Inkscape Dispersion Effect Tutorial: Easy Masking + Clone Trace Spray Tool Method

I'm Rick Johansen and this is iron Echo design today's inkscape tutorial I want to show you how we can make this dispersion effect where we take a source image and break it up into lots of little pieces it's done with a spray can tool and some simple masking techniques and I also want to show you some hidden features with the sculpt tool that lets you move things around interesting ways almost at will this video is sponsored by our very first sponsor of Southern New Hampshire University so thank you snhu and thanks to everybody who's been commenting watching these videos and let's do this one I went with a leaf for the subject of this project I just dragged it in this is a source image from pexels.com I'll have the details in the description if you want this exact photo let's set our scale so we're all working in the same size ratio up here you see this wrench with the paper that is document Properties or you can go to file document properties I'm on the A4 template which is 210 millimeters by 297 millimeters and if I zoom zoom out I can actually cheat on the zoom if I select this magnifying glass with a dashed box it will scale it to whatever the selection is and there is the A4 template we're going to be using a combination of Clone tracing with the spray can tool so a large image doesn't actually hurt us as badly as it normally would if you're going to follow along size it roughly so you have your A4 template and the leaf is about like that my normal go-to if I want to extract a vector out of a photo is Trace bitmap and you can do that but there's an even quicker way with the paint bucket tool click on paint bucket by Nature Paint Bucket will adopt the fill and stroke color of the last thing you did I forget what I did so I'll choose rectangle and draw something I don't want the stroke so I'll hit shift and the Little Red X on the far left on the color ribbon and that will eliminate the stroke now Paint Bucket will dump this color and we're going to tell it to select the saturation of this image fill by sash duration threshold will say 45 and grow shrink let's shrink it by negative 2.0 the reason for that is I see this see this white pixelation I don't want to collect that I only want the beautiful Orange Leaf we've got the settings down let's do it Paint Bucket I'll click once somewhere on the orange and there it is made a vector shape put this one aside for now Ctrl D will duplicate it and the spray can tool is going to spray whatever you have selected right now if I double click I'll see the nodes that's a lot of nodes the more nodes you have the more spray can needs to think so let's go to path simplify to see how the nodes reduced by quite a bit try it one more time path simplify even less this first one I'm going to keep pure with all the nodes because it's going to become a mask later on I'll hold Ctrl to keep the ratio locked in and we'll shrink this one down to be our Vector object right about there here is how spray can tool works at the most basic level right down here spray tool you've got different modes the first mode is spray copies of the initial selection I've got that little leaf selected don't worry about these controls right now hold down left Mouse button and you spray it out or you could spray clones which is the next mode I still have this original Leaf selected now when I spray it out it looks the same except if I change the color or the size or anything of the original all the Clones change now let's go one step deeper and add a tracing feature to the tool I'll go back to the first mode spray copies for width I have it one amount 30. that's how many copies get sprayed out when you click it isn't actually accurate to that number I think the more nodes the initial selection has the harder it is to spray but 30 is fine rotation 50 that'll vary how much it rotates scale 30 maybe 25. scatter one Focus one you want to have both of these eyes selected so if it's toggled off make sure they're both toggled on and here at the end the eyedropper pick color from the drawing choose that and now you see the first one apply the picked color to the fill first I'll show you a quick example then we'll do it for the actual project wherever I click it's going to create a copy of that leaf and it will be the color of whatever's underneath it see my leaves and to show you what we just did drag this out of the way there are the leaves so how do you get rid of the background part that's easy duplicate our original leaf with all the nodes put it wherever you want I'll make it green only out of habit because it denotes a clipping object now I can reduce the transparency to see exactly what I have selected here green object selected hold shift to get the picture object clip set all right let's do it for real this time here is our red original leaf Zoom to selection and we'll add one more control to the spray tool mode spray copies with one amount 30 rotation 50 scale 25 scatter one Focus one this time on the second eyeball apply over transparent areas deselect that and you see this group of rectangles click on that that is the offset if you want to prevent clumping you can add the offset 100 means it won't Clump at all which is a little too aggressive we'll do 25 percent enter click and hold and you'll see your leaves come out if you try to spray out here nothing happens that's what the closed eyeball designates it's not going to spray in a transparent area and now you can have at it just spray as much as you want experiment maybe spray out 50 see if it comes out a little bit faster it's come up in the comments a couple times people asked did I go to school for graphic design and kind of I went to school for architecture and design but it was so long ago we didn't have a lot of compute power we had AutoCAD but you had to like log in to get computer lab time but that's not the case now at places like Southern New Hampshire University this video is sponsored by our very first sponsor Southern New Hampshire University where they have a Graphic Design program where I can tell you they do not limit the amount of time you can spend on your computer they actually feature over 200 degree programs that can help you get started in a career that you're going to love I think YouTube's a great place to start because you can do tutorials like this to get your feet wet but if you want a deeper dive like with snhu's graphic design degree you can learn not only design but also how to be a professional they even have concentrations in some things that we've never done on this channel like 3D modeling or if you want to be your own agency you can get into web design on top of all this graphic design they have programs that are extremely flexible there's no set class times you can work where you want when you want if you already have college credits you don't have to start over snhu will let you transfer up to 90 credits and up to 12 if you want to go get them Masters so if you're watching these videos after work and you hate your nine to five you can consider switching careers go to snhu.edu iron Echo to learn more thank you Southern New Hampshire University for the sponsorship and let's see what our sprayed leaves are looking like look at that nice and even if you want the dispersion to be spaced out this is the 25 offset if the look that you're going for is no overlap you want to be in 100 offset I actually don't mind too much overlap but I also like to cheat so I'm going to grab all of these and do control D which will duplicate them but you say where are they they're buried underneath but if I select them again when I go to the sculpt tool the settings I have right here is 25 with Force 40. go over here to this one move objects in random directions watch what this does it just look at that it's like the wind if you do it too much you can always do control Z to bring it back let's try it again there we go before we go too crazy with the sculpting let me do the mask now because I have to get rid of this half or this third the simplest way to explain how a mask works is whatever you have set to White it's going to take that so whatever is under the white gets taken here's my random rectangle hold shift I've got the leaf object mask set mask it only takes whatever is white and it's non-destructive which means if you didn't do it right like I don't want that rectangle I don't want that I can go back to object mask release mask there it is what I want is a jagged portion here that reflects exactly these leaves are going to be coming out so I'll select these leaves right here Ctrl D set them all to Green because we're just going to use them temporarily as we clip things out here I'll bring over our rectangle cover all the stuff we want to take minus this profile of leaves gather all your leaves up path union now it's all One path because path functions only work on paths remember that where do we want this maybe here I definitely don't like this hard line here if you don't want to spray clones you could take one of the originals and if you hit space bar it will stamp it out I'm adding more to break up that hard vertical line now I have to make that red line of leaves part of the original Green Path if I hold shift it lets me make a bounding box over those items it's either all selected there but now I have to do path Union I have the white box hold shift I have the path of Green Path difference now my mask will only take what's white the mask is selected hold shift I've got the leaf object mask set mask there we go let's put these two together and I want to show you some more of the scope settings because I think it's an unsung tool let me zoom in look how nicely this fits right in there look at that here's the first relevant scope setting that will work I want this to get smaller I can hold shift and control and reduce it manually but there's a faster way let's select these go to the scope tool for mode the fourth one over shrink objects click that I need my circle larger make that 50. now when I click see that it just scales it down if you hold shift it will enlarge so shift enlarge no shift it will shrink it won't work if you don't have it selected see how I'm over this one I'm clicking nothing's happening I think it's good fail safe the scope tool will only work on the stuff that's been selected I'll make a bounding box over these back to sculpt shrink those a little bit I cheated again I brought in a backdrop so there's more contrast than the gray desk here don't need the original the amount that you explode out the leaves is all by choice and you can control which of the leaves will actually be affected by sculpt by what you select I've got this Bunch right here let's duplicate that again go back to sculpt random whoa we don't need a 50 width we'll change it back to 30 with yeah there we go that just moves in random directions you have other options we'll go to this one move objects towards cursor the intensity of the effect is based on Force so Force 40 is fine a little bit more forgiving if I click up here it's like they're getting vacuumed up what if I click right in the center they all go into the center why don't we go to a huge width 50 and we'll do the first mode move objects in any direction let's see what happens if I just click and drag the whole thing this is the leaf pile I'm taking sculpt any Direction with a force of 40. there we go I like the randomness of it change it to 30. let's take just this part getting carried away if you're going for precision you can actually go back and take them one by one and put them wherever you envision them to be laid out best I need to bring these back in a bit move towards cursor suck these in suck them back in what if we do it all oh this is the example from the very intro if I old shift it explodes out a very organic feel to a software program and you want to put a stem on that you might as well grab your draw calligraphic brush Strokes like that black and that'll do it for today thank you very much for our first sponsor Southern New Hampshire University thanks to everyone who watches who comments let me know what you think you want to try this out in a different application let me know and see

Channel: IronEcho Design

Views: 19,757

Keywords: Rick Johanson, IronEcho, Inkscape, Dispersion, Leaf, Graphic Design, Effect, Tutorial, Iron Echo

Id: xCQ6TFgTTAY

Length: 12min 53sec (773 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 29 2022