Guide Lines & How To Use Them In Inkscape

[Music] foreign press graphics and today I'm going to be showing you just how powerful the guidelines are in inkscape now for the people who don't know guidelines are lines that you can put onto your page without putting it into the final product and then use them lines as the guides to draw whatever it is you're trying to create they can come in handy for all sorts of things so today I'm going to show you exactly how to use them and just how good they can be so without further Ado let's get into it now when you first start of course set up your document by going to document properties making sure that you have got PX for pixels in this little drop down for display units and then set up your width and height to whatever you would like it to be once you've done that you can close out of it for this we are going to need snapping so make sure you turn snapping on in the top right corner where it says toggle snapping on or off and make sure that you have got the text editor and of course the fill and stroke open on the right hand side if you don't know where they are you can come up to the top toolbar the fill and stroke is right there and the text editor is right next to it there so let's crack on this bar this ruler that you have got at the top and the left of your page that is where you can click and get the guides from Simply go over it with your cursor press and hold the left Mouse button and you can bring a guide down now once you've got that guide there you are able to use these kind of guides to snap your objects to wherever you want them to be like this and you can also do it in different ways and manipulate the guideline to suit whatever you want to do say this block is red and you wanted to cast a shadow from behind it down to the ground well you can do exactly that all you have to do is take use the select tool take the little dot that you can see right there and you can use this dot as an anchor point for the line so if you move it you can move it around to wherever you want now if you want the Anchor Point to be here then you can simply hover over the line until you get the little hand and then hold shift and it will turn into the rotate you can then rotate and as long as you bring your cursor down to the point it will snap on to wherever you want it now you can do that again you can have as many of these guidelines as you like highlight keep your finger on shift and snap it onto there now that you've got a simple box with a predetermined lines of where the shadows will cast if the light was here then you can simply go to the bezier tool and snap onto them again and now that you've got that you can turn it black take off the stroke and if you was to come to the fill menu and go on to linear gradient which is just here and then come down to your gradient tool on the left hand side we can move the start point up to the start of where the box is or where the shadow is being cast from get the end point and do the opposite and now if I come up to the ruler and just click once it will take the guides away go back and there you go you've now got a simple red block with what looks like a shadow underneath it but say you wanted to make a cube a three-dimensional object well for this that is very simple again I'll leave that there just as an example but if I was to come over here and then I wanted to use two different points for the perspective the best way that I have found is by simply getting one of the ellipses by the toolbar on the left clicking shift and control and do one Circle and then Ctrl alt D so we can duplicate or you can just right click and select duplicate and then move that across you have now got two reference points that you can create from that so again come up to the ruler click and drag until it snaps into the center of the circle highlight hold shift and rotate it now we do this a few more times you will be able to see exactly what I am talking about around there would be good and we're going to need one more which I want to take further down oops that's because I didn't hold shift there we go and now we're going to do the same from this dot coming in the opposite direction we're going to do three of the guidelines now all you have to do when you're doing this kind of design is make sure that it is always got vertical lines so from each Crossing section that is where a vertical line should appear from as long it's with as it's within the boundary of what you're trying to create now what I am trying to create to show you is a sort of rectangle cube style object now from these guides I can do exactly that now when we're at this point the first thing we need to do is make sure that the lines are straight so the best way you can do that is by clicking on the lowest of the Cross sections click and then hold Ctrl to make sure it goes completely vertical and we can bring this up to exactly where we need it to be and then right click to get off it now what you will find is sometimes you will have this kind of section where the cross is not lining up on here well that's very very easy to sort you get to the select tool come back down to the line and then you go with the lowest line hold shift and rotate until it snaps to where you want it to be now if we zoom out slightly you can see it is absolutely straight and if you are also having an extra little bit here then you can always click on it hold Ctrl again and scale it down until it snaps on to the same corner just like that but now that we have got that section completely straight we know we can move on to the next so I'm going to delete that for now and I will show you why if you go to the bezier tool you can click to each of the Cross sections they should line up perfectly and hold Ctrl on every vertical line and then back up again and we now have a square say if we make this a very light shade of red and we take away the stroke then we have something that looks like that then we can just repeat the process but going in the opposite direction across to the cross section click hold Ctrl come down vertically until it meets the line below and then across and you have another shape now we take off the stroke and we'll give this one a slightly dark shade of red and then finally we are going to use the bezier tool again and we're going to click and make a square on the top well a deformed square at least and we're going to make this one a mid red just like so take off the stroke and as you can see you've now made a Cube that's completely set with these two as the vanishing points now we would if we were to come up to the guide bar again click and as you can see we've made a significant looking Cube from that kind of perspective now finally if you want to get rid of a certain line you can come up to it using your select tool as soon as the hand appears which is kind of awkward sometimes so just give it a little bit of time and be very precise once the hand is visible just press delete and it will disappear and that will work with all of the lines too so that is it my friends that is how you can use Vanishing points and guidelines to create all sorts of symmetrical or 3D objects if you found this useful then please consider hitting subscribe because I am trying to grow the channel and if you want me to create some graphics for you then please get in touch I make custom bespoke graphics for a very reasonable price but until next time thank you for watching my friends I hope you have some luck and I would love to hear any feedback that you have until next time I will catch you guys later [Music] thank you

Channel: Button Press Graphics

Views: 3,157

Keywords:

Id: 2KBJtf9R2Qc

Length: 11min 34sec (694 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 06 2023