How to Create Chrome Text Effect in Inkscape | Step-By-Step Tutorial

i'm rick johansen and this is iron echo design in this inkscape tutorial i want to show you how to make an easy chrome or metal text effect even if you're just starting out with the program i'll show you how you can make this type of effect and best of all it's not just layers of filters this is something you can edit on the fly you can set it up once and make changes as much as you want even with the colors and it's still something you can edit so this is editable text using just a couple of gradients that you can apply to any project that might need this type of application so let's begin we'll start by setting up inkscape so it looks more familiar to you if you're opening the program it might look more like this so go to file document properties and you'll get a sidebar menu that opens with options we want to be on the a4 template which is 210 millimeters by 297 millimeters and i actually do want that black background with the checkerboard because it's going to make the chrome easier to see when we're working with a white to black gradient to do that go down here right down here says background color click that you'll get a pop-up box choose black x out of it and to jazz it up even more click on the checkerboard background a hidden feature not everybody knows if you hit this delta here there's a whole bunch of built-in palettes i'll go to gold and you can see it just looks better against the black but if you're working on a project and you need just blues there's all your blues x out of that let's go to some open space and we'll start with our basic text hit the create and edit text tool up in the modification area you'll see you can change the different fonts i have it on a google open font called enter if you don't have enter you can get it for free at fonts.google.com i think it's pretty sharp also on the license it is open source and it's all thanks to erasmus anderson a swedish maker of software living in san francisco so thank you rasmus this is one of my absolute favorite fonts if you don't have enter or don't feel like doing that for this demonstration enter is actually pretty close to ariel so choose arial heavy and type out whatever word your creative juices wants to mine is in black we need to change that so go to object fill and stroke this pops open the fill and stroke menu on the fill tab i'm going to go and bring it to white so we can see what we're doing i'll change the font size to something that we can see better 400 and i'm going to type in enter because i have it already style heavy let's see what we have run at this point we don't want to have a stroke on the text click over to the stroke tab and if you had something like this for example just x out of it we'll come back to the stroke later it helps with the effect but we don't want it for now now this easy metal chrome effect is done by doing a gradient the method i'm going to do is going to be with black and white and basically the shading we set up you can use on every color of the spectrum i've got the text selected i'm on the fill tab i'll hit linear gradient you'll see down here these the two gradients of the one i made previously but let's start from scratch so i'm on this top one here i want to hit the pencil and that will give me the gradient bar grab the square node and bring it to the top then choose the circle if you hold control when you get to perfectly vertical it'll lock in that axis just so you can see how the gradient works i'm going to click on the square and change it to red we're going from full opacity and the gradient takes it to full transparency if you click on the circle at the bottom you'll see on the transparency slider it's fading into nothing we need to take this slider and bring it to full opacity and you'll notice the circle is set to black so if i drag the bottom node it's going to take the black with it and fade it into the starting color the actual metal effect is done by adding different stops to the gradient we're going to go from black to white black to white i know that sounds easy but it will help if you just visualize it that way choose the top node change that to black go somewhere on the bar double click and you'll get another node change that one to white and make sure you're on full opacity right next to it make another node and we're going back to black then at the bottom choose that go to white here's your first style decision if you're typing one specific word and you want to make sure the break point in between the light and the dark hits a certain way because you have two nodes very close to each other if you want to move this and not have it separate like that hold shift and grab both and then use the arrow keys and you can move them in unison let's add one more node somewhere towards the middle and make it full white did you see how that brightened it up a little bit you can play with where that goes and it will kind of set the mood of how your finished product will look it's also going to help on this next step so zoom back out and let's add a stroke on the fill and stroke menu click over to the stroke tab let's activate the stroke and there's a basic feature on the stroke style tab that isn't always apparent to beginners and at least while i was learning it was a frustrating point until i realized the solution was right in front of my nose here's what i'm talking about if i were to make the stroke wider let's say 10 i lose all of my interior fill let's say it was just a 4.0 width it still takes away my interior have you ever experienced that if you have here's the solution down here under order it's preset to this first one which says fill stroke markers which means the fills on the bottom and the strokes on top of it and markers is like if you're adding arrows and things don't worry about that i'll change it to something huge so it's easy to see if i change it down to here markers stroke fill the stroke is going to be underneath my fill the way i want it see if you are trying to make a very wide fill around it i have a tutorial on that it's the sticker tutorial about offset and that's a totally different area but for this beginner tutorial it may not be 6.0 millimeters just set it to something so it looks about this wide it's like finally warm enough to take the jacket off changing the stroke is what really sells the effect go to stroke we'll do linear gradient on our list here the first two were from the example at the beginning of the video this one seven nine seven that's the one we made for the fill click on that once but don't make changes to it yet hit the plus that will give you the newest gradient click onto the newest gradient which is specifically for the stroke in fact we'll change the name to stroke gradient so we don't forget grab the square node if you have snapping on it's going to want to grab on to that original square node so stay away from the square node i'll hold the circle node and doing control will lock in the vertical axis and put it almost uniform up here you'll see this gradient directional reverse the direction of the gradient hit that that is a time saver because we don't have to set up the second gradient in reverse all we have to do is slide the nodes to make it look good if you're following along this is all now personal preference i'm going to go back to fill once i see both of them together i like to do the fill one first make slight changes and then bring it home by changing the stroke linear gradient i'll move in an easy trick is to separate these two a bit because that's going to give you a touch of blur almost you see how that's very subtle this if you want to lighten it you can move that around let's click over to the stroke back to linear gradient i know i'm on the stroke gradient because i labeled it and we want to get these close so it looks like a more natural light refraction this is the double node so you can't just pull one so hold shift grab both and now you can bring it down when they are lined up then you can separate them click off of it and make your blur i find that as long as you split up this stroke gradient so it straddles your hard line it makes the effect a little bit better let's click off and see it and just to prove you can change the words now we'll change run to rain rio rain all the same edit text modifications still apply if you want to add a wider kerning that will still apply if you want to do the secret kern which is holding alt and then arrow keys you can move them right or left i think we'll keep rain let's wrap it up oh actually i want to show you the color too if you want to change the color you could either do gradients every single time or just save your inkscape program so you can always come back to this i'll do ctrl d which duplicates it and this one will go to filters color simple blend you get your dialog box you want to be blend mode color i find it looks better if you don't go 100 percent on the transparency 85 86 87 i'm on blue live preview and there you go apply close out of that i do want to show the sparkle thing i don't know if you even noticed it in the very beginning had these sparkles i'll go to the trusty bezier pen tool i will make a random triangle fill will be white i'll shrink it down a bit ctrl d duplicate it flip that thing grab both control d let's turn this one horizontal control g group the whole thing together ctrl d duplicate shrink that one down turn it group all that blur it out a bit shrink it in my last trick for the day i'm just gonna do spacebar and stamp it everywhere so i've got the thing selected on all the lighter parts just spacebar it'll stay somewhere down there big one down there all right that'll do it if you have any questions leave a comment below i appreciate the input i like this method it's quick simple and my favorite part you can change it on the fly red all right thanks [Music] you

Channel: IronEcho Design

Views: 10,785

Keywords: chrome, metal, text, font, effect, Rick Johanson, Inkscape, IronEcho, Iron Echo, Design

Id: 7WtjSmTKbYs

Length: 10min 21sec (621 seconds)

Published: Mon May 16 2022