Inkscape Beginner Tutorial: Draw A Simple Leaf

one of my favorite things about working with vectors is having the ability to make complex designs out of simple shapes a good example of such would be this iconic leaf design that was made using only two circles a square and a little bit of design magic in today's lesson i'll be showing you how so getting us started here the first thing we're going to do is draw our circle so i'm going to locate the circles and ellipses tool which is located over here and then i'm going to click and drag on the canvas while holding down the control key so we get a nice perfectly round circle like that now what i'm going to do is open up the fill and stroke menu which is located over here or you can press ctrl shift and f to open that up and it should open up on the right hand side of your screen over here now you can use these sliders to make this whatever color you'd like i'm going to make my leaf green so i'm going to use a green shade over here [Music] there we go and what i'm going to do now is reduce the opacity of this circle i want to drop this down roughly in half because it's important that we're going to see through the shapes that we're about to work with once you've done that you can go back to the select tool over here and what i want to do is right click on this object and go to duplicate now we have two copies of it so now i'm going to hold down my control key and click and drag this shape down here so that we have this intersecting area between these two circles right here which is going to represent our leaf shape so now i'm going to create a new object out of these intersecting areas by clicking and dragging over both of them we want to make sure we have both of them selected and then go to path and select intersection and this is going to represent part of our leaf anyway so now we're going to create this stem i'm going to put this off to the side for now i'm going to use a couple of squares to make this stem i'm going to grab the squares and rectangles tool which is over here click and drag on the canvas to create your shape hold down control to lock the aspect ratio so we get a nice symmetrical square like that and now what we want to do is first make sure that the corners of the square are sharp up here in the toolbar this icon right here that reads make corners sharp when you hover your cursor over it if it's grayed out then that means your corners are already sharp and you're good to go if you have rounded corners go ahead and click that button and it'll make your corner sharp okay so let's convert this to a path now let's go to path and select object to path and now we can grab the nodes tool which is right here and i'm going to click and drag over this node right here to select it and i'm going to press delete on the keyboard to get rid of that node and then i'm going to click and drag over the remaining three nodes and make them sharp by clicking on this button up here that says make selected nodes corner and now we have this triangle shape like that so let's go back to our select tool let's give this a different color so we can differentiate it from the leaf when we apply it over i'm going to make this red and i'm going to right click this and go to duplicate and i'm going to make this one a different color i'll make this one blue and then i'll come up here where it says flip selected objects vertically i'll do that so it's flipped vertically and i'm going to hold ctrl and move this one down here like that now we want this to attach to this right here so i'm going to temporarily turn on snapping which is this little magnet icon up here in the top right corner and then you should be able to just click and drag and snap it in place like that and then we also want to flip this horizontally so come over here where it says flip selected objects horizontally and select that this is what we're looking for right here so let's turn off snapping now actually no you know what let's leave that on for now i'm going to click and drag over both of these objects i'm going to group them together by going to object and selecting [Music] and then i'm just going to take this bottom node right here or this bottom handle and just bring this up so that we end up with a shape like this so we have these two triangles these two long triangles going this way and now i'm going to take my leaf let me bring this over here let me make this a little bigger i'm going to hold ctrl and i'm going to click and drag this scaling handle right here to scale that up and i want to take the corners this corner of this object right here and snap it into this corner right here just like that and now we can turn off our snapping because if we leave that enabled any further it's just going to get in our way so now we have our stem in place i'm just going to hold ctrl and move this over like this i might even make this a little more a little longer like that and what's how this works is this red object is going to represent the stem and this blue object is actually going to be used as negative space for this leaf let me show you what i mean here let's ungroup this object let's go to object and select ungroup and then click off of the graphic to deselect everything i'm going to select just this blue shape right here and then i'm going to hold shift and click on the green leaf right there so we have both of them selected and i'm going to subtract those two shapes from each other by going to path difference and now we end up with something like that right there so let's click and drag over everything here both of those objects and go to path union and now we have our base shape for the leaf in fact we can take the opacity of this and bring this back up and i'm going to scale this down i'm going to hold ctrl and to lock the proportions and scale that down like that so we have a rudimentary leaf here we're going to make this look a little more whimsical and and with curved edges uh by using the pen tool so let me uh right click on this and go to copy or the pencil tool router come over here to the pencil tool or the draw free hand lines tool you can use the letter p on your keyboard to access that and up here where it says shape in the tool setting we want to change that to from clipboard and the smoothing up here this is important as well this is based on this will vary based on your screen resolution but i'm going to start out with 60 and see how that looks and now what i'm going to do is i'm just going to click and drag like this to create a line like that and if you notice it took that strap that it took that uh shape and stretched it out along that path now the problem here is that the the leaf is way too thin so let's come over here to the edit pads my nodes tool and there should be some little there should be a little handle right here that you could just pull out like this and it increases the size of your leaf as you can see here and this right here is the effect we're going for so let me make this green let me remove the stroke by holding shift and clicking on the red x over here and now i'm going to grab my selection tool and scale this down to size a little more a little more of a normal size like that and now what i'm going to do is i'm going to finalize this by converting it to a path i'll go to path and select object to path and we have a little bit of a whimsical leaf here now the problem is i'm not too happy with how these lines look they don't look as fluid as they could be so what i'm going to do is i'm going to manually adjust them let me zoom in on this by holding ctrl and rolling up the mouse wheel i'm going to grab my edit paths by nodes tool i'm going to click on this object to select it and if you see all of these little nodes here going along this edge i'm going to select all of those nodes i'm going to hold shift while doing this to make sure i can select multiple nodes at a time and we want to have only these nodes selected up here and then just press delete on the keyboard to get rid of them and now you should have these two handles that you can adjust according to your preference so i want to give this more of a fluid contour like that that looks a lot better so i'm going to do the same thing down here now i'm going to start selecting these nodes while holding shift on my keyboard so i can select multiple nodes at a time and then press delete on the keyboard to get rid of them and now i can take this handle and manually shape it however i please [Music] okay there we go that looks a lot better so let me grab the selection tool i'm gonna press one on the keyboard to zoom back out to a hundred percent and there you go now we have one of our leaves okay so let me show you another way you can do this or actually let me just show you how to make another leaf of another uh style instead of drawing the curved line like it did before i'm going to draw like a u-shaped line so i should still have this copied to my clipboard we do have the settings in place here from clipboard i'm just going to click and drag to create like a smiley face like that okay that didn't come out as expected that looks really sloppy right there so i'm going to press ctrl z to undo that i'm going to increase the smoothing up to 70. and try that again [Music] okay that looks a little better that that's not that's still not what i'm looking for but that's enough for me to work with so i'm going to leave it as it is let me grab my selection tool let me scale this down like that i'm going to hold ctrl and shift while scaling so i could scale from the center and preserve the proportions and i'm going to make this green i'll remove the stroke by holding shift and clicking the x and i will go to path object to path and now i can go to my edit pads by nodes tool and let me zoom in and clean this up a little bit press the delete key to get rid of those nodes just like we did before same process take this handle and take this handle and bring that in a little bit [Music] there we go [Music] and then i will take these handle take these nodes down here and get rid of them just like i did before just to make this more smooth i missed one right there let me get rid of that one there we go so let me adjust this handle and i think this one looks pretty good yeah that's good enough and once you're done you can grab the selection tool zoom out to 100 by pressing one on the keyboard and there we go now we have another leaf and there you go you should get the idea you can draw all of these different whimsical style leaves by grabbing your pencil tool over here and drawing different contours as you can see there like that or maybe not maybe not as sloppy but you get the idea okay so there we go let me take this one scale this down [Music] and there we go there is another leaf okay so now we have all of these different leaves and different shapes going in different directions and different contours and you could actually arrange these to make somewhat of a pattern or you can use these for logos or icons or whatever else you'd like so i think that should do it for this tutorial that is how you can draw simple iconic leaves using inkscape before i end this video if you found this lesson useful then consider checking out my inkscape master class it's a collection of over 60 videos where i go over all of the tools and features in inkscape and i explain what they are and demonstrate how they work kind of like how i did in this video we even have a private community where you can ask questions and get help from me anytime you want and best of all there's no monthly membership fees you just pay 17 one time and you're in for life i'll have some information about that in the description of the video if you want to check that out as always thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: Logos By Nick

Views: 70,425

Keywords: inkscape beginner tutorial 2022, draw a leaf inkscape

Id: WlL_3t4Kn6w

Length: 10min 53sec (653 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 15 2022