Inkscape Class - Creative Crew Zoom Q & A - How to turn images into svg files and more!

okay i think we are recording so i just want to welcome everybody here to the creative crew class tonight tonight we're going to be going over inkscape and it's a very informal class and thanks for hanging out with me i will open it up to questions at the end so if you have a question just jot it down so you don't forget what you want to ask tonight we're going to do a brief description of what inkscape is and how it can be helpful for you in your studio pardon me this is the most talking i've done all day uh so i might lose my voice so inkscape oh it is a program that can help you not only if you are a quilter but if you're a scrapbooker if you're a woodworker if you are a painter if you do anything by a pattern that you want to design you can design it in inkscape inkscape is a vector-based program where you can design graphics that you can use on your website on facebook on etsy as your thumbnails you can also design cutting files for brother skin and cut cricut maker silhouette uh the big great big cutting machines like the rollins you can also use the fancy laser cutters that cut wood and metal and all of that really fun stuff all of that can be done in inkscape so let me just tell you some of the ways that i use inkscape in my studio i make my quilt patterns with inkscape the patterns that you have purchased or that you have gotten the free patterns from those were designed in inkscape i cut applique by designing svg cutting files in inkscape i cut die cuts out of scrapbook paper from designing an inkscape i create t-shirt graphics and cut heat transfer vinyl using inkscape i cut final letters for my mailbox and vinyl decals for my car windows using inkscape there is just an endless endless ways you can use inkscape i also designed my quilts in inkscape and towards the end dawn had a question about how to make graph paper so she could design a quilt block using escape and we will be showing that towards the end so that's just a small hit on some of the things you can do with inkscape now earlier today i posted a post on creative crew group and i got a couple questions from that and then i'm going to go over those and then if anyone here in the group tonight has a question we'll go over that those as well okay but we're really going to try to focus on let me join this person in we're really going to focus on tracing bitmap images to make an svg cutting file so that's going to be our large focus tonight but i'm also opening it up for other questions as well so what i'm going to do is i'm going to go ahead and share my screen and open up inkscape let me just join these two people coming in escape is a free program you can find it on the internet if you don't already have it by going to inkscape.org o-r-g wanda i see your picture in the screen i can see you on the side can you tell me yes or no that you see inkscape on your page okay thank you thank you so when you open up inkscape i'm working in the version that is the 0.91 okay i'm not working in the newest latest greatest version of inkscape because it has so many features that it's too much for my laptop so the virgin version that you see on the screen here is the 0.91 it might look a little bit different from the version that you have but all versions will do the things that i'm showing you this evening so when you open up inkscape this is by default the screen that you will see it'll have a box right in the middle of the screen that's your piece of paper okay for right now i'm going to take that off because when i'm designing anything i think that box to me is a distraction and so the first thing that i usually do when i open up inkscape is i go to file and then i scroll down to document properties document properties has a lot of really cool features and we'll be coming back to this to answer don's question towards the end [Music] but when you open up document properties you can change the size of the box on the screen by default it is an a4 size piece of paper when i create patterns i need to change that to the eight and a half by eleven so you could do that here you could change it to any size legal size piece of paper uh you can do that here in document properties but when i'm designing i think that box is a bit of a distraction and so i go down to display and i click on show page border and i just hide that piece of paper and so now we have a blank canvas that we're working on okay so let me hit on gene's question first because it's probably one of the more quicker questions to answer uh and it's working with a photograph i'm assuming uh she said how do i convert images into grayscale i'm thinking she wants to make a pattern and she wants to change a colored photograph from colors to a gray scale so we're going to import a picture we're going to go to file we are going to go down to import and i'm going to find a picture let's find a picture picture picture here we go harlan's going to join us in our informal class this evening and because i'm streaming it's going to slow down my computer a little bit let me turn them around here all right here's harlan he has joined us for our class this evening the very first thing i want to do when i bring in that picture is of course turn it around get it situated the way that it needs to be if you click off of that picture you'll notice that there's no little arrows surrounding that picture we need to make sure we select that picture miss jean and then we are going to go to this very top menu up at the top of my screen you'll see a bunch of different little uh tabs we're going to click on filters we're going to scroll down to color and then a new box opens and we're going to go to grayscale a menu pops up and to be really honest i usually just try the default i do not change the red the green the blue and the lightness you can play with all of those things you're going to get different results when you do and so those are the kind of adjustments that you need to experiment with when you are in inkscape with your photo i usually try the default settings which is exactly what you see here and i hit apply to see what happens and there's my photograph at a grayscale so i'm hoping that that answers your question and if you have more questions write it down so we can come back towards the end but to change the color photo to grayscale filters color and then a grayscale so there's our harlen right there we're going to save him off to the side because we'll be coming back to him and i'm going just to change him back to color for a minute and just put him off to the side next denise had a question how to convert a jpeg to an svg the same steps that i'm going to show you not only are the same steps for a jpeg but they are for the different file types like a bmp image a png image a lot of the clip art that you can find on the internet will be saved in three different ways basically jpeg bitmap or png i'm going to bring in let's see we're going to import from my desktop i saved a couple of examples let's bring in this pair of gloves this pair of gloves is actually a png file we're going to import the pair of gloves and i'm going to go up real close on my screen so that you can see that so let's say you found a free coloring book page and you want to make it into an applique for a mug rug or a quilt block let's say we want to make a little winter mug rug and we found this free pair of mittens picture on the internet we've imported it into inkscape and uh y'all hold on one second i think we have people who are trying to come in let me just make sure that everybody's here okay all right okay we're back to our mittens we've imported our mittens and we want to turn this into a cut file so we can cut some applique and make a whole bunch of mug rugs really quickly right i'm going to click on my mittens when i do you'll see that we can move them around they have the little dotted box around them with the arrows in the corners we know that it's selected we're going to go to this top menu and we're going to click on a path we're going to scroll down that box and we're going to select trace bitmap when we do a new box opens up and i'm going to try to move it over on my screen so hopefully you can see that pretty well with our box selected there are several different options within the trace bitmap feature and depending on your picture you might need to experiment with all of these different options we're going to keep it really simple tonight and we're just going to do the brightness cut off which is going to be selected by default when you open this up anyway there are two thresholds that you'll want to play around with that will adjust how dark your image is and this is going to also hit on one of cheryl's questions because she was creating an svg file for her for design space and i think this is going to answer cheryl's question too um if you play around with these settings it's going to adjust what happens but we're going to keep it right on the default which is usually 45 and 65. you can see those two numbers right here you can do a live preview and it's going to show you kind of what your file is going to look like we're just going to hit ok and we're going to see what happened we're going to drag that over and just like that we have nodes which means that is now a cutting file all of those little boxes that you see in that mitten is like a road map that is going to tell your cutter where to go it's going to give directions on where the blade needs to travel to cut out the paper or the fabric right and so there's your nodes now if you're happy with it with the default settings then you don't have to do anything else but what i'm going to do is i'm going to lower the threshold to show you what happens if maybe your image quality wasn't as great then you might have something oh no that's pretty good too oh no i got a really good image let me bring in another one that's going to be a little bit harder for it to do maybe [Music] just bring in the trees so there's some trees you can see at these low settings that it has only picked up on the branches of the tree so then you can adjust your settings bring the threshold see all the things popping up in this live preview when you adjust the settings this is how ms cheryl you would get all of your items in there just by adjusting the threshold and i think that's going to answer the question that one of the questions cheryl had is you need to play around with your thresholds now there's all these other different boxes and i encourage you to play around with them uh but they work a little bit differently and most of the time the brightness cut off will give you your outline shape okay now that we have this outline shape of the trees i just want to show you something really fun so let's say we want to make some applique we've just made this into an svg and you can tell because when we click on the nodes on the left bar it has all of these little boxes those are your nodes another one of her questions was how do you clean up an image that has a bunch of nodes just like this second tree see all of these little boxes around this shape that is entirely way too many nodes it needs to be nice and simple just like the first tree and the second tree even this last tree is pretty good but the second tree has a tremendous amount of nodes so cheryl this is going to answer your question the first thing we need to do is we need to ungroup this group of four trees okay and we can do that by selecting our image we can go up to path up at the top and we can select break apart when we do now each one of these trees has its own little box now i can select each tree and move it around or i can even delete it right if i didn't want that tree we're going to select this tree i'm going to click on the nodes we're going to see all of those nodes we're going to go back up to the top there are shortcuts you'll see little shortcuts that you can do for your keyboard but i want to show you on a screen where you can find it as well if you go up to path and you select simplify that's going to erase a lot of your nodes and make it a lot more simple for your cutting machine to read right sometimes it simplifies it too much okay so let's set bring it back to the way it was see all of those nodes you can go in and manually delete some of the nodes and make it more simple and you can also adjust with the little curves with the little handles you can adjust your nodes this way so you can manually simplify each one of these nodes as well it is time consuming but if it's a pattern that you are going to be using a lot maybe you're someone who wants to sell a pattern then the time you invest in the pattern is well worth it right you can manually select the nodes and delete them just like this and you can drag these handles out and move things around just like that i'll show you something really cool with this too is if you select it right now it's all colored in black but really the only thing that's going to cut out is the outline of the shape so we can go to the fill and stroke button let's say uh you're making a pattern and you don't want the whole thing filled in black you just want the tracing outline if you select fill and stroke and you come over here and you click off of the fill and then you select stroke and turn on your stroke there is your cutting line or if you're making a pattern to trace let's say you don't have a cutting machine but you want to be able to trace this with heat and bond light or trace directly on fabric there is your outline you can even make your outline more bolder and thicker just like this or you can make it really thin you can also change it from a solid to a dotted line just like that so that answers a few of cheryl's questions another question that she had i'm going to erase these little trees all right i have a brother scan and cut and my mat is a 12 by 12 inch mat there's been some times when i've designed a whole bunch of svgs and grouped them together and saved them and it said that my file was too big to bring into brother canvas workspace let me show you a little shortcut that will help you avoid that problem what i like to do is i like to draw a little square box on my canvas and that this is going to be my pretend brother scan and cut matte okay i'm going to go right up to these measurements and i'm going to change it from pixels to inches and then i'm going to type in there the width of 12 inches and the height of 12 inches and now i can bring my svgs in there just like this let's say i had a couple of these oh goodness let's say they're all different sizes right i have some small ones the baby ones the mama ones and the daddy ones right and i want to fit them all on my mat i can make sure that they all fit within this 12-inch box before i even save my file right but you don't want to save this box you can get rid of the box but once all of your items are grouped within your mat space then you can delete this and now you can save this file to bring into your cutting machine and it's going to fit on your mat and the file size won't be too big when you design an svg i want to show you how you can save it so that it can be read by your cutting machine so i've selected all the objects on my canvas we're going to go to file we're going to go to save as this is where you can name it mittens s v g and uh the default is going to save it as an inkscape svg when i'm working on something and i'm not done and i know i'm going to come back and modify and change it i'll save it as a working file at inkscape svg once i am done designing and i'm ready to cut this thing out i changed that from an inkscape svg to a plain svg and now i'm ready to save it and then we can clear off our canvas gabby wanted to know what are the best images to work with using inkscape and there are several different images you can bring into inkscape and we talked about those a little bit you can bring in photographs like here is harlan you can work with that you can crop photos and print from inkscape i print on fabric and crop my photos using inkscape you can also design text that you can print on fabric using inkscape so i love that you all know i love that but you can also bring in jpeg images bitmap images and png images i have found my highest success rate in most ease of use is to bring in a png so if you have a png image that you're working with you're going to find it a lot easier but you can work with a jpeg and a bitmap the smaller your jpeg and your bitmap is the harder time you're gonna get a clean svg you're gonna have to do a lot of work with it to get it to where you want it to be um and the higher contrast in less pixels and noise in your background the better okay how to clean nodes after tracing we did that we did that all right so the things that i've covered now i'm going to stop sharing my screen for a second if anybody has questions about what i've shown to this point let's go ahead and go over that and then don had a question about creating graph paper that she could work with using escape and not have to work with paper at all so we're gonna go over that before we're done tonight too so i'm gonna go ahead and unmute everybody but if you have a question raise your hand or if your camera is off click on the uh raise hand a little button if you can find that gene did that answer your question about the gray scale or did you want me to go into something else about that oh it pretty much did i will have to play with the settings because i just i want not to have really a true picture i wanted to see my lights my mediums in my darks areas so that i could know what colors to collage darker than you know that's a but yeah that i think it put me in the right path to find what i needed okay great great all right evelyn i see uh do you have a question if how were you deleting things all right let me uh let me pull that back on my screen and i'll go over a couple of different ways you can delete okay i use my keyboard for a lot of stuff so let me share my screen and i'll explain exactly what i'm doing what i'm going to do is just draw a couple circles just like this and let's fill them in so you can see them there we go so the more you use escape the faster you'll get with keyboard shortcuts i've drawn a little circle on my canvas i'm gonna uh hold on one second i'm going to mute everybody for a second oh okay right here's my little circle on my keyboard i'm going to hit ctrl d and that's going to do duplicate my circle just like this ctrl d duplicates you can also find duplicate up in uh let's see one of these will let you duplicate somewhere here we go under edit at the top menu if you select edit you can come down to duplicate but when you go to duplicate if you look on the right you see the little keyboard shortcut ctrl d a lot of these functions have shortcuts and the more you use them the more familiar you'll get with those so here are a bunch of circles on my screen i'm going to select one of them and right on my keyboard i'm going to hit the delete button and there goes that circle and there goes that one and there goes that one now i'm going to select this circle and on my mouse i'm going to right click and we can delete right from the mouse click as well and now i'm going to select this circle and we can go up at the top and we can hit the edit button and we can delete from here as well so there's several different ways you can delete you can also if you have a bunch of things on your screen like here's a bunch of circles and let's say i've made all these circles but i only want to keep two of them so a fast way to delete is i'm going to hold down the shift button and start clicking the ones that i want to delete and you'll see those three circles have boxes around them the other two at the bottom do not so just those top three are selected and i can hit the delete button on my keyboard whoops i unselected that one oh there's a whole bunch there there we go and delete a whole bunch of items all at one time so that's three different ways okay i have a question okay um i have a cricut cutter you had mentioned that um do i have to have a special adapter to go with that to transfer my um pattern to the cutter okay so i have a brother scanning cut and i've used a roland before i got my brother scanning cut i had a roland which is actually one of the bigger cutting machines um and i did not and i do not have to convert anything when i open up in brother canvas workspace now because i belong to an escape group on facebook i see a lot of people who have the um i think it's the cricut maker and the silhouette and whatever software like in some of my videos you'll see me open my svg up and show you it before i cut it out like the last angel i showed on my screen the whatever program you can open up to operate your cutting machine i do not know the software and so what i highly suggest if you open up a svg like let's say you purchased that angel mug rug set and you opened it up and it has made it really big or really small you might need to figure out why it's doing that because i don't have experience with all of the different cutting software i know that there's one of them and i can't remember which one it is but it changes the sizes of svgs from the original size and it either makes it bigger or it makes it smaller and a lot of people are frustrated because the svg is the true size it needs to be and they always have to play with it to get it the right size and i cannot remember which machine that is but there are ways to fix that but it also has to do with the way that you save it so if you're wanting to design something yourself and you come to inkscape if you choose that default inkscape svg that gets messed up when you bring it into your cutting software it's going to change the size of it but if you select plain as feeds like i showed then most of that stops most of it stops that'll fix that issue thank you you're welcome do we have any more questions about converting uh like a piece of clip art into an svg lisa yes susan frank uh can you like the on the mittens can you separate the different parts like the stripes and the cuff and make them a different color absolutely so let me let me share my screen and we'll bring in the mittens again because that's really helpful if you notice a lot of patterns like a lot of my um a lot of my patterns the pieces will be separated and you layer them but you don't necessarily want it all to be one piece when you're tracing right so let's get rid of these circles let's scoot harlan off to the side there and let's bring the mittens back in all right we're bringing the mittens back in right now it is currently a png file okay we just saved a free piece of clipart off the internet and here is our mittens i'm going to zoom into them a little bit closer so you can see better all right so the first thing we want to do is we want to change this from a png file to an svg we're going to go to path and trace bitmap this box is going to come back up and by default it's going to have brightness cut off selected you're going to have your two different threshold numbers that you'll want to play with if the first time you do it it doesn't get all your pieces keep playing with these two buttons until it does i'm going to go ahead and click ok now what's changed is there was a box surrounding this gray area which is really faint that's the background of the png and now there's a dotted box that goes exactly to the mittens we know that it's created an svg i'm going to close this little box here's our png and here is our svg and if you get confused which one is which come over to the left bar and select the nodes and if the little boxes show up on all your pieces you know that it has converted that into an svg i'm happy with the quality of that svg so i'm just going to get rid of the png to make it nice and simple and i'm going to make this bigger on the screen now there's a couple of things there's a couple ways you can attempt this miss susan but we're going to select our svg and right now it's grouped both mittens together so with them both grouped together like this we're going to go up to this top menu and we're going to select path we're gonna come down to break apart and when i hit this the whole mitten's gonna turn black for a second okay just like that but when it does you see all of these little boxes right there's a ton of little boxes showing up those are all your different parts with everything still selected i'm gonna go to the fill and stroke box and i'm going to turn off the fill and everything's going to disappear but you're going to see all these boxes still on the screen so you haven't deleted your pieces they're still there we're going to go to stroke which is the second tab in the fill and stroke box and we're going to right now it's turned off we're going to turn it on just like that and there's all of our pieces they show up and at this point we can move each one of these pieces out so what i like to do is i like to grab the mitten shape this outline on the very outside and just move that over like this so there's my applique piece for the mitten right there's the base of it now we could grab these cuffs just select all the cuffs by drawing a box around them just like that i'm going to on my keyboard hit ctrl g and that groups them together there's my cuffs here's this bottom portion here's the top portion and here's the two stripes all right so now what i'm going to do is i'm going to show you how you could print this off right remember at the very beginning i erased the box the piece of paper that shows up right we're going to bring that back we're going to go to file and document properties i'm going to click on the display i want that box to show back up and my printer takes an eight and a half by 11 sheet of paper i'm going to select us letter and now here's my piece of paper we need to move all of these pieces and you might have to save it as a couple of different pages if they all don't fit you could rotate them to make them fit like this like that anything in that box is going to be saved now i like to save my uh my templates for applique to trace with as a pdf and you can do that here in inkscape as well so anything in this box is going to be saved so if you have this going into your box the little bottom of that piece is going to be saved so make sure everything is clear off the page at this point we can go to file save as we're going to save it on the desktop we're going to call this mittens pdf1 because we're going to have two pages right and we're going to change it from an ink svg we're going to save it as a pdf so there's our first pdf and now we can move these off the page and bring in our second page pieces and now we would save this as page two we'll have two pages for our mitten templates to trace with right okay is that helpful oh yeah okay yes all right thank you so much you're welcome i was wondering how you printed you know you could just print it because i don't have a cutter so you change it to the pdf that's awesome yeah you can you don't have to have a cutting machine to use inkscape you can make the tracing templates that's why you know a lot of the patterns that i offer have both the tracing template and it has an included separate svg for those who have cutting machines but you don't have to have one to make the pattern right you can make it without it so yeah you would want the tracing i have a question about the breaking it apart i was just playing around with the drawing actually that i'd scanned in and was trying to break it apart but it's not breaking apart in the way i want it to is there is there a way to do it like manually like separate parts or uh well it's hard to see exactly what you've done to this point because i can't see your screen yeah but it's like well um i have a flower and the the flower petals came apart from each other just fine but then the leaves are all stuck together with the silhouette for the for the background and it's like how in the heck it's like i'd really want to see what what you have and know how you've gotten to where you are because all of that plays a role in to tell you how to fix that okay if i i can't see exactly what you're talking about makes it really hard to answer that specific question okay but like if you want to take a picture of it and post it on our group page i might be able to tell you what's gone wrong or happy evelyn did you have a question uh well yeah how so how do you send the svg to the cutting machine okay so once you save your svg you're going to need to open your svg up in your cutting machine software so if you've if you watched that angel mug rug the vintage angel mug rug my show and part of that video my brother canvas workspace on my computer and how i imported the svg file and moved all the pieces around so that i could put the different pieces of fabric on my mat and it cut everything out all at one time you'll need to transfer the saved svg file either with a usb stick straight to your cutting machine or to like design space or uh yeah it's called design space whatever a qriket or silhouette uses brother uses brother canvas workspace okay yeah all right uh if there's no more questions about turning uh an image into a svg or how to break apart or even save as a pdf so you can trace a template don had a question when we first came in uh and she said she'd like to design some graph paper uh i think she said she had carpal tunnel if i'm right don i can't remember but she'd like to be able to design a quilt block right on inkscape right on our computer without paper so i'm going to turn my screen back over and i'm going to show you that before we're done all right i'm going to go ahead and erase all of our little mitten parts thank you very much lisa not sure that you're well thank you lisa i'm going to share my screen i'm going to share one more thing before we go and you might find it helpful but if you have to go come back on the replay okay i'm going to mute everybody for just a minute i'm going to share my screen we're going to say goodbye to harlan bye harlan all right on default when you open up inkscape you got this box right here i like to design without it so i'm going to go to document properties and i'm going to go under display and i'm just going to click off that box so it's not in my way and i don't get confused so we're working with a blank canvas and let's say we want to design a little baby quilt right the first thing that i do is i make some graph paper because that's how my mind works i need to graph out my blocks i need to graph out my quilt and for me it just makes the whole process much easier and i either do that on paper or i open up my laptop right here at my workstation and i use inkscape so we're going to go to file we're going to go back down to document properties and a little bit ago i said we'll be using this box towards the end so here we are with document properties i'm trying to move this it doesn't want to move all right hopefully you can see that it doesn't want to move when you open up document properties you're on the first page but there's several different tabs it's like a it's like a file cabinet right we're gonna go over to grids and we're gonna choose the grids folder when you do you your little box will look like this and we're going to click on new all of a sudden on our page it looks like graph paper right but we can customize our graph paper by default inkscape likes to work in pixel measurements so and i as a quilter i want to work in inches right that's just how my mind works so we're going to click on grid units we're going to change this from pixels to inches there's four little tabs underneath of there and spacing x and spacing y that's your vertical lines and your horizontal lines of your graph paper we're going to change those measurements and because i like to cut my blocks with a quarter inch seam allowance we're going to change the spacing to 0.25 inches that's our quarter inch seam allowance 0.25 just like this both the x and the y spacing is 0.25 you could make this 2 inches you could make it 5 inches you can make it whatever size you want your graph paper to be and that's the awesome thing is that you can make your graph paper any uh measurement that you want so here we are at quarter of an inch by quarter of an inch i'm going to zoom right in closer each one of these blocks on my screen now represents a quarter of an inch so i could draw out a little quilt block just like this when it's selected at this menu here we're going to change this from pixels to inches you can change this the default but i just manually change it when it's selected you see our quilt block right now is 1.261 inches wide we can change this to 5.5 inches wide and 5.5 inches high so there is our five and a half by five and a half inch block then we can do all kinds of things right we can click on the draw curves and straight lines tool on the left we can draw a line from here to here and then we can divide this triangle just like that of course you can play with it to get it exactly right you could select the paint bucket tool and we'll do red here and then we'll select blue here paint bucket tool blue and then this big one we're going to select the background and unselect paint bucket tool we're going to choose gray and fill that square gray so let me zoom out just a little bit and i'm just playing around so i'm going really fast okay you can come back to the replay and watch all these steps again i'm going to select all of these pieces and i'm going to group them together you can right click on your mount on your mouse scroll down and hit group so now when you click on this all of your pieces are going to move at the same time right now on the keyboard i'm going to hit ctrl d duplicate we're going to make another one and another one we'll make one more like this now to have some fun we can turn these around like this now i can select all of them and group them together duplicate it and move it down i can even turn that around like this and i can keep on duplicating and making them bigger so a lot of actually all of the at home quilt blocked the traditional quilt blocks were designed just like this so that i could show you pictures of what the quilt would look like but once you come in closer let's ungroup it you can tell by the lines on the graph paper how big your pieces need to be right because each one of these is a quarter of an inch each one of the line each one of the little boxes but also when you ungroup them yeah they're all ungrouped there we go this one little gray triangle piece that is 5.378 by 5.378 if you're good in working in triangles this might be helpful for you but yeah it'll tell you the size of each one of these pieces as well and then this is the basic layout of your block just like that so that's something really fun that you can do with inkscape as well unmute okay all right i see carla you have a question yes um back to the importing like clip art if you have imported like color clear the yes when you change it will it do each color [Music] automatically okay so there's a couple different ways you can do that and we didn't go quite into doing color but let me just pull that up so you can see it you're going to have to be playing around with this different settings but i'm going to show you real quick how you do that let me do file new let's bring in a new canvas i'm going to bring in the trees again so here's my trees uh let me go up closer to my trees just like that a little bit we're gonna go to path and trace bitmap so when that trace bit map box pops up we've been working in the default setting which does a vast majority of your transformations from an a picture to an svg but if you go down to the bottom you'll see multiple scans creates a group of paths and what it's going to do is it's going to stack multiple cutting files on top of each other based on color okay so if we take a look at these trees we see the brown we have two shades of green we have an orange and a yellow that's five different colors in this svg so let's come down towards the bottom and we'll just go over this a couple real quick this is something you're going to have to play with if you're working with a color uh p picture but instead of brightness cut off we're going to choose colors and we're going to change this to five scans and what it's done is it stacked five svgs on top of each other so we're going to select this and we're going to right click and we're going to hit ungroup and it's going to separate all of the colored pieces okay so we have our brown little did we know there was a little bit of green in each one of these pieces that we did not see there was some yellow in each one of these pieces we did not see and there's our orange so you'll see the the yeah that's the wrong screen got the wrong screen up i've done all that on the wrong screen yeah all right i still see pinwheels oh goodness sorry oh i had two inks oh okay we're gonna start all over again see all of my pieces yeah see all of my pieces all right we're going to do the trees real quick i'm going to bring them in we're importing the trees all right there's our trees in the trace bitmap we're going to go down here to colors and we're going to choose five colors because that's how many different colors that i see in this image right we're gonna hit okay and then we're going to ungroup these pieces so we have the brown tree trunks we have green we have yellow and we have orange so if you wanted to make a really easy template of the whole piece i'd select the orange copy and delete the rest right because that's going to give you the whole shape of the tree if you wanted to make little trunks that go on top you could also save the brown copy as well because there's your little tree trunk right so that could go on top as a layer these are pieces that i would probably just delete you could change these from orange you could just do a fill and stroke you could turn the fill off and turn the stroke on so there's your tracing template you could do the same thing for the tree trunks and give yourself a little tracing template just like that so there's your basic pieces now i do have a little penguin that i'll bring in and he has some color on him too cute so there's a little penguin let's go back to the original default setting of brightness cut off and we can adjust the threshold and see what all is going to show up so there's our penguin we can separate these pieces by going to a path and a break apart while they're all selected i have not unclicked off of it we're gonna go back to the fill and turn the fill off we're gonna go to stroke and add a stroke around each piece but now you'll see i can move his belly i can move both of his orange feet i can move his face so let's say you wanted to group the white pieces together for his face and his belly there's those two pieces let me get rid of that tree here's the outline for his entire body right there if you wanted to make that one piece here is his mouthpieces if you look really closely there's that dark orange underneath the two mouthpieces that it's made that piece as well so if you wanted to do that you could do that as well or you could delete that and just do the the beak itself you could do the eyes oops here's his eyes and there's the pupils of his eyes now at this point just double checking we can go over to the edit pass by nodes these pieces have nodes you could cut this out of paper fabric cork belt foam board any of the fun stuff that your cutter will do vinyl or you can set up a pdf and make this a tracing template if you do not have a cutting machine and you can trace the pieces with like heat and von light or trace it right on fabric whatever you wanted to do does that answer the question of doing it in color oh hold on you're muted yes thank you you're so welcome i know that's a lot of information and a lot of this y'all is you're going to pull an image in that you want to do and it's not going to work right just like dawn was messing with her flower and it doesn't work a lot of those settings you're going to have to play with the numbers play with the settings until you get it to look the way you want it to look and if you're extremely new to inkscape that can be very time consuming but you're not going to get proficient at it unless you work with it a lot i've been using inkscape 12 years and so i'm really fast with it but you're not when i first started using it i didn't know i had to learn all of this stuff and so you know the more you work with it the easier you it gets yeah i think that's answered all the questions from the post thank you lisa it was very important that was that's interesting yeah who likes to print on fabric print quilt labels stuff like that you can design yeah you can design text like one of the very first patterns that i found here uh was the uh the love letters kit and in that love letters kit for the mug rug is a panel that prints script on fabric and that was like a little story poem that i typed out and made up and i designed it as a pdf and you can print that right on fabric so a lot of people who like to make their own quilt labels use inkscape because you can design with all kinds of fonts and uh design your quilt label right on inkscape and print it right on a piece of fabric uh or you can design your own panels you can scan a piece of fabric and bring it bring that picture into inkscape and crop it whatever size you want and print off a reproduction piece of fabric i never thought about that oh wow yeah i'll see if i kind of said things yeah so let me see if i can show you now i'm not going to go into a lot of this but because i mentioned it i want to show you we're going to get rid of our little penguin parts i'm going to create a circle there's our circle shape i'm going to import let's see i don't know that i have any fabric hold on a second swatches swatches swatches give me just a second [Music] swatches so here's some fabric swatches let's open up these leaves it might take a second because i'm streaming at the same time so my computer is working double time but we'll give it a second miss carla you're freezing up but i'm going to show you this and then we'll see if i can answer your question the fabric swatches are is stuff that i have scanned with my scanner or you can go online and find google search fabric swatches and save them to your computer so here's a piece of leaf fabric that i had and let's say that i want to design uh a flower let's just say this is going to be the center of my flower right you can bring that flower right over top of that leaf fabric you can right click on your mouse and set clip oh you have to select both the backgrounds and the circles set clip and there is my circle of leaf fabric i'm going to duplicate that we're gonna release the clip so there's my fabric swatch and my circle template that i'll save for later and here's my little circle of my leaf fabric neat yep you could uh create text so let's just say so there's my name there's the text let's say i'm designing a quilt label and i want it to say from lisa but i don't want it just to be black letters i want it to be leafy green and orange and yellow right so there's my text i'll go up to text or path object to path now it's got little nodes around it i'll bring this right over top of my leafy green my leaf fabric select both items set the clip and there's my name cute we'll release the clip and now we'll put a little outline around my name so i'm going to select the black text i'm going to go to fill and turn the fill off we'll put a little stroke on it we'll make the stroke wider like this and now we can add a little stroke around my name so it just sticks out of the fabric a little bit better so there's my leafy name you could turn this into embroidery too huh uh inkscape has an embroidery model and i have not downloaded and installed the embroidery model because i use uh and brilliance and brilliance does everything that i want it to do pretty simply and uh so i have not downloaded the it's like an add-on to inkscape but it will and there are tutorials on youtube that'll show you how to do that i don't know anything about that module that you add on to inkscape for embroidery are you talking about to go to an embroidery machine yes no awesome i might look into that then and i forget the name of it it's called stitch or something i have digitizer but oh yeah yeah uh if you go to inkscape.org and you go to extensions there's a little tab called extensions there are hundreds of extensions they're like little module add-ons to inkscape uh there is one for embroidery that will digitize embroidery so if you wanted to make up your own embroidery and digitize it and uh keep in mind that the more extensions you add to your inkscape the more you're gonna bog down your inkscape so you might have to wait longer for a file to process and stuff like that but if you have a newer computer or one that isn't bogged down with a bunch of files like mine you'll probably add the extensions with no problem i most probably have to get a new one i slow now yes yes evelyn i see your hand is up did you have another question uh no okay i'm gonna lower your hand there we go all right does anybody have questions i know that was a lot of information and it might even be helpful to come back on the replay and just revisit believe me when i tell you that everything that i showed you tonight there are tons of youtube tutorials that break it down for each one of the things i showed you and they really just focus on that one thing so you can grasp it and it's not a whole bunch of stuff in one video but there are hundreds of youtube videos showing everything i showed tonight and uh yeah it's just like a crash actually i did have a question okay but i think you might have answered it i was wondering like when you had the penguin up if you have a clipart you bring in and you want to put like your name on that penguin yes how you how you would do that and then print it out and i think the same way you do sorry go ahead so you want to make you want to make a tracing template for applique or do you want to make a penguin that you're going to print on paper or fabric which one do you want to do crap okay for applique yeah okay well what i would do is i would separate the penguin and the name anyway because you uh let me show you let's see this one has my name in it already so let's get rid of the leaves let's get rid of the circles all right here's my name let's bring in the penguin we're going to turn that into [Music] an svg just like that so let's say we want our penguin to be five inches tall or here he is let me bring in my piece of paper first okay here's my piece of paper oh goodness okay oh i was trying to find my little piece of paper there it is okay so here's our penguin we're gonna break that apart so i can separate the pieces half break apart we're gonna unfill all those pieces and then we're gonna add an outline stroke paint and before i move it you say you want to put a name on the penguin yeah i was just saying the penguin because you already showed that but by any kind of a a penguin a pig whatever you want to put a name on them um on him somewhere right okay so here's the name and let's just pretend you're gonna applique it there right to trace it you know you can resize it just like this until you get it the size you want maybe you want it a little bit bigger like that once you have it you can actually do that and then put the name on it like that and then just print it out on fabric and the name would already be on it you could do that yep you could even color these pieces in if you want if you have a color printer you could select each one of these pieces oh okay if you wanted to print on paper that's why i was asking because uh if you're just tracing as a template then i would separate these pieces to make it non-confusing right right but uh if you wanted to print it you could color these pieces by just selecting each one of the pieces and color them and then you could print him right out just like this of course i'm not going to take the time to do all of that but yep you could put the name just like this and send that right to your printer oh okay okay but if you're making it for applique that you want to trace then most certainly i would probably separate the pieces just to make it yes yes and like the feet the feet are both the same so you really only need one and you don't have to take up all the space you just need one but you you're gonna make two of them same with the eyes you really only need one eye they're both the same but you could make two when you make your applique that's gonna save some space on your on your paper just like that right does that make sense how you could add your name and applique to it yes okay good all right i see thank you you're welcome all right everybody i'm going to go ahead and i'm going to stop the share i'm going to stop recording and then we'll say our goodbyes but i just want to thank everybody for joining my unofficial class on inkscape and we'll see you all next time bye everybody y'all say bye to the camera bye-bye camera hi everybody thank you

Channel: Lisa Capen Quilts

Views: 1,605

Keywords: inkscape tutorials for beginners, inkscape tutorials, inkscape svg tutorial, inkscape for beginners, inkscape vector tutorial, inkscape trace image, inkscape trace bitmap, lisa capen tutorials, lisa capen quilts, lisa capen inkscape

Id: ILa9l9zGPPM

Length: 74min 43sec (4483 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 07 2020