a lot of mistakes in Inkscape and you'll have to go back and you know go back three four or five steps sometimes and correct what you did or figure out a different way to do it because what you try didn't work right or maybe it distorted your image and you have to find something a different way to address it now our next commands there's four commands right here the difference intersection exclusion and division those four commands more or less make up the slice command in Inkscape except this it divides it out into different things that you're you're going to do in design space when you take two objects like this and slice it you'll end up with four objects at the end you'll end up with the top-left part of the square here you end up the bottom right part of the circle kind of looked like a pac-man and then you end up with the square part that was cut out of this corner and then you end up with the circle part that ended up out of this corner you end up four pieces now that's all that happens all with one slice now in Inkscape they're separated so if I overlap two images like that and I get a difference what it does is it takes the top image and cuts away the body uses it to cut away the bottom image I use intersection it takes the it keeps the difference it keeps the course that's overlapped and gets rid of the other parts I use exclusion it takes away the park that's overlapped and keeps the other parts it's the exact opposite then division is the other one I use so it used the top one to cut a path out of the bottom one so it's separated so you can see there how I accomplished all these same things that the slyke's command doesn't design space but in Inkscape they are just separated into separate commands and then break apart is the next command that's a I use a lot and break apart let's say I'll do this for you here we're going to have these two shapes here and I'm going to do a difference so that we have a hole in the middle okay seeing see through that you see my document border there and so now I have two paths in this object the outside is a path and the inside is a path and so and this isn't a you know like a raster image where part of it is erased because it's pixels like I said it's two paths and they've been put together the break apart command and I'll show you an example why what this is useful for later but the break a Park man will separate those paths so if I select my object I hit break apart you see that it broke apart those two paths okay so if you picture taking a two pieces of string tie them in a circle so you have two pieces of string that are in n circles and one's bigger than the other one and you lay them on the table and you put one inside the other one so it looks like a donut so then you take the middle when you take it out and put it beside it you just broke it apart and that's what I did just now well with that image the next commands that I use are inset and out set and then linked offset okay now LinkedIn inset and offset are just opposites of each other and what I'll do I'm going to hit ctrl D is in duplicate and it's going to make another square now it doesn't look like I did anything but you see there there's another one right over top of it and I'm going to hold ctrl shift and adjust that in a little bit I'm just doing this so you can see it okay you see and see the the difference that it does so I'm on the elves oome in a little bit make this larger I'm on the Guv selected the inner square the only reason I had this other square here behind it is that so that you can get a frame of reference to the distance between here and here okay but I'm working with this one if I go to path an inset if you notice they're shortcuts here control left parenthesis is the shortcut for inset so I'm going to hit ctrl left parenthesis you notice it kind of starts to shrink so I'm going inward I'm saying I want to take this object inward go back to where it was now if I do the opposite I go out set and I hit my control right parenthesis it's adding to that path and making it thicker okay so what's that useful for it's useful for most common thing that people use it for is to thicken fonts and letters so I have from lettering on here I'll make this nice and big so you can see it and then I'm going to hit ctrl right parenthesis and do an outset you see it can make my letters thicker you see it starts to distort them a little bit this depends on what font you're working with and how well that font is designed okay so some fonts will be perfect some of them will have a little flaws in them now when I did that earlier I'm a I made the statement that when you do a certain commands it changes your object to a path for you and in set an outset or an example of those commands so if I go back to where I this is a font now and I can edit I can double click that I can change it okay like this bigger again so you see it better once I do an inset or outset I'll just do outset one time this is now a path I can double click on this all day and I can't edit it now it's a shape it turned into paths okay and when I turn on my node editor you see that it starts to show the little nodes that again this is the point where the blade is going to make a decision on what it has to do and you know if it's drawing that you're cutting this line when it gets here it's going to make a left hand and turning them over here then it's going to make a or like a right hand turn it's going to make another right hand turn and go up so it's going to do something in every one of these nodes and get rid of this I put a shape on there we're going to talk a little bit more about the nodes real quick let me finish this path menu first though linked offset is how we use you typically people use this to create a shadow layer for an object or for text so if I have this object this this is a path and I go to path linked offset you see I get a little note here we're going to go back and do some more of this later so don't get you know if you if you're not following along right now then just bear with me we'll do some more this later when I went to linked offset I got this little node up here by itself and I can grab that and drag it out and what I've done is I it created a layer behind that square that I you know kind of drug out and stretched so if I go back to my electric tool you see I still have my square here I'll change to a different color so you can see it but there is a solid layer behind that that's the link offset and will be that with some text a little bit later on and another command that I use sometimes is simplify I'll show you that show you example this a little bit later when we trace an image simplifies use to reduce the number of nodes in an object and in this version doesn't work as well sometimes it works okay it can distort your image sometimes if you trace an image and I have a lot of nodes in it that are not necessary sometimes you can use simplify and reduce those without changing the image too much you just have to do it you know sometimes you have to make your imagery large to for some fighter work good for you think Lea if you're in here I think you said if I'm not mistaken in point nine to one of the features they did is they give you some control oversimplify but and and some people like that I don't use it that much so I've forfeited that for some of the other things I don't like about nine - and then so over here we have our text menu and usually the only main thing I use out of this is put on path which is how we create our curved text and we'll do that in just a little bit now up here on this toolbar when you're working with different shapes a lot of times you'll see this these should look pretty familiar to you if you use design space and some of the others the these are the flip tools so you can mirror things horizontally or vertically and so when you have an object on your screen we'll do some of this in a little bit when we do some shapes here but you can flip them around real easy and it's real handy to create identical opposites of objects and I'll show you an example that a little bit it works it's not like design spaces split because I don't know about za space 3 yet I haven't tried this but in design space 2 if you had an object that was rotated screen when you did the flip function it didn't take into account that rotation so it didn't do what you expected it to do a lot of times but I'll show you an example that just a little bit of exactly what we're going to do with that so a couple shortcuts that you want to become familiar you're familiar with an Inc skate as with any software program control s is save just about every software program that's the shortcut and you want to familiarize yourself with that so if you're working in any design program it's advisable to right after you get started go to file and save or save as and create your file name and save it I'll just name this one class and while you're working with you know your actual image and working on your project save it as an Inkscape SVG because that will retain all the properties of the file like your fonts and things like that and then once you've saved your file you'll see the name of it up here as you're working you just hit ctrl s every few minutes and save it every program out there will at one time crash and while you're using it and you will lose what you have been working on so anyone who tells me I worked on something for four hours only to have the program crash or the power go off and I lost everything well if you didn't save it that's really your fault because you really have to save often and get familiar with that as I mentioned earlier control Z is undo and control Y is redo so if I have an object and I move this object I can undo it I want to go back I can redo it so control Z ctrl Y other commands that you want to be familiar with on your keyboard is your plus and minus key is your zoom in and out so if you press - it's aimed out for in increments and uh ski zoom then you can also scroll with your mouse wheel of course if you hold ctrl you can scroll your mouse wheel and zoom in and if you select an object and you hit number three it goes fullscreen on that object or a group of objects so if I had three of these I select all of them and I hit my number 3 it goes fullscreen to all three of those so some of those shortcuts really get you around in Inkscape really fast compared to having to go to the scroll wheel you know the scroll bars and all those kind of things now there are some other tools that we're going to the right hand side I don't even touch these so don't even worry about those so let's get started and just use some of these tools and what I'm going to do first is just insert a square and I'm going to get my square tool and hold ctrl shift as I drag down to a 45-degree angle and make a nice symmetrical square okay now when I let me go back and do that again so show you this right after I created this square you'll see that I have there's three nodes here there's one here one here and one here but there's not one on this corner and that's because this is just a basic shape or an object it's not a path yet okay if I want to convert it to a path I get a path object to path and then if I click on my node editor you'll notice I have four nodes one on each corner I'm going to drag this down in the bottom here in the middle here where you can see it better we'll go to the node editor again and you see these nodes and as I put my little cursor with my node editor on them they turn red we can now grab these nodes with our mouse and move them around and do things with them so again it's like having a piece of string tied in a loop laying on your desk and you're just moving around the string dragging things around so we can do whatever we want with this now if I want another note I could double click here and just put another node there I can do the same thing here but one here Cal looks like a cupcake doesn't so now these nodes have different node types and the the node types can vary and I have looked for this and I've not really to be honest not really found a good definition of what the different node types are and what they do I just play around with them if you hold ctrl and click on a node it will change the node type for once for each click and there's like four or five different types so I hold ctrl and I clicked once and you notice that turned into a curve instead of being a pointed corner and it also gave me these little handles these handles I can drag out and do things with them make that curve deeper or more shallow and grab this one and you notice that this particular node when i swivel the handle around the other handle stays 180 degrees away from it okay if I hold ctrl and click again soli says if you hover over the node settings in the top tool panel say node settings I don't know where that is all up here I guess yeah so these are the different node types so I held control and clicked again and you notice now that I can move these in and out and then if I do it again let's see here you notice there it's kind of anchored so that node is staying in place okay so if you is you change these node types you can do different things with them so if probably go here and I click there and there with coding control down and now I look at you see that I've turned that into what look like a kind of a Pentagon I've turned it into a really a rounded cupcake shape by doing that now earlier I'll go ahead and do this and show you now and then we'll come back to to the other view earlier I mentioned the view display mode and the outline view so we're looking at a solid block shape here on my screen dark-brown shape I guess it is if I go to outline view it shows me my path and so it takes everything away and shows me my path and choose me my what this would be my cut line okay so if I go back to display mode and normal then we're back to seeing our shape now with this shape we can do you know any of these different commands once it's a path we can do all these Union you know difference and all these things that we talked about earlier kind of showed you how those worked and I'm going to get rid of that and we're going to do some text now and then we're going to apply text to shapes okay one of the important things when you're working with text is and really with your entire design your end game your end goal is to get everything to a path in your design so whether it's one layer in one color and one path that you're going to bring in and cut or if it's multiple colors multiple shapes and multiple layers then everything you run want to be a path and so when I type text I save this right now and try to import it into design space it's going to tell me that text elements are going to be dropped because this is a text element it is a font like I said I can still change it and make edit changes to it I can come up here and change the font okay I've changed it to the milkshake font and now I'm going to change this to a path and just like the square I changed earlier it's a simple saying object path there is still more work to do though in design space and silhouette studio and all the rest that I worked with when you work with a font like this and you have overlaps if you were to cut this it's going to cut those overlaps well when I converted it to a path it did a couple things it converted to a path but it also converting it change this to a path and they grouped these letters so if I go to my node editor now and I hover over these and I'll zoom in on this a lot tighter so you can see this see there when I hover over it it comes up and goes away but you see that little overlaps okay so these are separate letters right now if I click on that or click on this when you see that I'm selecting those separately you have to ungroup these so if I go to object ungroup you have to select entire thing object ungroup and now you see that they are separate letters so I can move these out and do whatever I want with them if I highlight all of these and go path Union then it becomes one path or one set of paths this is actually a compound path because we have different circles and separate objects here that are joined together but when I click on it now you see that when I clicked on it with my node editor it it gets selected the entire word it didn't select each individual letter okay I'm going to go back we're going to step backwards to where we have a font again and you saw that little thing there writ it part of my font disappeared there are some little refresh issues sometimes in Inkscape that you'll experience sometimes when you drag something across the screen it will leave like a trail and you just hit - being a minus and plus one time do mountain back in and it'll come it'll you know that will go away and then I'll show you another little problem if you have certain fonts that have like really tall or really low hanging parts like this Margarete font you see that it you don't see all the font up here and down here don't worry about that because once you change it to a path they will show up so I'll change that into a path and then we don't have that problem with the font anymore so I see a lot of people posting questions about that and they say well it doesn't show all of my font well it's because you didn't change it to a path and once you do that you don't have to worry about and yes control Z is these undo the step backwards part so what I'm going to do I typed Troy tube in here you can type any word you want I'd suggest you try to get something in there that's you know six or eight letters so just select your font tool and type whatever you want here actually I'm going to type this in all uppercase letters and I'm going to double click in there and so once you double click excuse me double click you can you know how like with your cursor and everything and then I'm going to change my font to Arial and I'm going to select that I want it bold so have a nice heavy font to work with here and then I'm going to get my circle tool I'm going to hold ctrl shift and draw a nice symmetrical circle by dragging it down at a 45 degree angle and then I will select my circle and I'm gonna hit control D for duplicate so we have two circles there now one over top the other I'm going to change the color of this one so we can see it a little better and I'm going to adjust this in a little bit so that we have one circle over top of the other here let's make this a different color so we can see a little better so now I have a gray one and a green one so I'm just making these different colors so we can see into work with them real well here and I want my lettering on top so I'm going to go to object raise the top so now I can see if that fits in there real good I want a little bit of a gap above and below it so we're just making sure that fits inside that circle real good a couple different ways you can do this this is a probably a little bit different way than I did it before in some other videos we're just going to move that circle over there out of the way and I'm going to click the circle and then I can either hold ctrl and click our home shift and click the text so I haven't both selected or you can draw a box around it and select the entire thing and then we can go path or excuse me text put on path and you see that it put my text from right around that circle and if I try to move my circle the text goes right along with it however if I try to delete my circle now because I have my curved text that I want you lose your path because your text was attached to that path your text was on the path okay so what we need to do we need to do a couple things one when you put text on the outside of a circle like this your spacing increases so you see I have larger gaps between them and this so I'm will double click and give our cursor in here you can see I can still move around I can still edit this if I wanted to this command is for Windows I don't know what the command is for Mac and somebody if someone is in here that does they can speak up but we're going to adjust the spacing between these on Windows you hold your Alt key and use your left and right arrows so I can draw this text over to the left move my cursor over I navigate around here and just adjust it to where I think it looks good okay we're just drawing these letters up to close those gaps so that it's not quite spaced out so far okay so our goal here though is we want this up here on the top path or on the top of this circle but we can't do that we it just doesn't work out it when you put text on a path that puts it down from the bottom I don't know why I've never looked it up never concern myself with it because that's you know I'm going to make this a path and get around it anyway so when I click my text and I go path object to path we've now changed this to a path and it's separate from the circle okay and you notice when I did that it kept its shape now just like when I was working with the text before when I converted it to a path these letters are all separate letters that are grouped so I'm going to ungroup them by going object ungroup and now with I'm not selecting anything you see all those letters are still selected when I after i ungroup them and you don't need to touch anything to do this after you ungroup just go to path Union and now we have one object when you click on an object twice you click on it once you get your size arrows that you can adjust your size of the object when you click on it the second time you get these rotate arrows and you can grab one of these on the corner and just spin it around and what I like to do is I look at the bottom left and bottom right corners the lowest parts so the bottom corner of this e the bottom corner that T and I just kind of turn it until it's touching that little dashed line that little box that it puts around when you have something selected so now if I put this up here you see that it's a perfect fit right around the top of that circle now I should have done this beforehand because I don't know what size my fonts are what I usually do is when I create my text I'm going to create the top and bottom lines so that I know they're they're the exact same color this case I'm just going to create your coffee here I'm going to go ahead and change my font to Arial again and make it bold and then I want my letters to be about the same size here actually I want them to be exactly the same size if I can do it so what I'll probably do is I'll this match that up here and the size of it and it looks like I've got them about the same okay like I said I usually do that I just didn't think to do it this time I usually do that and create my top the top and bottom text at the same time so that I know they're exactly the same now I want to curve this around the bottom side the key here is it doesn't work the way you think it's going to work if I try to when it puts a text on a path that uses the bottom of the font the bottom row okay it doesn't so if I try to put it on this circle it's either going to put it on the outside or it's going to curve it inside this path it doesn't take the top and wrap it around like you would actually want to do okay so what I'm going to do is create another circle and we want to change the color here again so you can see it or make it a little larger and this is where this opacity comes in sometimes earlier I mentioned this opacity setting down here if I turn this down where it's transparent I can see a little bit more of what I'm doing and I'm going to adjust it to where I have that circle it's right against the top right against the bottom and that gives me a frame of reference for my letters are going to wrap right around in here so the important thing here that I'm teaching you is when you wrap text around for the outside of a circle like this you have to do it one way and then if you want it curved underneath you have to do it a different way so I'm going to again hold shift and select both of these items I'm going to text put on path and it does the same thing it puts them only puts it on the outside just like it did with this one when I did it what I'm going to do though is I'm going to deselect everything I'll just click over here in the middle of nowhere and then I'm going to click this circle and I'm going to flip it horizontally now the best best way I can describe that is if you took a wide rubber band and you laid it on the table where it was in a circle hence in it standing up on its edge and then you take that rubber band and twist it and flip it inside out that's what I just do with that circle so my text was on the outside of the path and I flipped the path so that the text went on the inside and if you notice the opposite happened to where the letters got closer together because we're only inside of the curve now so I'm actually going to put my circle underneath here a little lower the bottom and the same thing happens if I try to get rid of this circle I'll lose my path okay so you can't do anything with it yep I'm going to click in here and use my alt left and right Roz's just the spacing here and so now we have that and we're going to again get a path object path we're doing some of these commands just over and over folks so you're going to see me do object path ungroup Union a lot of these things we're just going over and over again and then I'm going to get an object ungroup you see they're all selected and we'll go to path Union and now my letters are separate from my circle I'll get rid of that circle don't eat it anymore I'll do the same thing as I did at the top part so I'll click on it twice now rotate it around there it's nice and even the top part here is is against the little dashed line the top part here is the same if I put this up here you see it's a nice little fit right around the bottom of that circle now I think you see where we're going with this well adjust the size of this circle just a little bit to give us a little gap in there I'm going to hold shift I'm going to select this circle and this circle so I haven't done anything with the text I just have this two circles selected I'm going to get a path difference and you see now I have my little ring that's a you know like a coffee ring and look like a doughnut there and a couple more things we can do if we want if we click you know click the top one and then click the circle we can go to there's a couple ways you can do this you can do them one at a time I'll difference that out and then go to path difference on or select this one and then this circle and then path difference so now you see I cut those out let's change it to green and so now we have our little donut coffee circle with our name and coffee cutout at the bottom well we're missing these little stars okay so we're supposed to have little stars over here and I'll draw this out here you notice it's kind of transparent our opacity is still turned down okay so turn that back up to a hundred and if you try to put this over here you lose sight of it because it's a same color okay so I like to just choose a color and make it different just for the heck of it so I can see what I'm doing and now the trick is I want this star over here but exactly the opposite and perfectly lined up and the same you know the same position vertically but this star I can't just duplicate it and move it over there because it'll be angled the wrong way so what I can do is I can duplicate it then I can move it over here and this is where these flip buttons can then earlier like I was telling you about and now I have two stars one's the exact opposite of the other and they're both angled the same way now how do I get them lined up perfectly so if I hit control shift A or if I go to object align and distribute control shift a is the shortcut for this you get a panel that opens up you have these same functions in design space where we can line things up horizontally and vertically or we can distribute a set of objects out evenly also a space so I want to select both of these stars I can hit Center on horizontal axis and they were pretty close there they moved a little bit this is the other whirly or when I said you can do this two ways when I sliced out the name and the coffee I can do the same thing here I could slice out one star and then I can or difference I can difference away the other star if I want or I can Union these together and make them one object and then select both of these so these stars are tied together now let's one object okay let's like both of these in the path difference and I have my stars cut out of my ring just like I want okay now if I go to my node editor and select this you see that I have all my nodes different areas and it's ready to cut and how do I know that I can go to view display mode outline and there is our cut lines so if I had typed a font in here let's go back and do that and I'll show you why this is an important thing to use sometimes the word test in here I'm going to view display mode outline you see that the word test is still solid it's not a path so that tells me that I if this was part of my actual design I would have it would have told me that I forgot to convert that to a path okay so that's an important thing for a lot of folks to to use to look at their images and figure out why something may not work like they're expecting oh this is this designs for all intents and purposes it's ready to save and import into design space or silhouette studio or or whatever now you can save as some different SBG types in design space I mean in Inkscape and what I tell people is - I tell people to save as a plain SVG file the three main types people ask about our Inkscape SVG plain SVG or optimized SVG and so the differences between them is Inkscape SVG can contain a lot of information about the file that Inkscape can utilize so if you've saved it with font and you know if fonts that haven't been converted to a path maybe you're working on a design it's going to take you a couple hours a day over three days to do it you save it as an Inkscape SVG so that it maintains all these properties so that you can take a pre left off when you save as a plain SVG it saves as the most simple form of an SVG file that Inkscape can save it as and so any of that additional information is not contained in there and there's the same thing for optimized SVG there are it will save some additional information that other software can sometimes use a you know in regards to editing the SVG file later on historically design space has been real picky about what can be in an SVG file when you import it so a lot of times it'll tell you that text elements will be dropped autoflow text we dropped you know some objects may be dropped if they're not a path or something like that and so I always tell people to say to the plain SVG just to minimize the chance of something won't be happening that that's the only way I could say it you know design space has been real finicky with some of that stuff and you know it's it save it as a plain SVG and and you know it eliminates some risk out there that that something may not work right with design space or something else but a lot of people tell me they save as Inkscape SVG yellow time they haven't had a problem so you know if plain SVG generally always works stick with that otherwise kind of on your own there because I'll tell you the save the plane SVG if you have problems so we'll save that as they play nice movie file and now we're going to get rid of it and move on to the next thing okay the next thing I will show you is tracing a basic image and how to convert a an image like a simple JPEG or PNG file to an SVG file first of all a tell everyone they need to understand image resolutions and there is a I've got a couple videos on my channel to talk about this in some different ways but image resolutions are real important if you're going to convert an image and so if you have a really poor quality image I'll see people post things all the time and say can someone help me convert this or I'm trying to convert this and you know the point I try to convert it it's not coming out very good and so when I look at it the image will be just an extremely low resolution low-quality image and you really need decent images to do this and when you look at these two images here these two little thumbnails this jack-o'-lantern face right now they both look pretty much the same you know you can't tell a lot of difference in them if I open one of them up you'll see this one's all nice and sharp clear really large image but if I open this one you see that it's really small and if i zoom in on it you see what happens this is what I was talking about when it's beginning class when you have a flat file if you try to make it bigger like a jpg or PNG you lose quality okay so it starts to stretch that out and you see all these you know stuff cuts and jagged edges and all that so this would not be very good for tracing an image now I'm going to where's that here in this file I'm going to go get an image here and I'm going to post the link to this in the chat so if you want to download this and follow along you can if you click that link I'll put it on the screen too so if there's anyone not in the chat he's watching you can go to that address there I'll leave it up there for a few minutes so you can get it because that is a tough one to type and so we're going to use this spider as an example of how to trace an image in Inkscape and this is a pretty simple image to work with and there's reasons i chose this one because i don't want to do anything too complicated a night i just want to teach you the fundamentals of what you how to do this and you know if this is your first time watching some of this and you know you go through tonight's class and then tomorrow morning you post on in the group with a really complicated image and say i'm trying i'm trying to trace this image and it's just not working then you didn't work oh you know you didn't study this long enough because the you know it takes a while to working with all this to understand how it works and get this fundamental down that's why i recommend it really do this challenges in that morning Inkscape playlist i have i know Rhonda has a bunch of videos out there on Inkscape too for beginners and you know Kay Kay Hall has some as well and that those you know getting this fundamentals down will make your life a lot easier and doing basic images like this will is is just a step along the way okay I'm going to just drag and drop this file you know I've already saved it here as a JPEG so if you click that link in the chat or if you've typed this address down up here and save the image I'm just going to drag and drop it right into the Inkscape here and you can also go to file and open and open it just like you would any other computer file with software and so I'll zoom out a little bit and you notice that's a really big image so it's way bigger than my canvas there is so I'm just going to kind of shrink it down a little bit where it's a little bit more manageable by the way the same thing worked on this file control shift and adjust by the corner and it keeps that lengthen or with a knife perspective there and move this over here so now we're going to go to path and you know your first inclination is well I want to convert this to a path I want to go object path well that's not an object it is a it's a pixelized image it's a raster image okay so the first thing we have to just trace it so we're going to do trace bitmap and that will open up this box there's all kinds of settings in here and some of them have not even really messed with very much most of the images I trace I accomplish everything with this little bottom portion right here and usually you select colors and for the number of scans the number of scans is basically the number of colors that are in your image so you use the number +1 so if your image has three different colors in it you would set your number scans to four okay now this one actually has the the legs of the spider are black and the body is gray but I'm going to keep it simple I'm going to run it down to two colors so that it's just going to come out black and white and I'm going to uncheck smooth smooth it's kind of like that simplify command I showed you earlier on the path menu only it does it at traced I'm rarely use it every now and then I might try it but very rarely stock scans I usually use and that what that does for you if you have multiple colors it will [Music] it will make the each layer the entire object of that color so for example if if the legs were black and the body was red after I scan and I'll do another one here the moment show it to you but after I scanned I would have a a total red one and a total black one to work with and I'm going to select remove background so again the settings to scans for colors I believe stock scans checked it doesn't really matter on this one because it's one going to be one color when I finish and then I'm going to remove background if I hit update it should give me a preview if you don't get a preview over here you probably don't have your image selected you have to have this selected so you see or arrows before they'll give you an update next I'm going to hit OK this is going to happen really fast on this image so I hit it and it's done so it takes like a quarter of a second for simple images to trace and it kind of doesn't look like it did a whole lot but if I come over here and drag this off usually your top one is your vector file your SVG that you're going to work with and your bottom when it is your original image now I'm going to close this because we're finished with that for now and I can get rid of this original image if I want you just click it and hit your delete key on your keyboard and now we're working with this spider and if I move them around you see his eyeballs are transparent there so another reason I like to change the little background of the document properties to gray instead of white and you know that way I know that I haven't filled in the eyes with white yet there's a couple things that we're going to do with this file to fix it and I'll show you how we're going to do that one thing you look over here on the left you notice this leg is kind of chopped off it was off the edge of the design and it doesn't look the same as the one over there on the right so I'm going to zoom in on that a real close here so we can see it and now I'm going to select my node editor and you see where your nodes are located and so we can start to move these around and make this adjustment and you see when I drag that out there it creates that straight line here and here and that's a corner okay so if I deselect it you see that that comes to a point and we want the legs to have nice rounded curves like this so what I can do with this node editor is hold ctrl and click on that and you see that it changed to a curve so and then down here you see this one I'll zoom in real close see how that's comes to a point it's a couple things I can do here I can change the node type we're in this case because there's another one right here real close to it I can probably just get rid of this node so I'll draw a box around that selected and then I'll hit my delete button and all I did was remove a node to eliminate a little point there that didn't need to be there so now you see that it's nice rounded curves so that's part of where node editing comes in to help you out now if you look at the spiders mouth here resume in real close on this seat and see it a bunch of little tiny artifacts in here oh this was a kind of a on the original image this was like kind of a gray color and you know had these little specks in it and they came out in the trace and if I look at my node editor now you see all these little tiny pieces in here now this if you tried to cut this what would happen if you were cutting it out of save I know I these little pieces would be so tiny it would just make little tiny pieces and they might get stuck to your blade and and just be a real pain and of course it would never weep like that anyway so we can get rid of these a couple things we can do one we could just delete the whole mouth and redraw it but I'm going to do this the hard way because I want to show you how to edit and clean up things okay so I'm zooming in real close and earlier I showed you you could highlight a node like that and delete it over there when we fix the leg but I can do more than one I can select a group of nodes and highlight them and then hit my delete key and get rid of that path I can do that to all these little pieces now this is where that I mentioned earlier that that eraser tool that I don't really use that much comes in so if you went to the eraser tool and I put it on this this option that says it deletes any object to touch oops back to that again here and I'm betting that it won't delete that one because um it's actually part of this compound path and that's what it did it actually deleted the entire spider so because this is part of the actual compound path I cannot use the eraser if it was like an abandoned went out here in the middle that was a separate separate from the spider then I can delete that object using the eraser tool another reason I don't really use it that much because most of the time I'm doing things like this and I find it easier now if you notice I deleted that little dot there now I have a whole well you just treat it the same way just delete the nodes and you notice that what I did there there was three nodes on that little hole that was cutting in and I deleted two of them and left one here and I left it's a kind of an orphan node and you see that line that it made sometimes when you import an SVG file into design space you'll see a line like that just a real random line in the middle of the design and so when you bring it into Inkscape you can get rid of some of these abandoned nodes like that and fix that kind of problem and bear with me just a minute here I'm going to get a drink of water okay so we can continue cleaning up sputters mouth there or I meant earlier we could get rid of it and just redraw it so I can highlight that entire section and delete it and what I can do is just kind of draw a circle in here we'll go object excuse me path object to path and then we can turn on our node editor and start to shape it whoops so now we have a nice clean piece there and if I select that one I hold shift and select this one I can hit a path difference and now we have a nice clean cut piece there for the spider's mouth now we don't have whites for his eyes okay and so this is where the fill bucket comes in so if I I want to deselect anything before I touch the fill bucket it'll change the color of my object so I'll select the fill bucket I'll go to white and I'll just click here and click here and a little bit hard to see but I think you can see that these are they and it creates two separate objects and I can go close shift and select both of them and then go to path Union and now I have the spiders eyes that are joined together now depending on what kind of material material you're working with you may or may not be finished with this most of the time if you're working with something like vinyl you do not want to cut out a piece like this and then cut this out and when you apply it try to fit this in there because one you'll probably never get it to fit exact when you know I tell people don't put vinyl edge to edge being this edge to this edge the reason is there's a couple things one is very hard to place it you'll almost never get it in there correctly but the other reason is that vinyl shrinks over time so if you're using something like 651 vinyl that's I should say calendared vinyl shrinks over time there's two different types of vinyl we usually work with it's cast vinyl or calendar bottle 631 651 cricut vinyl all that is calendared vinyl and what that means it's a difference in how they manufacture it and there's an article on my website at 651 vinyl dot-com that explains it in detail but it shrinks a little bit so if you place these in here a few months after you put it together you're going to have little gaps between the edges because it's going to draw in each piece is going to draw in so we want to have this solid again there's always more than one way to skin a cat and you know Inkscape there's different ways you can do this you could use your node editor and just delete the eyes and make these solid pieces here make this paste solid you could also just put a shape over it let's say I'm going to get a cert circle tool here and just draw an ellipse and just kind of put that over the where the eyes are and then you could get paths Union on that I use the keyboard shortcut but you made that I made that all one piece by just Union unioning a shape over top of it okay and so then you put the eyes back in there and I guess you have a choice with the mouth you could let it just cut out or you can do the same thing and you could fill it with white and then use the node editor now I know I'm going a little bit fast here but I'm really just doing things over and over and over again and showing you what you can do with it so you want to you know you may want to go back and watch this video I really recommend you do this challenges though beyond the this you know this class do those challenges and learn all the foundations and and all these your basic commands and really everything I'm showing you tonight are all the basics things that you need to know to be able to do these things and if you know all these basic commands well then it's a matter of just knowing how to apply them or or you know deciding how to apply them that's best for you because like I said there's different ways to do different things in here and I you know do things the easiest way for me to do them at the current time you know I don't have a standard practice I follow on some things as long as I can get down to where my finished product is what I want it to be in a path that's a file that I can cut then I accomplish the goal now right now the eyes and the mouth are separate objects so again I'll go to path Union and now I have two different pieces here and if I go to outline mode my view display mode outline then you can see my cut paths for the two different layers a tutor actually two different objects here but when you import them into design space or whatever it's going to be two different layers okay now so then we would save as what type of SVG a plane SVG then that file is ready to be imported and cut with designs based or so what studio or whatever you want to do now I say I mentioned silhouette studio several times a night if you have silhouette studio you do have to upgrade to the designer Edition too in order to import SVG files so you need to be aware of that I don't know if John Poindexter is in the chat tonight or not but he's usually in here he gave us a good tip in the group the other day silhouette has there upgrades for their design designer edition of software on their website and it's like 50 bucks for the basic designer Edition but you can buy it on Amazon for like twenty seven dollars or something like that so there's significant discounted upgrades to do that and so thank him for that little tip helps everybody out and we share that information so we're going to get rid of this one and I'm going to see if I can find a different question there if you're going to put it in silhouette to cut wood should you keep the eyes and mouth separate to cut separately that's up to you when you bring it in those are going to be two different objects I kept the eyes and mouth together you can keep those together or keep them separate because if you keep them together when you cut it you're going to apply the mouth and eyes all in one application with your transfer tape so then you know that's your choice if you want to keep them separate or put them together I just put them together so that when I cut and I weed it's ready to apply with one swipe of the transfer tape so hopefully that answers your question there next on the next one I'm going to trace an image here for you I am my wife and our both from West Virginia so I'm going to do the Mountaineer logo here and show you earlier what I mentioned was the break-up heart command and what it's useful for and this can be applied to many different types of images I'm going to just do it with this logo because this is a pretty simple one to show you what it's good for I'm going to select it and then go to trace bitmap again and if you remember that's the number of colors plus one and then select colors stock scans and remove background and then when you have this selected hit update and oh well I didn't get an exact preview remember what I said about the number of colors there is one two three different colors in this image so I need to go up or actually this is the background there's two colors in this image the yellow and the blue and so I need to go number of colors plus one so there's two colors plus one is three scans and now it looks correct and when I hit okay again this is a simple image it's going to happen really fast done so it traces it you know it happens fast you don't even see it and if I drag the top one off you see that this is our vector you see that this is the old image that we brought in and we're going to click on it and hit our Delete key and get rid of it and we can get rid of the trace bitmap box again now does anyone remember what the shortcut was to zoom in on an object stay number three key on your keyboard so when you have a selected hit number three and I'll go fullscreen for you and now since I traced this and I said stock scans if I go to object ungroup this is for trips a lot of people up sometimes they watch my videos they'll say well I ungrouped it but it won't come apart and you see that I'm dragging it around and it's not separating well after i ungrouped it i have to click over here and click off of it and then go back here and then I can drag it apart okay and you see what it did is that yellow layer is exactly the same size as that frame that blue layer okay and I'm going to delete this there's again a couple different ways you do this but I want to delete that for a reason right now we have this WV here it's called the flying WV from West Virginia University and you see that Center part is transparent so that there is an outside path and there is an inside path here and an inside path here and I want to fill these with our old gold color so I'm going to deselect everything and go to the Paint Bucket and select my color here and I'm going to fill those in here's another problem that people message me a lot but I even had a lot of people message me about this problem that watch my Hello Kitty video and they'll get to this part and they'll not finish watching the video they'll stop they'll email me and when they I figure out that they just didn't finish watching the video where I explain this to them when i zoom in real close you'll see that there's some little tiny gaps here okay there's a couple things I mean you can adjust how when you are on the fill bucket there's a setting up here grow or shrink by so I could say grow my fill by an extra pixel or two and it would probably fill that in for me but you notice the gap not even all the way around so you know it's not going to be perfect no matter what you do with that doesn't matter what I'm going to do is since I filled these in with the bucket that's two separate objects so the first thing I'm going to do is select both of them hold ctrl excuse me hold shift and select both of them I'm going to go to path Union that way when I'm moving they're moving together okay and what did I tell you earlier about cutting vine on trying to place it in here you'll never get it to work right but actually if you did it you'd probably end up with it looking like this with little gaps in between it okay so we'll move that off to the side and remember that break apart command I mentioned earlier so this is where this is useful if I code here go path break apart it breaks those paths apart from me and without selecting anything I can go path Union and then I can put this back over top of it and we have our logo and it's set up now for layering so the what I tell people when you are designing your images for layering with most material you want to layer from what I call the bottom up and from the outside towards the middle or outside in okay so your bottom layer should be like a nice solid layer like this it works best if you're doing this way I mean some images don't aren't laid out like this but I you try to arrange things the best you can and so then when I layer on top of this I'm inside the borders of that bottom layer and if there was another layer on top of this I would want it inside of here or inside of here and so like I said if you you really want that bottom layer to be a solid base layer and then you put your pieces on top of it and work your way inward with each of your layers and you'll end up with a much better finished product than trying to you know fit things edge to edge or uh you know sometimes people will trace things and they'll end up with two layers the same size and they're trying to literally layer two pieces and get exactly like this well I can do that on the software because I can get it down to a pixel or I can tell it to a line but you know when you're trying to do that manually you're going to really struggle whether you really have problems with it so you know they those that's just not going to work out for you and now if I of course separate these not go to view display mode outline there are our two pieces with our cut paths view display mode normal okay so trying to think of what I might have missed here and I apologize I've struggled a little bit with my voice tonight and I'm through this I haven't seen near as many questions this time as I did the first time but we don't have as many people either the first time I did this class we had like 1,300 people in here we'll HTV shrinker blaring yes HDTV will shrink too so vinyl and HDTV you want the same thing if you can do it and if you can not help here if you can help it you don't want to layer edge to edge or you know try to fit one object inside of another like that it's the same thing it works out best if you layer and have you know either spaces between it or layer on top and have gaps on the edge and the other layers a lot of peeps some people do it and get away with it but it's it's best to layer on top without edge to edge pieces if you can avoid it now sometimes depending on your design you may have let me open this other SVG up and I'll show you an example of this one of my videos I posted the other day was a garden flag that I made and if anyone wants these this file it's in our Facebook group by the way ah let's see here you see if I can find it Oh crashed Inkscape it did not like me dragging that file in there and get back and try to open that up again Wow it does not like me doing that let me see if I can open it the old-fashioned way Oh import right one yes I must have damaged that file somewhere along the lines so I know some people have struggled with that it seems people in the group posts that they had that trouble when they were trying to open a file and Inkscape is crashing on them and so far that's proven out to be a usually something wrong with the file so I was going to show you an example I don't have another one readily available for me here that I can show you quickly but what I was going to tell you is sometimes depending on your design you may have two different colors that let's say it's a flower so let's just draw one here show you how I did that garden fly because I drew that entire thing I'm going to draw a circle let's make it yellow or let's make it pink and I'm going to convert it to a path here's the bonus round for you I want to do this here so we're going to convert it to a path I'm going to do this kind of quick so go back to my note editor and I'm going to add a couple nodes here draw this out or drag this out and you know that the best way I did this actually has better be a good business with draw square this makes it turn out a lot better or more symmetrical object to path and I'm going to hold ctrl and click here hold ctrl and click here and then I'm going to insert a couple nodes here and here one in the middle goes over and now we have a tulip okay and then draw this will make it green and now we have our stem for our tulip and so when I when you do this of course there's no background layer here like I was showing you with that logo so what I'll try to do when I layer this would be on top object raise the top I'll turn down the apat all the opacity is already down so I'll turn this one up and when I layer it I'll actually position it just like that so that it's overlapped just a little bit and that will keep you from having the little edge to edge gap problem after you press it or after you apply the vinyl and then when it shrinks it doesn't shrink a whole lot very very little it shrinks a little bit more than what the manufacturers ratings are the manufacturers ratings are under ideal storage and perfect application conditions and all that and it says something like point zero one inches you know horizontal no shrink vertical or whatever but of course it's not applied optimally and it's not stored 100% optimally so it shrinks a little more than what they say it will shrink if you read the specs and so if you overlap it by like an eighth of an inch or something you'll be fine and I'm going to shrink and leave a gap for you either when you press it or later on and since I'm in here going this I'll just give you another bonus round here and show you what I did with the when I drew that garden flag and had one of the leaves for it I use the Bezier tool and draw here here here here and here then we'll close it and hold ctrl and click that click that one that'll give some adjustment there and I'm just kind of showing you what power you really have little things that you can do so I fill that now I can get rid of the outline I can duplicate it can move it over here and mirror it I can even use my node editor make that leaf a little shorter and highlight all the green and I'll go path Union and now we have a stem with leaves on it so you really get an idea there how quickly you can do something like that and that I wish I had that file readily available so I can show it to you I show you the picture of it on the website or it's in our Facebook group but that gives you an idea I just drew that whole garden flag within a matter of minutes using Inkscape and the grass the tulips everything so that really just gives you an idea so I see a lot of people have started to fade out on me and drop off hopefully it's because they really just wanted to go to bed so they can get an early start tomorrow on it not because I bored them to death does anyone have any questions see someone asking the video yeah that video will be online later so you can watch it so it'll take a little while to process before it uploads for YouTube publishes that what did I do to duplicate and flip so all I did was I clicked on it I hit ctrl D for duplicate and that is like copy paste in one-step ctrl D and then I have to and then up here this little button is flip horizontally so there I have a perfectly symmetrical mate to that one well thank you a lot of people tell me I make it look easy done this a lot you got to remember I've been before I started using Inkscape a couple of years ago I was using Photoshop for 15 years before that so I've had quite a bit of you know experience using graphic programs that makes a little bit easier the flip button is up here this little the two little triangles it's kind of the same icon I think that's in the design space for the mirror or flip and just about any program that has that feature they use the same little icon for the most part how do I get the box around an image to go away of the box are you talking about this box the document box or are you talking about the the dotted line when it's selected you're probably talking about the document box so you can turn that off um by going to file document properties and turning off your page border if you're you you may not have been in the beginning class when I showed that the document border is your port so if you turn that off and you were to open the file in something like Internet Explorer to view it just to see what it looks like you may not see your image your SVG file so you really want to keep that on and keep your SVG inside of it it won't hurt anything as far as incurring the filed in the design space it'll work just fine but you know just for the purposes of viewing it now if you want to save this as a PNG file this has to be on and it has to be in that box how can I move all of the menu buttons to the top of my screens to the side of my screen I don't know if you can undock that and move it or not to be honest I've never tried almost every design program I've ever used has the tools down the left side here so I did not I've never tried to move this I don't know that you can even do that as some of the others like if you have [Music] here's one feature I forgot to cover I'll do this now is the fill and Stroke panel I hit control shift F to bring this up I really wish I to cover this for people started to drop off I kind of got sidetracked some of these things can be docked if you go into your preferences you can tell it to dock these then it'll put them over on the right or they can float like this I don't know about that toolbar so on the right side so that toolbar that was the same way I don't know if you can move that one either I've never seen it moved off of that side so I don't know if there's something interview maybe let's try preferences and see if there's anything over there probably under windows see here's your dialogues for these so I could say dockable and it will lock it to the screen but I don't see anything on the toolbars tools as the tools themselves but I don't see anything about the toolbars so I'll know maybe somebody else under views custom default and wide oh okay yeah there you go why'd you custom so you can do that custom view I guess okay thanks Ron I appreciate that the fill and Stroke panel I should have touched on earlier the fill panel determines how much and what colors and things are going to be filled when you do things like the fill bucket or you can use them to apply to an object to so on the fill if you remember down here I showed you where the fill is and the opacity setting so I'm gonna turn this back up to a hundred you see that gets a little darker when I'm selected on an object I can do some things over here such as I can actually turn the fill off and a shape is still there but I just don't have any fill in it okay if I turn it back on and select my color and then down here or my opacity settings there is on the RGB settings this is an important thing that a lot of people get tripped up on and that is they'll draw an object and they don't get the object just like I showed you it's like the fill is turned off but the fill is turned on and usually this setting right here this is your RGB for your colors and then a is alpha so that's kind of the percentage of the fill I guess or that or the level of the fill and a lot of times that will be set to zero for some reason that's one of these ghosts in the machine I think so if you ever draw something in it nothing shows up but you can tell it's really there go to your fill panel and check your alpha setting and make sure it's on 255 and then also down here you want to make sure your opacity is turned up too which is the kind of transparency the other thing that we use on this sometimes is the stroke panel and it's easier for me to show you this if I turn Phil off I can turn stroke on and it will give me an outline and then sometimes I'll work with that with the curb text feature just I don't have to see the solid circles or something and then the stroke style you can you know do things like increase the width of that stroke or whatever you want to do with it but usually you know you're working with that off and feel odd but you do need to familiarize yourself with the fill and Stroke panel the fill and Stroke panel and the align panel so control-shift a for a line control shift F for fill and Stroke those are two important it two important panels that you need to be familiar with and all of those things are in the challenge videos to cover all of those and talk about all the things that's you know and and how to use those tools and they're really basic to any more questions out there that I can maybe answer before we wrap up for the night a little bit over just a little bit over two hours a night not too bad I think we had a lot more questions the first time I did this class and this fight went on to about two hours and 45 minutes but I know we covered like I said at the beginning of class if you were in that part of it I said we were going to cover a lot of information tonight and go over a lot of things and for some people it might be overwhelming but if it was then you know just go back and watch it again or go do those challenges take your time it's just like everything else patience invest some patience and time in this I tell everybody that you know the first time when we first got our Cricut explore my wife bought it I said I didn't want anything to do with it and she talked me into figuring it out and then at the first day I was like all this thing is just total awesomeness and then the second day I was so frustrated I boxed it up and put it on her desk and told her I didn't want to touch it again and then the third day I hung my head and said I can't let this thing beat me and it's been on my desk ever since and so just like that Inkscape and and all these other things that you're you learn you have to you know invest the time and patience and trial and error a use that controls the undue use your shortcuts ctrl D for duplicate and you know the shortcuts like I said are all on your menus so when you want to command if you're using Union all the time you know use ctrl + it's a lot faster when you do these things so looking for any more questions there have plots patients yeah well you know I work in IT or I used to anyway and so patience was something I didn't have very much I love that I have did patients with different things so some things I don't have patience with sometimes some things I do when I'm programming and you gotta have a lot of patience and you know when I worked on the the night that I first put Troy Graham calm online then I was up to like 4:00 a.m. that night and really heads down and was pretty patient when it comes with messing up a t-shirt putting on HTV I'm every patient that I will show you some things here some of the things that I showed you tonight can be done on Troy Graham calm these are tools that I've written in html5 that new version of design space the preview for the public beta for design space 3 came out yesterday and it's written in html5 and that's why it's so much faster it's much higher performance so if you do some of these functions I made this specifically for folks who can want to do curved text and do some of these things without having to learn Inkscape and it's it's a lot faster and easier in in a lot of ways so those tools are out there and feel free to use them they are totally free to use for everyone do you get a coupon code a night the best question of the night Wow can't believe no one has asked yet yes you do yes you do so the coupon tonight let me go find the coupon for you the coupon for tonight is already active and it's all ready to be used and I'm going to bring it up on my screen here this is a sale that we are doing it starts now and the reason we're doing this we're going to run this sale from tonight all the way through till midnight Sunday night May the 7th so you've got like 10 or 11 days or something to use this and the sale is on everything but the kitchen sink ten percent on everything on our website coupon code is sink T n SI n k ten so you put that coupon code e in at checkout and you'll get 10% off of your entire order up until May 7th ok so you get something a little something for being first your first in the night yeah you can be the first to go use a coupon code so the question how did I delete these spiders and entire mouth so I can't really get back to that very easily but I can show you I I'll shrink this down a little bit and leave it on there so everyone can see it I'm just going to kind of draw that real quick for you and show you how I did that so essentially we have the same thing here we have a shape with a hole in the middle and that was the spotters mouth okay and when we're using our node editor I'll just go ahead and kind of make it look like the spider's mouth there so when we were using our node editor all I have to do is highlight all of these nodes that are in this inner path here and then hit the Delete key of my keyboard okay now the reason we're running this sale is I am going on vacation so you guys it's up you guys to keep everything running keeping folks at the office in that order and a order fulfillment the customer service team busy and hoppin while I'm gone we're leaving Saturday and going to be gone for a week and I'll be living it up in Jamaica for a few days and taking it easy life and I are going without the kids going on a little trip by herself and going to enjoy some time and so I'm you know totally today we're putting this sale out there and we're going to let this go until I get back and hopefully you all will enjoy it I do have some more things coming up the product wise got a little surprise for you coming up I'm not going to tell you yet I'll wait till I have the product ready we do have today a new product that I added to the site if you haven't seen it is the style tech it's under the metallic vinyl section here and it is rosy matte it's kind of a foil adhesive it is PVC vinyl so it's a permanent vinyl like 651 but it's a kind of a rosy color yes it's rose gold I've seen like 15 different colors people call rose gold but this is like a it's kind of a light copper color I guess it's absolutely beautiful stuff is just really nice it cuts like butter on the bottle setting on the explore air so this stuff is really really nice and we've got some more colors of this type of stuff coming it's a matte finish metallic looking foil vinyl it is permanent adhesive I think it's guaranteed for five years so it's real close to 651 and its properties so make sure you check that out and then in the last couple of weeks if you hadn't noticed we've added a couple more things to the tools section we are out of stock on these weeding tweezers again already we have a bunch of them on order should be here in a few days and then we added the exacto style knives and the blade refills for those so if you get these kind of things make sure you check those out and then of course uh people were dying for these things for a while and then we've kind of caught up we've got a bunch of these swatch rings in stock for 651 and we also have the auricle color brochures kind of like the Caesar color brochure so whether your preference is one of the other if you want both we have plenty of those in stock now - and thank you do plan on having a vacation we need it bad dreaming of Survivor yes I'm dreaming of survivor so soon as I get a few more thousand more signatures and can go down to go you know make my video and submit the application again then I'm going to do that I'll see a question help how do I get design space 3 well design space 3 is out in a public beta and if you go to our website and go to the learn section and go to Cricut there is a article here it's actually a video that says design space 3 public beta versus design space - so what we're doing is I made a video that kind of compares them side-by-side and shows you what's changed what's out there where it's mutiny how they move some things around some of the buttons they're in a little bit different places and all that so you have this video watch right above the video or two links and so you're going to want to read both of these links so if you click on them they'll come up it tells you how to install it how to get to it and you can switch back and forth you can use the beta bring switch back to two and so keep in mind that it is a beta there's probably a couple things that don't quite work right or Clark perfect and they've already gotten a lot of feedback Ison and several things today and I've chatted with them a little bit with cricut about some of the features and let them know and they are paying attention so you know this is a important that you use that feedback button that's in the menu on design space 3 beta and I'll show you where all that's at in the video so make sure you get you go watch this video here and then just so you know there's also another video pit of today that's a performance test where I show you what the difference really is it's pretty incredible like I held a file Freight for about two years waiting and checking it every now and then to see if there have been improvements and it took 8 minutes I'll show you this video took 8 minutes to open it under the old design space and under the new and it took 30 seconds and it's a huge file so it was a pretty good test oh let's see here thank you all for the very very kind comments [Music] looking for any more questions there it looks like we're starting to wind down people are starting to drop off the survivor petition if you go to my website at Troy young calm it's right here at the very top so Troy young calm and then it's right there and you can click on that and sign then does ask you after you sign it to make a donation but don't do it if you don't want it's just that's a donation to the website that's it's a free website and ask for donations uh from Puerto Rico so we'll be in the same region here in a few days in a couple of days everyone I am going to go ahead and wrap up and I thank you for joining me I thank you for all the kind of comments you know thank you for all the business all the support my family the employees at the office everyone really really appreciates it website donations if you go to Troy young comm again you can use any of my affiliate links to shop and I'll get a commission from it so panda security is the antivirus i recommend the iDrive is backup software mighty deals you can go there and buy the samantha font you can shop on my amazon store and I'll open that up one of the most popular problem item people get from my Amazon store is the heat press that I have so this heat press is the one I own and I think over the past six months there's probably been at least a hundred of them sold and I've only had one person so they got theirs in and it was damaged so pretty good success with that and then I'm down whoops close all this out on down on my page come more affiliate links and there's a donate button for PayPal and if you if you liked the class you want to donate how many support to group then you can but I don't expect anything just ask if you do shop use you know we use my affiliate links it really helps a lot the link for the survivor so it's up here at the top so if you click on this it'll go to a petition and I'm just collecting signatures I'm trying to get to 5,000 signatures and you can leave comments in there and once I do my audition video again I'm going to send that in and I'm going to say look I have 5,000 signatures and here's the signatures and all the comments and maybe it'll get some attention I don't know so anyway I appreciate everyone join me go ahead and wrap up I hope everyone has a wonderful evening again this video will be on a little bit later it takes a while for you to process it and host it you can go back and watch it over and over again and share it save it you can watch my other videos and while you're waiting on it if you're in the mood to practice tonight go to my youtube channel go to my playlist and then find the one that says learn Inkscape and there's a couple videos here that I give you a lot of information that's important where I'm talking and then here are the six challenges and if you go through those go through them over and over again so you can do them without any problems without watching the video even and then by the time you get through them all can do that you're going to be ready to do some serious designing so alright well ah it's time for me to go to bed folks are going to get up early in the morning so you all have a wonderful evening and again appreciate everything there and everyone to join us and I will see you in about a week about eight or nine days thanks

Channel: TroyTube

Views: 164,765

Keywords: inkscape, inkscape tutorial, beginners, #hangoutsonair, Hangouts On Air, #hoa

Id: XuMGaZKjX1A

Length: 138min 0sec (8280 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 27 2017