Inkscape for absolute beginners

doing everybody right okay you wonderful enthusiastic people it is my honor and my privilege this afternoon to introduce you Donna Benjamin who's going to teach us very very newbies especially what all we need to know about inscape please make her feel welcome [Applause] hello have I just um yeah I've just turned it on hopefully it's all good how is everyone part only the air-conditioning we've just pressed the button and hopefully it will kick in soon and it will chill a little in here how's your conference going what this is the theme okay so welcome to Inkscape for absolute beginners hands up if you are an Inkscape total newbie totally newbie probably about half of you maybe a bit more than half you hands up if you are a closet Inkscape developer like in my first tutorial not abuse you okay good that's that's good that's good but you're not you're not John Kruse no okay yeah yeah just checking just checking on in okay very good so okay hands up who are who of you are quite familiar with Inkscape and use it regularly one to any and all case maybe just a little bit down from there you wouldn't you you've got your imposter syndrome in the way but you do know what Inkscape is and you've used it yeah okay few more of you okay so those of you who are more familiar than our absolute newbies I don't actually like your help because I want us to be I want this to be a learning kind of environment where we're are where we get to talk to each other and we're collaborative and so if someone on your tab or please come on in please come on in and if you--if you're able to help out your your fellows your fellow learner who is a bit stuck then then then please then please do so on the other hand if you're completely new and one of those experts starts bossing you around tell them to back off if that you know just BR be gentle with each other but also own your own learning is that is that okay for some ground rules yeah okay so I don't have slides I have Inkscape up in its most bare basic form I've turned off all of the tools and commands and windows and widgets and things I'm going to turn them back on one by one and discuss and talk about what they are I'm also going to do something a bit new how's that have you actually been to one of my tutorials before I think there are a couple of familiar faces okay cool so this I haven't done so it's a bit of an experiment so go easy on me we'll see how it goes you may have noticed that on the table is this crazy stuff called paper and a pen yeah and now I I didn't I only got 20 pens so hoping that only some people would have additional pens but there should be enough paper to go around yes yeah unfortunately I don't think it came with the USB port my good one there's a couple of extra pens over here I'm gonna go over and grab so what I actually wanted you to do is to sort of think about what you're seeing on the screen right now which is a big blank piece of paper effectively it's the canvas and the page so outside the the the a4 lines see when anyone else need these two pins please don't ya don't sit there trance it over there very good anyone need pens I just stole the pins from how about I give them back to you this table because I just stole them from that yeah very welcome there you go okay so blank blank sheet of paper both metaphorically on the screen and actually on your desk what I want you to do is grab a piece of paper and a pen and drill a house I am NOT expecting Leonardo da Vinci architectural drawings I am not expecting anything much but a house should be something all of us I hope can conceptualize and draw to some extent I just won't just draw a house yeah I don't know how great a video this is going to be for you guys at home but by all means stick with it maybe you can speed it up and put it on fast-forward and see when interesting things happen how's the house drawing going it's very seeing concentration I write and and drawing things happening so this is good do I have some examples ready to ready to share they're awesome thank you very much rusty anyone else finished and up in the air we finished or hands up if you want a little bit more time a bit more time some architectural drawings going on over here you need your other glasses okay great so as as as people are finishing off have a little bit think about what you've drawn what shapes did you draw what elements did you put on in your house breaking it down look at it a little bit critically sort of now you've been lately have been the artist now be the the critic or the editor of that work think about the components that went into your drawing so one of the things about Inkscape is it is an illustration tool it is a tool for drawing sadly I cannot teach you how to draw I wish I could and there are people who can and you can definitely learn how to do it but that's not one of my secret super powers to help unleash that in you but hopefully I can help you discover the tools and techniques of Inkscape itself to facilitate your own graphical explorations but I'm not gonna turn you into Leonardo DaVinci I'm sorry oh there's been some additions to this I can't like you couldn't be proud of it rusty Russell has self assist D plus stick to programming I think that's an excellent house rusty I think you're being very hard on yourself yeah well I would I would expect that Arabella Shh we don't tell him all right okay so has everyone now finished their house yep okay great so now what I'm going to do ah sorry an important question does everyone actually have Inkscape installed on a device okay and is it open and ready to play okay great so the very blank canvas you can see on the screens in front of you not me I'm going to start to reveal toolbars and what-have-yous toolbars and widgets so I have brought a mouse who did anyone bring a mouse some people brought a mouse there is a spare pointing device of some sort there it will be easier if you have a pointing device but if you just have your trackpad or whatever your pointer is making do sorry this is the blank card I'm going to the View menu and I am going to turn on go to show/hide I'm going to turn on the tool the tool box oops that wasn't the toolbox but anyway try that again toolbox so now I have down the left hand side of the page the toolbox now because of the vagaries of projectors and screens some of my tools are hiding underneath this little arrow so gradient dropper and connector for me are hiding yours may already yours may be visible if you're doing this on your phone Paul I'm going to be very empowered so depending on your screen resolution usually when I'm not projecting I've got access to those what I accidentally turned on before were the tool controls that's up here and they change depending on which tool have selected and that's one of those aha moments for Inkscape when you select a tool you can do different things with it and so that that bar at the top we're just going to turn it off again and Bree there we go tool controls bar so on the left here I have my my tools does everyone can see their own tools yep this is one of the things if you've played with your Inkscape at all it may be set up slightly differently because it's quite configurable and I will confess I've forgotten how it comes exactly out of the box so sorry about that so tools and then I'm gonna turn back on the tool controls bar so this top one is the pointer this is the node tool this is the tweak tool I'm yet you know zoom in or out what might that be it's the magnifying tool huzzah next we have the measurement tool then we have one of my favorites create rectangles and squares f-for create 3d boxes probably one of my least favorite tools I will confess create circles also accessed via f5 and this is absolutely hands-down my favorite tool create stars and polygons and if I get a little bit lost in stars and polygons land a little later on please bring me back down to earth then we have the spirals tool and then the next three are all for drawing lines of different sorts so we have the pencil freehand lines the pen tool for Bezier curves and straight lines the calligraphic or brush strokes tool just lovely the text tool because quite often you do want text in your images the spray objects by sculpting or painting tool arrays existing paths phil bounded areas and then secret my secret squirrel ones they're not secret for you I'm sure gradient dropper and connector now enough noise from me let's get over to doing by you I would like you to build some basic basic skills now I want you to draw a square but I'm going to ask you to draw five squares in five different ways with different tools you can help each other here you can discover this together but a square there's one that's really obvious and I'll just I'll demonstrate that one first but feel free to go and explore while I draw five squares with five different tools okay so number one guess the square tool very good and this is simply click and drag now depending on the clicking and the dragging I can do whatever I like now if I if I actually use some modifying keys like for instance the control key I constrain the proportions I'm getting a perfect square but if I tug at that a little bit I get a golden ratio 2 2 1 3 2 1 and it just which is quite cool that's using the control key and also this way too if I let go of the control key I'm like whatever awesomesauce ok now that I also have this crazy rectangle and I've released the mouse I've got a little square at the top left and a little square at the bottom right and a circle in the top right now I'm going to click on that circle and it's just going a little red which means I'm on target and I can round my corners with Christ you betcha all right and now the other to the other to allow you to basically just make adjustments on the you know the size there this is one of those ones we're doing is easier than saying words about what it is and so Nick's here to tell me that the accessibility the alt tag thought I'm doing right now I have no idea how you no idea all right so I'm just going to delete that because I've gone completely out of bounds I'm going to my view menu and I'm going to zoom back to fit my page on my screen and I'm going to draw another square using the ctrl key like so square one so far so good has everyone successfully created a square with the square tool yes does anyone still need more time we're doing this together people we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna stay together on this yes okay so how are we going to create our second square like object now we yes a really really thin cube I just don't want to use the cube tool just yet all right well that's gonna be six then six sorry pencil tool yes polygon tool yes indeed that's a polygon tool so that's that was where I was going next so we're going to go to our star oh sorry Paul we could copy and paste one also it's an f7 we've got now seven squares I hadn't even thought of that we can take the text shown use a simple song awesome alright so just to bring it back into now okay so polygons they're just shapes so I'm going to the star and polygon tool and selecting that and if I just click and drag I get a five pointed star that's not what I want though right so I'm going to turn that from a star into a polygon up here click and change the corners from a five to four now the thing about so why would you use a squid why would you bother having a whole square tool if you can just create a Politan like a four-sided polygon well they have different kind of magical properties like you saw the corners and the rounded corners right well now this is where I might need to be talked down if I got a little bit crazy here again those modifying tools so bottom right for me there's a little square and that's my indicator that magic can happen right and now if I use the control key it doesn't go round and round in circles but if I shift to the shift key this is where I get lost and mesmerised fortunately I've only got four corners and I'm not going to get too lost so I back and back surround out come back back alright so that is your polygon tool and I'm gonna re select that and I'm just gonna use this little brush over here on the right to remove all of my crazy manipulations there and set it back to four and polygons do I are you like me do I need to let you play with that for a little bit okay Oh colors so that's working ahead but if you want to jump to play with colors at the very bottom of your screen there's a color palette and if you've got any object selected and you click a color that changes the color there's also the gradient tool is worth playing with Emily oh one more thing Oh Robin yes where did the brush come from excellent question alright so currently I'm selected with the put with the pointer tool and not the actual polygon tool so once that's selected then the tool controls for that tool become apparent and there's your brush no not for you please hold while I attend to your peculiarities let's see yep okay so I select a slight variation on Robins on Robins Inkscape her icon is not a brush but a little kind of backwards undo type button icon just if that's for you and you're wondering where your brush was thanks Robin that's a good good to know I wouldn't have I didn't know about that so that's good reset and shape parameters does it say the same thing yes use Inkscape preferences tools to change defaults now one more thing about both of these I'm gonna switch back from the the polygon tool to the pointer tool and when I select either of these first off you'll see please note carefully the direction of the arrows so see how they're all kind of pointing outwards right now yes if I click again by now kind of pointing round and this means I can rotate and you'll see that there is a crosshair in the middle of my square I can click on that crosshair and drag it to the corner and that becomes my axis of rotation yeah how did I get into rotation mode again who else needs to know always Paul the only one not listening you click on it and you click on it again that's right so you just toggle between rotate and not rotate so the arrows are pointing outwards it's not rotate click again and the arrows come all sort of rounded corners and then you can go around in circles yes yes bonus points you can also skill it by using the arrows on the side like so and it's cues on the center axis as well so just have a little play because these are shapes now it's we're not we're not creating a square right now but just so sort of complete the set feel free to create a circle if you want as well oh wait one question at a time yes distorting our cloverleaf so that's on the polygon tool who else can remember how I did look sort of kaleidoscopic effect can you remember which modifier key if you're dragging them in the right direction so it's shift shift will on the where's my thing tall engaged right so you have to have the polygon tool engaged and I do because you can tell this little star on my pointer and then I'm looking for the control point which is the little square at the bottom there and I click on that with this mouse I'm still getting used to and I can rotate it now if I hold down the shift key I can get that wacky wacky fun times effect yep all right [Music] what was the other there was another question that I had in my head all right so it's quickly on circles even though we're drawing squares because the important point with these shapes or primitives is that they have these control the these properties I guess that you can you can play with so it's with the circle or ellipse tool again control will constrain it to make it a circle again you get control points so the two squares at the top and the left hand side will affect the the size and shape but this little circle has some magic properties too and if you drag that with your pointer outside the circle you get a pac-man and if you drag continuing to drag but are inside the circle you get a slice off so pie or a slice off it like so and again your control key will constrain things slightly shift doesn't really do much magic when it comes to the circle which is why I don't love it as much as I love the star and polygon tool to be honest I am judgmental about my Inkscape tools all right so I'm going to get rid of the circle because I'm talking about squares and I'm going to set my fancy clover back to being a square five to four and polygon it's a little bit it's a little bit skewer so I might just try and straighten it up again a little oh hello maybe not maybe I'll just do a new one that's better all right so that's one and two now three we're going to move on to freehand and just draw a square just grabbing your pencil tool it's just like bang right that's not very square I can also click click actually sorry click with the pencil tool double click double click double click and then back to my starting point click and that's the freehand tool it's probably a little bit easier with the pen tool to draw Bezier curves and straight lines now if I hold down control again our friend for constraining things click and holding down control click click click well I didn't really kind of get that lined up very well did I and then double click to end it so there's a straight line I'm gonna get rid off now why why might we choose one or the other of those they're kind of getting a pretty similar result right can anyone want to want to pose some thoughts about why you might choose one or another of those so you can mess with it after you've drawn it yep anyone else yes because because I get paid by the hour for my tutorials this is LCA rusty what do you reckon any other thoughts why would you choose one of these methods over over and over there's no like honestly there's no right or wrong answers here why I'm asking you you to sort of pose this is because you can do it in so many different ways it's worth thinking about the the properties that you get from one method over another yes Emily excellent depending on how they're stored they might create a smaller SVG file less nodes and I'm going to demonstrate that right now so I'm switching to the node tool which is if - if you want to keyboard command I'm just going to hover over each of these squares right now so this was our original square and if I select it with the node tool I get my my square controls if I double click it I'm telling you lives so I'm not going to do that again and then I've switched to the polygon tool and get my controls now if I switch to the Bezier I've got the five control points that I set and the freehand I also have I only have four but if I was to do the freehand perhaps a little more roughly perhaps some kind of like that I'll probably have a whole bunch more see that because there's a lot more information in that script in there scribble than in this scribble so you're all being a technical term of course okay so that's the four obvious ones I actually came up with a fifth idea for creating a square and I'm going to use I'm gonna zoom in now on my free hand clothes tool here if I can remember how here we go zoom selection so I've zoomed right in and this is the scalable part of scalable vector graphics it doesn't matter how much we zoom that's going to be nice and crisp I'm going to activate the palette which is colors they've just appear at the bottom of my screen and I'm going to activate my scroll bars and he'll why I'm there my rulers and my snap controls and most importantly my commands bar which has got a whole bunch of extra things for me so now I'm going to zoom back in on that selection and I'm going to activate my palette my color II things where do they go lost them that's not what I wanted not them there we go fill and Stroke so what I actually want to do is make the stroke bigger and in this case stroke style I'm going to increase the width to let's go five pixels great and now I'm going to select down here hiding for me but probably accessible to you is the Paint Bucket and I have now got a paint bucket tool and I'm going to click and I have filled that space with color but that has created a new object and here's my fifth square okay now there are a couple of really clever suggestions by other people one was to use text and find font that has squares in it which is great and there was another one which I I'm forgetting was it you told me is another serious cube so the cube this is the cube tool and I'm going to just do one but I've never found a particularly great use for it but it by all means it's there and play with it but I didn't want to go into it in an absolute beginners thing there's some where's Allen is here so there's you know parameters and stuff that you might want to play with if you are doing scientific data and you are trying to represent volume and all sorts of cool and funky stuff but I've never gone there so I'm just going to plead that this is a beginner session and cube is an advanced tool yes I am yeah you can write yes Emily wait say that again great suggestion okay see yes okay so let's have a play with making oh I'm just gonna by the way I'm using and this is why Mouse's are great for this I've done a middle click and I'm dragging my page down but I got that on my scrolling wheel and I've got no idea how I would do that on the touchpad on my laptop so I'm going to create a line start here control and double click to end it and I'm gonna make it a little wider let's go with say 10 pixels so it's a bit easier to grab and see right now I've selected that I'm going to the node tool again and I'm going to click on convert selected objects stroke to paths and all of a sudden it has control points so I'm going to zoom in on that magnifying tool click and drag around it it's way bigger now back to my node tool and you can just see the nodes hopefully and I'm selecting those two and I'm holding down control and I'm going to make a rough Square and zoom it's not quite square a little bit there so now if I do you actually want to make that actually square so the dimensions were the same how would I do that so I'm gonna shift from the node tool that I have here to the select the first one f1 and now I've actually got the ability to say okay so it should be 250 wide by 250 high done we have a square haha [Applause] magic okay so I've done a fair bit of talking just now what I want to do is let let you just have a little bit of quiet playtime with the various tools I've used a square because it is a fundamentally kind of familiar shape but feel free to go crazy now go play with the polygon tool and and experience the wonder and all that that it is and and just sort of see what you what you know the properties of them get a feel for it how many people had some kind of square object in the house that they drew with a pen and paper or rectangular at least right no rusty yet I examined his work it was excellent so there is one more draw line based tool that we haven't really played with and it sort of has properties that Emily's great suggestion kind of led me to demonstrate so I'm just going to quickly play with that this is the calligraphy tool again one of my favorites it's just beautiful if I just do a quick line for that and have a look at the node tool you see it automatically creates a shape it's a very special sort of line whereas the other two create a single a single path the calligraphy tool actually creates a whole connected path whoops I've gotten myself tangled up there we go so feel free to have a play with the calligraphy to a while you're at it yes yep ah very good very good so what I did with that this object here aliens asked so how did I get the two nodes to be able to drag it down and I may have gone over that a little bit too quickly so I'm gonna do it again so I used what we call the rubber band effect so I've created that line I want to make it bigger and stuff again actually I can probably draw this one so back to the node tool and so you can select one at a time right or you can select one and ctrl click to select and I'm not control undo shift to select to a time but you can also do this iron if you just watch I'm clicking up here in the space on the node tool and I can rubber band around a couple and that's what I did and I can rubber band around these two and that then means I can select multiple ones so shift-click to multiple select or rubber band yes Emily yes yep yep yeah excellent question so let me play and say with this one because I've got lots of curves on here I'm going to zoom in on this selected object and Emily's asked is there a way to select lots of points along rather than than one by one so this is a bit of an annoyance of my setup the Alt key is meant to let you draw a line through things to select them however Ubuntu and whatever window thinking I'm operating god rest at soul won't let me do that it does that instead and I haven't I have I have done searching and my Google food has failed me to figure out how to undo this but if you are not so constrained as I if you hold down the Alt key and you click and drag with the selection tool this one you should you should be able to draw a line which then lets you select through all sorts of random things in whatever order you want yes Robin I feel like at Linux confer you I should be able to get this solved but I'll just zoom it's working for you thank you for your very constructive contribution there well it works it works in in Arch Linux as well awesome so there is hope for me I will be able to get this solved this is awesome so um yes so does that sort of Emily did that are you so constrained or yes hold alt and then click-and-drag let me come over and I have a little have a little play excuse me hang on one sheep let's see

Channel: LinuxConfAu 2018 - Sydney, Australia

Views: 31,153

Rating: 4.5048862 out of 5

Keywords: lca, lca2018, #linux.conf.au#linux#foss#opensource, DonnaBenjamin

Id: IcRwXTo2L-U

Length: 38min 49sec (2329 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 20 2018