How To Conform Text to a Shape Using Inkscape

in this video tutorial I'll show you how to create a shape and conform that a block of text to that shape using some tools in Inkscape and then importing the design into design space to be cut with your Cricut explore using vinyl or another material to get started we'll choose our shape and to do this we'll go to images google.com and we'll search for baseball bat to silhouette and this should be a pretty simple image to find you always want to click this view image button so you see your full image and then drag it off to your desktop and then we can just simply drag and drop it right into Inkscape now you may be prompted to link or embed your image so you can just choose embed for the time being it doesn't matter and now we're going to get a path trace bitmap and change this PNG file into a vector image and to do this we focus on this lower portion where we set these scans to to select colors and select remove background you do not select smooth or stock scans and we hit update and okay and the top one should be our vector image we can verify that by clicking on our node editor and you'll see we have nodes that appear on this one but not this one so we know this one is our vector image so we can get rid of this one just click on it and hit your delete key on your keyboard and we'll move this around before we have it on a nice horizontal plane and I'm going to make this a bit larger so we can work with it easier and we'll make this a bit larger make it a little easier to work with what we're doing here and and one of the things we want to do is change the opacity on this just so we can see things a little better and so I'm going to hit my ctrl shift F key and on the fill panel down here we want to change the opacity and turn it down to about half or so and see it makes it partially transparent and we can close that and get rid of it next we'll choose a font to work with and we'll type a name here and if I hold control shift when I adjust the size it will maintain the proportions and so what we're going to do is choose a nice font that fills out things so good choices for this might be Arial black or in this case I'm gonna choose impact and you see it gives me a nice thick font to work with and so what I'm going to do is adjust the size of this just kind of roughly here where I want to position this text along this shape and I'm just kind of eyeballing this and and getting a centered top to bottom looks like this maybe you may need to be rotated just a little bit more and it's like we're in pretty good shape there so it doesn't have to be exact you're gonna adjust this anyway so the next step we're going to do is change the name to a path so we click on it and we get a path object to path and one thing I always like to do is to ungroup this the letters and make them one if I click on my no data tree you can see they are individual still so they are grouped and so I can click on the name click object ungroup and then I can go path Union and that will kind of weld them together so now when I click on in they're all one piece and now we're gonna change the shape of this to conform to the bat and a change the shape of the bat a little bit make it a little bit thicker a little bit more of a shape there rather than such a long slim shape and so we'll get a path we'll click on our name then we'll turn on our path effects or you could also use shift control 7 as the shortcut and with your path selected now remember you have to have this to be a path if you if you create a word and you don't convert it to a path you won't be able to add anything over here so we're gonna choose envelope deformation and over here we're going to choose the top of Bend the path and when you click on that you'll notice you get this little line and now we can grab this line and kind of bend it and shape it and you can use these handles to adjust the amount of curve you're getting they can also insert nodes along that path so along that green line if I wanted to insert a note another adjustment node just like a regular path I can do that and then I can hold ctrl and click on the node and change the node type and get my different types of handles and conform this shape a little better now sometimes if you click off of it you lose that green line and you want to come back over here and click on that see get that back and you can make your adjustments and now I'm gonna go over here and choose my bottom bin path and I can go down here and choose the bottom and do the same types of effects with it now you see we have our name in the shape of the baseball bat there and the effect that I'm going for here's one mistake I see that I've made here somewhere along the line I've clicked on that and gotten the in out of shape there so I'll probably want to get back here to top Bend path and make that adjustment you see sometimes when you move things around you get these little spikes that pop up and you want to avoid those if you can and it's just a matter of patience and adjustment to make sure everything's right and so the effect I'm going for is I want to be able to cut out part of the left and right part of the baseball bat so I'm gonna take a square or a rectangle and place it in here and since I still have my opacity turned down I'll be able to see through that and you want to be careful here you want to select your square and you still hold shift and select your baseball bat shape and then you're going to go to path difference and that's going to cut away that piece and then if I hit ctrl shift F and bring back my fill panel I can turn my opacity back up all the way and here is our finished product and this is two separate shapes right now so I'm gonna select this and if I want to cut this all in one color I have a good at path Union if I did not I could change the color here and make it two different colors but since I want to make this all one piece in one color I'm gonna select path and go Union and now this is all one shape now I'm going to adjust the size of this down a little bit by holding ctrl shift and put it there inside my document box and we'll save this as a plain SVG file and we'll import this into design space well upload the image and insert it into a project and you'll see we have that as a nice shape it's one layer and ready to cut if you found this video helpful please subscribe to my channel by clicking the subscribe button and once you've subscribed please click this Bell icon and click the box so that you'll receive an email whenever I publish a new video you can also keep track of my videos by going to my website at 651 vinyl comm and going to the learn section where I publish various videos articles and how to's regarding vinyl HTV Cricut Inkscape and more

Channel: TroyTube

Views: 132,542

Keywords: All, Videos

Id: 8XbIsw48vTk

Length: 9min 37sec (577 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 28 2016