Inkscape for Beginners: Vector Abstract Background Tutorial

[Music] yes mrs. Nick with logos slide mix calm and in today's tutorial I'll be demonstrating how you can create this vectorized abstract background using Inkscape and this will be similar to the other tutorial I made about creating a low poly portrait but the only difference is we're going to be using a different method of creating this effect and we're also going to be using mesh gradients for the first time as well so let's go ahead and get started here in Inkscape by the way if you'd like to make Inkscape appear darken with these customized icons I will have a link to that information in the description of the video so let's go ahead and set up the document I'll go to file document properties and I just want to set the display units to px and I want to turn off the show page border and that we can close out of that and we'll go to view make sure you have custom selected and then we'll zoom in at 1 to 1 and then we'll open up the align and distribute menu with this button here and we'll want less selected chosen from that drop-down and then we'll open up the Edit objects colors gradients and Stroke menu with that button there and the first thing we're going to do is create a rectangle so let's grab the squares rectangles tool and click and drag to create a rectangle so something like that and let's go to the Select tool and we want to make this the size of whatever you want your background to be so in my instance I'm not actually using this for a background I just use this as a thumbnail for the video so the size I used was 1280 by 720 so if you're using this for something like a website you want to make it you know 1920 or something like that go right ahead so I'm going to set the width here to just 1280 then I'll hit tab on the keyboard to skip over to the height and set that at 720 hit enter and let me convert this to a path of it a path object to path and now we want to add a gradient onto here but not the typical linear gradient or the radial gradient you want to use a mesh gradient so I'm going to go ahead and click on the box that says mesh gradient and this will not work unless you're using the latest version of Inkscape version 92 so just make sure you you're upgraded to the latest version of Inkscape otherwise you won't be able to you mesh Grady's following along with this tutorial so I'll go ahead and click mesh gradient and that's going to put give us a a different sort of gradient as opposed to like a linear where it goes from left to right or radial where it goes in a circle or an ellipse going outward mesh gradients gives you four different corners to work with here and if you go to the mesh tool which is right here create net it meshes you're going to notice we got four different nodes here at the corner so I'm going to click on this node right here and highlight that and I'm going to put a different color at each corner so if you see here I used red light blue a tannish cream color and a dark blue so I'll start out over here I'll make this a shade of red something like that then I'll click on this node down here I'll make that a light blue maybe something like this over here and I'll click on that node I'll make that a like a tannish cream sort of color maybe something like that maybe something a little lighter maybe maybe I'll start with yellow and I'll lighten it up a bit then I'll take the s row and slide this to the left and I'm using the HSL tab here for this under the fill tab there's different settings get RGB HSL I like to use HSL so I'll use something like that and then I'll click this one up here and I'll change this to like a dark blue like a like a navy a deep navy blue maybe something like that and I'd say that looks pretty good so what I'm going to do now is let's go back to the Select tool and let's open up the layers menu now click on this button up here that says view layers the keyboard shortcut shift ctrl L and I'm going to click this button up here that says create a new layer and position it above the current layer name just leave it as layer two it doesn't matter what the name is go ahead and click OK and in this new layer I'm going to create a circle so let's come over to the circles ellipses tool and hold ctrl and shift and click and drag to create a perfectly round circle like that and I'll convert that to a path by going to path object of path and I'll go back to the Select tool and I want to make this a color like green something like some that step isn't being used here so there isn't really green being used here so I'm going to change this to green and I'll bring the opacity of this down a little bit let me go back to the fill and Stroke menu bring the opacity down a bit and then click back on the layers menu and I'm going to take this and put this in the top left corner over here so I'm going to hold shift and click on the rectangle so we have them both selected and I'm going to click the button that says align top edges and align left edges so we have it stacked up in the top left corner over there and then we can click off of the graphic deselect everything and now I want to take a duplicate copy of this green circle and put it in this corner so click on that hit control D to duplicate it hold shift click on the rectangle send not Center it align the right sides and we want to create we want to create duplicates to these two green circles and put them down here now so let's click and drag over both of those hit ctrl D to duplicate hold shift click on the rectangle and align the bottom edges like that go ahead and click off the deselect everything and now I want to take this circle down here on the bottom and hit control D to duplicate it and then I'll hold ctrl on the keyboard and just click and drag it up and down like that so it locks it on to the vertical axis and I want to create a quick little copies by pressing down the spacebar that's going to create a copy so go ahead and press the spacebar and create a few copies like that oops put that one right there and then I'll just click and drag over these Center ones here and I'll just duplicate them by hitting ctrl D hold shift click on the the rectangle align the left edges to put them over there so we have them on that side click off of that deselect everything and I'll take this circle here I'll duplicate that as well ctrl D I'll just hold ctrl move this over pressing the spacebar to create copies like that and these do not have to be evenly spaced out apart in fact it's better if they're not evenly spaced because we want a really whimsical uneven look to this effect right here so it's facing these giving these like uneven spacing between them is pretty good like you notice it's a bigger gap here than there is here which is we want something like that so again let's click and drag over these copies here in the middle excluding the ends on the left and right and I'll duplicate them by hitting ctrl D then I'll hold shift click on the rectangle and align the bottom edges click off it to deselect everything and let's grab this circle here let's duplicate that by hitting ctrl D and I'm just going to move this around inside the rectangle pressing the spacebar to create a bunch of different copies like that and again we don't want it to be evenly spaced out we wanted to be very random and sporadic like that and that's pretty good right there so what I'm going to do now is where it says layer 1 I'm going to click this lock icon so that we can't select anything on that layer and what I'll do now is I'll click and drag over everything which should only grab the circles because we have layer 1 locked and I'll go to extensions generate from path of Verona I don't know to pronounce that for annoy diagram we'll click on that the type of diagram we want I Galan a triangulation whatever that one is called select that one automatic from selected objects default stroke go ahead and click apply and close out of that and you'll see it created a whole bunch of different connecting strokes going to each circle so what I'm going to do now is click and drag over everything and I'm going to hold shift and click on one of those black lines to deselect that objects so we only have the green circle selected and then we can press Delete on the keyboard to get rid of those circles and what I'm going to do now is I'll click on the little wireframe right here and I'll ungroup that by clicking the button that says ungroup selected objects and click off that to deselect everything and what that did was it broke everything up into individual little pieces like that which we're going to need so again what we're going to do now just like we did in the low-poly portrait tutorial we're just going to go and color in each individual shape with the color beneath it so let me zoom in on this by holding ctrl and rolling up the mouse wheel and I'll click on this shape up here and I'll grab the dropper tool and I'll just grab a sample of that color right there and that should color it in with that fill and if we turn off the visibility of layer one you'll see we filled it in with that color so what we're going to do now is go and do that to each and every individual shape so I'll just click on that and for this instead of going back and forth to the toolbar I'm going to use the keyboard shortcut for that for the dropper which is f7 I'll just select that and I'll go back to the Select tool instead of using the toolbar I'll use the keyboard shortcut which is f1 and I'll just go in color in each of these with the corresponding color beneath it in the gradient so I'll just go through this and do everything and if you're wondering if you missed an object sometimes it happens sometimes we'll go through this whole thing and you realize that you missed one you could just go ahead and turn off the visibility of layer one and you'll see exactly what's what's filled in and what's not so I'm going to go ahead and fill in the rest of this I'll speed up the video so you don't have to watch me doing this whole thing and then we'll continue on so speak with you in shortly okay so as you can see from toggling off the the layer one you can see I have everything filled in so what I'm going to do now is I'm just going to turn off layer 1 permanently we don't need that anymore that was just a reference and I'm just going to click and drag over everything and what I want to do now is get rid of the black outline otherwise known as the stroke to do that with everything selected I'm just going to hold shift and click on the X or otherwise what you can do is close out of the layers menu go back to the stroke go to the stroke paint menu and then click on the X that will also turn off the stroke and then we can group everything together by clicking the button that says group selected objects and you'll see we have finished the design but the problem now is that we have like this white gap between the the objects there a quick little way to fix that would be to just hit control B in the keyboard to create a duplicate copy and that helps filling in a lot of those white gaps in there as you can see there's still some in there what we could do is you could just duplicate it again ctrl D and that looks pretty it looks pretty good so that's how you can go about creating this sort of background design using Inkscape so if you have any questions let me know and as always thanks for watching [Music] [Music]

Channel: Logos By Nick

Views: 182,947

Keywords: inkscape, learn inkscape, inkscape tutorial, inkscape logo, inkscape logo design tutorial, inkscape for beginners, vector, vector design, vector graphics, vector logo, vector tutorial, vector icons, graphic design, learn graphic design, graphic design for beginners, vector abstract background, inkscape background tutorial, nick saporito, logos by nick, logosbynick, inkscape beginner tutorial

Id: 7hcxuwDKo6I

Length: 11min 57sec (717 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 13 2017