Inkscape for Beginners: Simple Water Drop Icon

this is Nick with logos by Nick comm and in today's tutorial I'll be demonstrating how to create this simple water drop icon using Inkscape and at any point in this tutorial you could look down at the bottom left hand side of my screen to see which mouse clicks and keystrokes amusing so we'll minimize this and we'll get started here in Inkscape and by the way if you'd like to know how you can make Inkscape appear dark and with these custom icons I've designed I will have the link to that information in the description of the video so let's get started the first thing we're going to do is make sure that the view is set the custom and then we're going to zoom in at 1 to 1 and we'll open up our align and distribute menu make sure we have last selected chosen from the drop-down and then we'll open up our edit objects colors gradients and Stroke menu so the first thing we're going to do is create the shape of the drop right here and to do that we're actually going to draw a square so let's come over to the squares and rectangles tool and hold ctrl and shift in the keyboard and click and drag on the canvas to create a perfectly symmetrical square like that and I'm going to take the opacity of that and drop that in half and I'll go back to the Select tool and I'm going to click on this again so that the rotation handles come up and then I'll hold ctrl on the keyboard and just rotate this thing around until the corners are going vertically like that what we want to do now is we'll go to the edit path by nodes tool and we'll go to path object to path and then click and drag over these bottom nodes right here the bottom node and then the middle nodes right there we want those three nodes selected we turn that off and with those three nodes selected we're going to click on this button right here this is make selected nodes Auto smooth and it's going to make those nodes smooth and as you can see we kind of have the start of what's going to be the drops but we have to we have to alter this a little bit so let's click and drag over just these two icons here in the middle and with them both selected we could hold ctrl in the keyboard and click and drag them down about that much maybe to about there and then we'll come up here and turn on this button that says show transform transformation handles we'll turn that on and once we have our transformation handles they'll be these little arrows on the left and right I'm just going to hold ctrl and shift and grab this arrow right and scale this in until it's about I'd say about that with that's pretty good and then what we could do is click and drag over this bottom node right here to select that and we're going to click this button right here that says make select a node symmetric and we'll click on that and then hold ctrl and grab this handle and just pull this out a little bit just so that this the shape of this entire thing is nice and smooth and fluid like that and then we can go back to the Select tool and here we have the shape of our drop so let me click off of that to deselect everything just to make sure it looks good let me click on that again I'll go back to the edit pads by nodes tool now I'm just going to pull these two nodes down a little bit actually I'm going to turn off the transformation handles cuz I don't need those I'll just pull that down a little bit maybe pull that in a little more like that that's pretty good and you can play with it and adjust it to get it looking how you'd like but what we could do now is I'm actually going to make this thing a little bigger I'm going to hold ctrl and shift and scale this up like that and what I'll do now is I'll bring the opacity of this all the way up and I'll come over here to the color picker and I'm going to come over here to these blue shades pick on this I'm going to pick this a light blue shade right here that's 0 0 CC FF I'm going to make it that shade and under the fill tab and under the HSL tab on a come over to the H column and just slide this to the right a little bit just to make that a little more more sharper blue like that that's pretty good and then I'll right-click that and go to duplicate and then I'll make this that same shade we just previously use which is the 0 0 CC FF and I'm going to hold ctrl and shift in the keyboard and click and drag this arrow to scale this in just a little bit like that and then hold ctrl and take just this bottom right arrow this bottom arrow and bring this up a little bit like that and then what we could do is let me come back up here to the H column I'm going to slide that to the right just a little bit maybe that much just a touch and then I could right click that and go to duplicate and we'll make this the same shade we were previously using hold ctrl on the keyboard and click and drag this down to about here and then hold control again and take this arrow and bring that in a little bit like that and this one I'll make this I'll slide this to the right a little bit just to make that a little lighter like that and then I'll right-click that and go to duplicate hold control actually know what before we do that let's take this l column and slide that to the right a little bit make it a little lighter that's good then I'll hold ctrl and click and drag this one down about that much and then I'll hold ctrl again and take this one you bring that in just a little bit like that that's pretty good so the next thing we're going to do is create this little glare right here this white object so in order to do that let's click on this shape right here the second biggest one right click that go to duplicate and I'm going to make this one red and bring the opacity down in half just so I can see it just to offer some contrast to the rest of the graphic so I can get a better idea of what I'm looking at and I'll hold ctrl and shift and I'll scale this in a little bit like that and then I'll right-click that and go to duplicate I'll turn that green hold ctrl and just click and drag this up about that much and then hold shift and click on the red shape beneath it so we have them both selected it and go to path difference then we could turn that white bring the opacity all the way up and the next step would be creating this little glare right here and to do that I'm going to click on this smaller shape right here right click that go to duplicate I'll turn that red bring the opacity down about in half and hold ctrl and shift in the keyboard and just click and drag the scale it in just a little bit like that just put a little padding between that and the shape beneath it and then we could right click that and go to duplicate turn that green and then I'm going to hold ctrl and grab this top left arrow and just pull that out maybe about that much and that's pretty good right there and we get a hold shift click on the red shape beneath it and go to difference you could turn that white bring the opacity all the way up and the final step would be to put these three little ellipses right here to represent like a glare of light so we'll come over to the circles and ellipses tool and I'm going to click and drag to create an ellipse like that maybe about that size and once we've created that we can go to the Select tool put this right here right click that go to duplicate hold ctrl and click and drag it up like that and then hold ctrl and grab this top arrow and just scale that down so it's a little bit smaller than the other one and then we'll right-click that and go to duplicate hold control bring this up here and then hold ctrl and grab this top arrow and scale that down a little more then we can hold shift and click on all three of those ellipses right there and we're come down here the distribute panel and make sure that they are spaced out evenly so we're going to click the button that says make vertical gaps between objects equal then we can group it together with the group button up here and then click on it again to get this the rotation handles and hold ctrl on the keyboard and just click and drag it around one step like that then we can put this up here right about there and then we can click off with the deselect everything and that's it we're pretty much done we've now created our very simple water drop graphic using Inkscape so if you have any questions let me know and as always thank you for watching

Channel: Logos By Nick

Views: 37,407

Keywords: inkscape, learn inkscape, inkscape tutorial, inkscape logo, inkscape logo design tutorial, inkscape for beginners

Id: dGi1FO_hBmw

Length: 8min 18sec (498 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 12 2016