How to Pattern Fill an Image with Inkscape

one of the questions I received a lot is how to fill a basic shape with a pattern to cut with their Cricut Explorer or another die-cutting machine and so we'll take a look at how to do this in Inkscape so what we're going to do we'll do first is go to images google.com we're going to need our shape and our pattern we're going to fill it with so we're first going to get our shape so we will get a heart silhouette and this looks like a pretty given here 600 by 556 pixels so we'll click on that I mean you do this make sure you click on the view image button so that you get your full image and we'll just drag this off to the desktop here where we can get to it real easy and the next thing we're going to do is get our pattern so we'll do the basic chevron pattern and want to get one that's kind of tight just for this that looks like a pretty good one so we'll view that and drag it off to the desktop as well and we're finished with our browsers we'll close that and we will grab both of our images and I'm just going to drag and drop them over into the Inkscape desktop and if you're prompted to link or embed the image you can just choose embed for each one you can also just go to file and open and import those images as well so what we're going to do first is trace these these are both believed there's for both PNG files so we have to trace them into vector images first into SVG format so with the first image selected we'll go to path trace bitmap real easy we set our scans down to two colors we'll uncheck smooth and stock scans and we'll click remove background and click update and I hit OK it will convert my image and when I drag one off you'll see that it is a vector image so I'll get rid of the old image now you can also verify that you have the right one by clicking on and then clicking your node editor and if your node show up that means you have the right images does your vector so I've kept my vector file and gotten rid of the original PNG file and now we're going to do the same thing for the heart or does we can just leave the settings the same click on that click on update and it should be our top one so we'll get rid of this one and again I can click my node editor to verify that there's probably several different ways you can do this is the way I like to do it it seems to work out well and have really good control over some of the things I do like to do with my with Inkscape when I'm working with images is I'll zoom out and I'll make my images really large and this gives me a little bit more tolerance when I do things like step in and out within sets and out sets and things of that nature the Inkscape by default does like two pixels at a time so if your image is really large and you're adjusting to pixels it doesn't make much difference but if it's really small and you make two pixel adjustments it will make a really big difference can make your image look bad so I just make them really large as you can see that this is all the way it to like 81 inches so when I make sure we resize that down before we put it into design space or any of the die-cutting software so the next thing we're going to want to do is to create our outline of our object and so the way we're going to do this there's probably like I said a few different ways you can do this I like to stick with the inset outset and and linked offset features so the first thing I want to do is click our image and we're going to go to path linked offset and I like to make it a different color so I can see what I'm doing here so I'm going to click red and you see this little node and so I'm going to drag that up and make an outline of the image now don't want it to large and you'll see why here in a moment we're going to adjust the thickness of that so next we're going to click off of that and we need to make this red outline a path now if I drag this off you'll see that it is you know solid underneath so I need to be selected on the red outline and go to path object to path and if I select my node editor again you'll see I can get nodes on either one of these objects and here's the important things you want to do so that you have an object that's the exact same size so we want to get a copy of this black heart the top layer here so I'm going to click on it hit ctrl D and then I'll drag that off to the side here so we can have it for safekeeping we're going to use that in just a moment so now we're going to select both of these objects and we're going to slice that away using the path difference command so that's the same thing as slice and design space and now you see we have a nice outline there that's the same size of this black heart now what we want to do is we're going to actually cut a piece of this chevron pattern that will fit in here the difference is if you cut the exact same size it's just going to barely touch the edges and it may not close all the gaps all the way around so we're going to show you a little trick on how to get around that so first thing we'll do is slice the pattern and we'll need to make it just a little bit larger I'm not being too discretionary on the pattern size and everything so we'll do that and the way difference command works and Inkscape is the layer on top slices away the layer on the bottom so we actually want the heart on the bottom so we're going to go to object lower to bottom and it's kind of hard to tell there because they're the same color but it is on the bottom of the - so next I'm going to select both of these objects and we'll do the same path difference command you see it leaves us with that chevron pattern in the shape of the heart now like I said if I try to drop this in here it's gonna be real difficult to line that up and get it to touch all the way around and we want this all to be one solid layer so we'll correct this over here in the center where we can see it nice and so what we want to do is to thicken this line here the red outline so that overlaps all the way around on these edges now to do this perfectly we want to Center them first so I want to select both of these objects I'm going to hit ctrl shift F to get my alignment panel then I'm going to line it horizontally and vertically so that these are perfectly centered and if i zoom way and you see that little tiny gap I was talking about between the chevron pattern and the outline so in order to do this the easiest way in my opinion I can click on this red outline and I'm going to hit ctrl shift F to get my fill panel and on this fill tab down here at the bottom you have opacity and you can turn this down and you see it starts to get kind of pink well it's not really changing color it's just changing transparency so if I were to drag it over here you can see the black layer underneath of that okay so we're going to turn that opacity back up in just a moment but first we're going to thicken these lines up and the way we're going to do that is select the red outline and we're going to go to path and we're going to go to an out set now this out set command I used in one of my other videos to show you how to how to do this with inset on a font but the out end and out set is used to thicken lines so what this is going to do is add to the inside it's also going to add to the outside a little bit so we're going to click on the outset command I'm just going to use this short cup of control white parentheses and you'll see that it starts to thicken that line up if I hit it several times I can get it to where it is overlapped just a little if I look all the way around and make sure that I'm overlapped at every point then I should be in pretty good shape so now if I can turn my opacity back up I can select both of these objects and get it paths Union which is the same as weld in design space and now we have an object that is filled with a pattern that's all one object and it will cut without leaving any gaps between any of the edges all the way around now the next thing we want to do is to resize this again before we save it so I'll shrink this down and looking at my size up here in the corner this is about a three to four inch size image and I will save this as a plain SVG file and now we'll go over and import it into the side space so that will upload our image and insert it into our project and you see we have one single layer with a nice cut file ready to cut using our Explorer machine 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 any more

Channel: TroyTube

Views: 60,636

Keywords: All, Videos

Id: 61wRAl72bmI

Length: 10min 57sec (657 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 22 2016