Inkscape Beginner Tutorial: Reflective Text Effect

[Music] this is Nick with logos by Nick comm and in today's tutorial I'll be demonstrating how you can create this reflective text effect where it appears as if the top half of the text is reflecting or casting a shadow that represents the bottom half of the text so I'll go ahead and get started here in Inkscape we just want to get our document set up so that we're all working with a similar view the first thing we want to do is go to our document properties let me try that again document properties I want to set the display units to pixels and I just want to turn off the visibility of the page border we can close out of that and now we can go to view make sure we have custom selected we'll zoom in at 1 to 1 and then we'll open up the align and distribute menu with this button right here we're gonna want less selected chosen from that drop-down and that will open up the Edit objects colors gradients and Stroke menu with that button right there as well so the first thing we're gonna do is create some text so I'll grab the text tool and I'll click on the canvas to get the cursor going and I'm going to use all caps and I'm just going to write reflect for the sake of this tutorial let me go back to the Select tool I want to change that font let me grab the text editor up here this letter T icon and let me just grab that from my other monitor there we go and the font I'm going to be using is called Lee gothic but you can use whatever font you'd like any non cursive font should work just fine I'll go with Lee gothic close out of that if you'd like to use this specific font I'll put a link in the description to where you can download this font for free and I just want to hold ctrl and shift and scale this up a little bit like that and once we've done that I want to change this from a text object to an actual vector object or a path I'll get a path object to path and then I'll click the ungroup button to ungroup it and then I'll go to path Union so that's no longer a text object it is now a path and what I want to do next is where we have the width and the height of the W and H up here I want to turn on the lock icon between those two and I want to set the height to 200 pixels I'll just hit to 0 0 and hit enter and now I'm gonna grab the rectangles and squares tool and I'm gonna click and drag to create a rectangle going over the bottom half just like that and what I'll do is I will turn that red and I'll bring the opacity down about in half and only go back to the Select tool now I want to convert that to a path as well I've got a path object to path and I want to change the height of this to half of the height of the text so and that would be 100 so let me change the height to 100 and then I'll click and drag over both the text and the box right there and just Center it up on the vertical axis and then I'll click the button that says align bottom edges like that and with those two objects selected I'm going to go to path and division and it's gonna break everything up into these separate segments and I'm gonna click and drag over the top half of the text right here so we'd have the top half selected and go to path Union and then I'll click and drag over the bottom half and do the same thing I'll select all of those and go to path Union and what I'm gonna do now is I'm going to right-click the bottom half of that text and go to copy and I'm going to create another square or a rectangle so grab the squares and rectangles tool and create another rectangle convert that to a path by going to path object to path and then go to edit paste size and paste size and that's going to paste the size of whatever the object that you just copied is and once you've done that you can grab the Select tool hold shift click on the bottom portion of the text and just Center it on the vertical axis and again align the bottom edges like that and now we can click off of that to deselect everything so what I'll do now is I'll take this red object over here and I'm going to send that to the bottom I'm gonna click this button up here that says lower selection to the bottom and then I'm gonna go to the edit pads by nodes tool click on that and then click and drag over these bottom two nodes so we have them both selected hold ctrl click and drag these up to about here maybe about halfway through the bottom half of that text like that and then up here on this icon these arrows icon that says show transformation handles for selected nodes go ahead and turn that on and that's going to give us scaling and rotation handles just like when we're working with the Select tool and with that's with that what though is now present you can hold ctrl and shift and grab one of the arrows on the side and just click and drag to scale it out like that and this is going to be the the I guess you can call it the perspective box that we place the lower the lower half of the text in so I'll go with something like that we'll let go of everything let me turn that back off so the next time I work with the nodes tool I don't have to have that in my way I'll go back to the Select tool I'll click on the lower half of the text I'll go to path path effects and I'm going to click this plus icon in the path effects menu and let me make this a little bigger so you can see it better I'm gonna look for perspective envelope right there click add and up here versus enable snapping we're gonna want snap to cusp nodes and we're gonna want snap smooth nodes we want those two selected and once we've done that I'm gonna go to the edit pads by nodes tool and if you zoom in I'm gonna hold ctrl and roll up the mouse wheel to zoom in you'll notice in the corner of each in each corner of the object you're going to notice a white node that'll allow you to change the perspective of the object like that now be careful not to confuse it with the the slightly the slightly darker gray nodes which they don't that doesn't work that way your you're going to use the the white node in the very far corner and once you've done that I'm just gonna take this and snap this into the corner over here then I'll take this one over here and snap this into the corner over there and then we can finalize that by going to path object to path we can close out of the path effects menu to get rid of that I'll go back to the Select tool click off of it to deselect everything I mean I'm actually gonna press one of the keyboard to zoom out to a hundred percent I'll take this red box and we can just get rid of that now as you can see we are finished we've created our reflective text effect using Inkscape let me just show you one last thing if you want you could use this just as it isn't colored in however you'd like or if you'd like you could create a shadow out of it you can make this look more like a shadow you can maybe go with uh you click on the bottom half and on the fill tab you click on linear gradient to give it a linear gradient and you go to the gradient tool over here and then you could just change the gradient where it's placed something like that or maybe it'd have to be like this put it up there like that and you pretty much get the idea so that's how you can go about creating that reflective text effect with xscape if you haven't done so already be sure to join the logos by Nick mailing list in order to receive email alerts whenever new tutorials are posted your information won't be sold to or shared with anyone else and you will never receive any kind of spam or promotional offers from me in fact the only time you will hear from me is when new tutorials are posted and you will get to watch them on the logos by Nick website without ads so I'll have a link in the description if you want to check that out if you have any questions let me know and as always thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: Logos By Nick

Views: 17,637

Keywords: inkscape, inkscape tutorial, inkscape beginner tutorial, inkscape text tutorial, reflective text effect, nick saporito, logos by nick, logosbynick

Id: j6cGrIgpt3k

Length: 7min 55sec (475 seconds)

Published: Tue May 08 2018