Inkscape Celtic Knot Tutorial: Path Effects Knot Tool Explained

i'm rick johansen and this is iron echo design inkscape is full of special tools and hidden features that allow you to make complicated designs easily this tutorial we're going to cover one that is appropriately named not you can find it under path effects not and what it lets you do is you can take some shapes or objects and if you apply the effect it will interlock them automatically so if you look at this center square it goes over this one then under then over then under which is fine pretty simple but again that will let you make some very complicated things such as these celtic knots that we'll do today so i'll walk you through step by step it's very easy they're fun and let's do it let's set up our canvas so we're all working at the same scale under file go to document properties you could also hit this piece of paper with the wrench icon and you'll see under here we have the a4 page size you can change it to all these different settings but today we'll do a4 change the orientation to landscape and under page color if you hit this right here you can make it black and a quick shortcut if you want to resize the zoom to fit this exact page we just did hit number five or you can choose this icon here that looks like a magnifying glass with a rectangle in it like that here is how the knot feature works on the most basic level i'll grab the squares and rectangles tool if i hold shift and control together i can draw open what looks like a white square with the gold orange stroke we can change that by going to object fill and stroke and over here you'll see a fill and stroke menu pop up if you're on the fill tab we actually don't want to fill for this exercise we're going to x out of that so now there's no fill and we're left with this outline of it we'll go over to the stroke tab and we can change that to plain white go one more tab over to stroke style and here's we can change the width why don't we do 5.0 i'm set to millimeters and if you look down here under cap these are sometimes overlooked but we want to go to the furthest one to the right square cap it won't matter right now for this first example but it's going to come into play when we get more complicated make sure you're on square cap all right go to selector tool we have the first one selected i'll do ctrl d to duplicate it i can drag it anywhere i want now i'll click in no man's land to select both at the same time and do control g which groups them once they're grouped the path effects can be applied so if your path fx menu isn't open which it probably won't be go to path path effects the menu pops open blank hit the plus sign and you'll get your live path effect selector look around this is always a different configuration you want the one that says not and there you go if you look down here the gap length the default is 3.0 and it's in units of stroke width so 3.0 millimeters you can change that if you do 4.0 it makes it wider or you can make it more narrow depending on what you want to do and if you want even more control hit edit paths by node and you'll see well you can't see it that well here switcher size 15 and let's change it to 25. you see this blue circle with an arrow that's what's called the switcher if i click on the center node it will change if the shape is going over or under so now the first square is going over now it's connected now it's going under to go to the next crossover area just drag the node to the next part same thing click it for over connected or under now if you want to change the colors and things you do have to do one more step with the selector tool grab everything and choose path stroke to path you notice that your path effects menu has gone away and that's what you want now you can manipulate this and change the colors at will i'll go to fill you can change it to red yellow whatever you feel like you could also add a stroke around it to have a more interesting design like that moving on the next basic level of study i want to show you let's go to the circles and ellipsis tool again if you hold shift and control together you'll make a perfect circle change the stroke back to white and we'll make it wider 5.0 this is a precursor to the advanced design we'll do just next i want to change this before we do path effects right now it's a basic shape we built right off of the tool itself go to path object to path locking that in will help the knot feature work better also we could do control d to duplicate but that i've noticed causes some complications as well so instead do right click copy right click paste i'll bring these two overlapping select both over here you see the align distribute menu you can also find the menu under object align and distribute if you're on the align tab relative to last selected i want to hit this one here align bottom edges now we know they're perfectly justified here ctrl g groups them together back to your path effects menu if you need it again it's under path path effects hit the plus go back to not and there it is again so we have the default 3.0 gap length i wanted to show you this because if you're happy with this or if you're prototyping and doing all sorts of different designs you want to make them quickly it looks fine but if you zoom in it doesn't look as fine as you want it looks like it's not perfectly done i'll show you how to fix this now moving on to the ultimate project here let's make a celtic knot we'll start again with the circle draw it open shift and control nice and even go to path object to path don't duplicate it do right click copy right click paste line it up a bit get both of them align and distribute menu justify on the bottom now we'll go to path intersection i need to make one of these eye shapes and i'll grab it by the bottom and stretch it out to wherever you see fit right about there is good hit it one more time until you see the handles that have a curve on the side if you hold control and grab one of the handles it will click over in increments until you see a square like that that's what i want i almost did ctrl d don't do that do copy paste now i have two i'll go up to my directionals if you're on selector tool hit the opposite direction bring them close enough grab them all and under align and distribute for last selected hit vertical and horizontal axis now go to the circle tool shift and control grab a nice circle eyeball it like that we have to make it a path object to path let's see how this one's looking that was pretty lucky you can resize it if you need to i want to keep it just like that now i'll grab in no man's land to collect all of them they're all selected there but i want to justify them again so relative to last selected vertical horizontal now they're all lined up at this point you can group them ctrl g over to our path effects menu hit the plus i find not and there it is it's looking bad so now we do have to clean this up a bit a couple ways you can do it first you could try changing the gap length 2.5 i'll stick with i think i'll do 2.6 this will slow us down a bit because we need to clean this up i'll show you how to do it in just a minute first let's make sure our over unders are correct if i go to edit paths by node i see my switcher let's make that bigger 25 and i try to just follow along one shape at a time so on this left eye shape we go over under over under over under over under so that one's good let's go this direction it's going under under again we'll change that to an over now we're over oh it's good content right now mathematically the circle should be correct because we just lined everything up done with that go back to selector tool now with the whole thing selected grab everything go to path stroke to path here is why we change that stroke style to the square cap if i go to edit paths by node click on one of them and i zoom in you can see i've got these two extra nodes this is the square cap and all i have to do is move them so they're better in line down here check this out measure hit this tool right here and you can draw between two points so i know i'm 2.2 millimeters helps you be a little bit more accurate than eyeballing and we'll move to the next one through the magic of editing i'll do them all at once actually just kidding before i go to the reveal with them all cleaned up let me show you one of the hacks that i use if i click on this middle shape right here it doesn't matter which one it is and i go to stroke and add my stroke to the width that i want now when i click on the other shape and go to edit paths by node it's very easy to drag it right into place just makes it go faster okay back to the editing and there is the magic of editing i'll take off the stroke here is our celtic knot now there are other methods to make these with thanksgive and i've seen some great tutorials logos by nick comes to mind there is a rumor that inkscape developers are currently working on a shape builder tool just like adobe illustrator has think it might make methods like this obsolete but still the purpose of this tutorial is to show you the not feature so if you have any questions let me know in the comments i hope this was helpful and we'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: IronEcho Design

Views: 11,586

Keywords: Celtic, Celtic Knot, Inkscape, Rick Johanson, Tutorial, IronEcho, IronEcho Design, free

Id: 08zpOs-yoTw

Length: 9min 16sec (556 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 30 2022