Inkscape Clipping and Masking | Inkscape 1.1

[Music] hello and welcome to another video on inkscape a free open source vector graphics editor to learn where you can download a copy and how to use it click on the link in the top right hand corner of the screen if you find this video helpful then help us by giving a like and subscribing to the channel remember to hit the bell icon so you're notified when we release new videos in this video i want to take a look at clipping and masking and how we can use it to create some nice effects a lot of people associate vector graphics with images like this one where it's just block colors to make up the image a lot of people don't realize that you can with a few simple techniques create images like this chili where we've got reflections shadows and it just generally looks all together more realistic so i'm going to show you in this video a few simple techniques you can use to to get your images to look more like this one so to get started i'm going to come up and grab the ellipse tool i'm going to drag out an ellipse i'm going to change that to green increase the opacity up to full i'm then going to go up to path object to path just to convert it to a path and not a predefined shape i'm then going to add a couple of extra nodes to add nodes you can just double click with your nodes tool where you want to position your nodes so we've got another two nodes there so i'm going to take this top node and i'm going to drag it up to give us a pear shape make it even and there we go a reasonable pear shape so what we want to do now is add some shadow um when you're drawing an image you want to think about where the light source is coming from so i'm going to put a highlight down this side and a shadow at the back so we've kind of got our light coming from the front and from the right hand side from that kind of direction so when we think about it we want shadow down the back here and we want to highlight down the front so we start with the shadow so we gotta go up and get our bezier tool because we're going to be using blurring to make it more graduated we want to make sure that our our shading object overlaps quite a way over the outside so that the blurring doesn't end up with this side of our shading being lightened so we're going to start just drawing around the outside we've got our shape so we want to do is color it in we use a dark green so we can select our dark green from the bottom and we want to get rid of the stroke so we're going to hold down shift and we're going to click on the x which will get rid of the stroke around the outside of our shape so this is our shading that we want to cut it out to the same shape as the pear we need a cookie cutter so what we're going to do is we're going to come up grab our selection tool we're going to come down select the pair and we're going to press ctrl d to duplicate it this duplicated shape is going to be our cookie cutter to cut out around the pear shape so if we have that selected press shift select our shading area and then we're going to go up to object down to clip and we're going to click on set and that gives us a nice clean cut edge at the moment we haven't got this nice graduated um shading but what we can actually do now is use blur so if we get blur and drag it over it only blurs the edge of our shaded shape so the piece that we've cut off is also blurred around the edge but the actual clipping clips a nice sharp edge to our shape so this gives this ability to have a nice crisp edge on one side and graduated um shading on the other so we can do the same again with highlights so we just come up get our there's the air tool we're just gonna draw out a rough highlight shape like so if we fill that in with white um hold down shift again and we get rid of any stroke we can go up to our nodes tool if we don't really like it we can adjust it slightly when we're happy with it we can add a little bit of blur what i'm going to do is i'm actually going to change it to a lighter green so i'm going to select the green from down here which is the same at the moment and then i'm going to come up to the fill and stroke box and i'm just going to drag down the lightness to make it lighter so there we have a pear shape drawn out it's not perfect but we've got a bit of shading down this side we've got a highlight on this side obviously the more time you take the better you can get it to look in some cases you may want to use this this technique for blurring but you won't want this sharp edge on the outside you might want that semi-blurred so you've just got a softer edge the only way i know of doing that is to use is to blur the layer that you've drawn it on so if we go up to layers i've got layers opened up here you can also open your layers dialog box from the top here so you click on that it'll bring it down into your dialog box section so i'm working on blank canvas at the moment so so what we can do is blur the whole of the layer so if you were doing this and you just wanted to blur a particular object you'd have to stick that object on a separate layer but as you can see now we're getting a soft edge on the outside of our pair like say because i've got everything on here on the same layer it's creating this blur effect on the arrow as well but if we click on our orange pepper chili pepper you can see that that's still nice and crisp so that's clipping actually while we're still on clipping let's just quickly show you what the other ones are the other things in the menu so we've got release so if we select our shading we go up to object down to clip and release and that takes them apart again so they both we've got our the shape that we used as our cookie cutter and we've got our blurred shading so if we with both of those still selected we go back up to object and now come down to clip set inverse what it's done we get hold of this and move it away it's actually cut out the pair from our blurred shape instead of cutting the blurred shape to the shape of the pair one other thing i just wanted to mention about clipping it also works with raster images so if we went up and imported an image just okay to all the settings so we have this image and we wanted to cut it out using clipping we can draw a shape over the top same as we would when we're making up our art we can go up oh hold on hold down shift hold down shift select the image as well so we've got the image and the clipping path selected then we can go up to object down to clip and set so we can cut out images the same way this is quite handy if you want to put it inside writing or inside and you know an image of something else so let's get back to our pair so the other thing i want to talk about is masking masking is very similar to clipping except we can use gradients to graduate um how much of the image shows so if we look at our our green chile here you can see that i've got this reflection underneath so i've used a mask here to cover up some of that chili we do a similar thing here going to group this lot together so we take all of our bits and bobs we come up to group then i'm going to press ctrl d to duplicate when i click on it i'm going to go over to our snapping menu on the right hand side i'm going to turn on snapping so we need to enable snapping to boundary boxes and i'm going to use snapping to boundary box edge midpoints and we need to make sure that our rotational centers down the bottom are enabled as well so i'm going to take the rotational sensor i'm just going to snap it to the bottom mid point of our boundary box i'm then going to use flip it vertically so we've got a reflected image down the bottom or what's going to be our reflected image then i want this to be graduated so it disappears the further away it comes to do this all i'm going to do is drag a box over the top return it to black now with masking the lighter it is the more visible the object is underneath so if we have black at the bottom and white at the top everything that's black will be completely hidden and disappear and everything that's white will be visible so we come over to fill and stroke we're going to change it to linear gradient so we've got a linear gradient now i'm going to drag the black stop down to the bottom and i'm going to take the transparent stop up to the top so i've i've found to get the best results i use black graduating to white fully opaque so for the time being we can leave it transparent at one end but what i will do is take the color and take it to white i'm going to move the bottom stop up so we lose some of that pair if we go to the top stop now we want this one to be fully opaque and white to turn that right up we're gonna get our selection tool we're just going to drop it down one so it's behind our pair if we click off so we'll select our pair we're keep it selected but we're just going to drop it down behind our masking path and holding down shift we can select our mask then we can go up to object down to mask set and as you can see we've got this nice graduated effect as it disappears the other thing you can do if you think this is this is too strong is you can use the opacity just to reduce it slightly so it looks more like a a subtle reflection the other thing i had in the image that we looked at at the beginning was i had some shadows just underneath our image so the way i created those was just take the ellipse the ellipse tool drag out an ellipse just to sit roughly where i want it we turn off snapping because it can be a pain when you don't want it on um we make our shadow black we can turn the opacity up for the time being so now we're going to blur it so we can come over to our blur put a bit of blur on that looks quite good so we need to raise our pair if we select our pair we'll take that to the top so if we come over take it to the top so the shadows behind it they can just leave it like that if you think it's too dark you can reduce it um quite often what gives a nice effect is if we keep that we're going to press ctrl d to duplicate it and then we're going to shrink it down so it's a smaller darker shape where it's making contact with the ground and then we can again we just raise our hair to the top so it's above it so that's how we can create more realistic looking images with reflections shadows shading looks like i made a little bit of a booboo down there somewhere i seem to have lightened up the bottom of my pair but you can sit there and work on your art until you've got it looking nice as with clipping when we're masking we have the same things that we can use so we've got we can set it set inverse and we can release it if you ever want to go in change something and then you can reset it afterwards so i hope that's been helpful i'd like to know whether or not you knew about these techniques before so yeah please leave me a comment below if you've got any questions again leave a comment below and i'll get back to you thanks very much for watching

Channel: Create For Free

Views: 2,766

Keywords: Inkscape clipping and masking, inkscape clipping mask, inkscape mask, inkscape clip, inkscape masking, inkscape tutorial, inkscape clipping tutorial, inkscape masking tutorial, inkscape, clipping, clip, group, vector design, tutorial, Inkscape 1.1, design, clipping mask, mask, vector, gradient, inkscape tutorial for beginners, learn, basics, how to, explained, free, software, graphics, inkscape tutorials for beginners, inkscape tutorial clip, inkscape tutorial vector, art, create for free

Id: TGbXWu2dd3w

Length: 14min 22sec (862 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 15 2021