Inkscape Lesson 1 - Interface and Basic Drawing

welcome to this inkscape video tutorial series in this video i want to go over the basics of inkscape and kind of just show you the interface and explore some of the different tools and things we have that we're presented with when we first open up inkscape if you haven't yet already installed inkscape on your computer you can download it free on windows linux and mac so check out my other videos for that it's a completely free and open software it's not a free trial version and it's very very powerful it's very similar to adobe illustrator and has all the same functionality and tools that you would find with that program so the first thing i want to do when we open this up i just want to show how to kind of pan around and change the way we're viewing this page so to do that if we use our scroll wheel on our mouse we can see we can scroll up and down and if we hold down the control wheel we can move this around this is going to be really important because sometimes you'll be you'll just be seeing white space here and you won't be sure where your object and your page is and so we can hold the pan key and just uh that we hold we can pan by holding down the control wheel and go around and do that we can also hold down the control key on our keyboard and scroll will in and out to zoom in more detail on this page or zoom out so we can find it okay and then we can use these bars here to kind of uh pan around as well and we can also while the control key is held we can use the the arrow keys on our keyboard is another way we can pan around and that just kind of moves that document around so we have our selection tool selected right now these are our tools on the left hand side and by default we have a little light blue box around our selection tool which means anything we click on we can select it and change the properties for it so right now we're not really selecting on anything because it's just our page but if we want to draw an object we can come down here to the square and we can draw a square so i've got a little green square because that's the color by default the last color i was using in inkscape so you might have a different color there but left click and drag and then unclick and you'll create a nice square like this and then we'll go back to our selector tool and when we click on the selector tool it'll have a nice selection around it and we can see that because that's a little dotted black line and also has some different arrows ways that we can change and adjust the shape so if we click on one of them we can resize the shape of this square rectangle we can also change just one axis so we can make it kind of shorter or taller and also with every tool when you click on a different tool or when you have an object selected like this there'll be options along the top that change so here we have a w and an h option with a little with some numbers in a text box we can change and that's going to change the width and height if you look at if you notice up here while i change this those numbers are changing and so if i want to change just the height i can come up here and manually type in a number like 50 and hit enter and i'll change the height to 50 millimeters which is the unit that it has selected by default i can change this to inches if i want and now it's now it's in inches so now if i want to change the width to maybe 2 inches i type in 2 and hit enter on the w side and the height if i want it to be 2 inches i hit 2 on the height and hit enter and now we have a 2 inch by 2 inch square box so if we were to print this out it would be two inches by two inches on our piece of paper we can left-click and drag this box around to any point we want we can even drag it outside of the page border if we want to but then if we try to print this page it'll just print blank because this is outside of the page border so we want to make sure we're always working within our our page guidelines or guides um what else can we do with this okay so while it's selected if we click out here in white space we just see that there's nothing selected we can't change these numbers anymore because because there's no selection if we go to the bottom there's different colors and if we click on them nothing happens because we can't change the color either because nothing's selected but if we left click on it and have the box around and come down here to the purple color and left click again we can change the color of this box to a purple or yellow or green any color we want we can also change the size up here now because it's selected if we hit the escape key it becomes deselected if we left-click it becomes selected again if we click off into white space it becomes deselected if we left-click it becomes selected again while it's selected if we left click again you'll notice these these arrows sort of change direction so between left clicking if we keep left clicking slowly we'll see these arrows change so the first selection we had we could change the size of it but if we left-click again we can change the skew we can skew this square either along the x or y-axis and we can also rotate it so if we go to the corner once we can rotate it around and again to get that rotation option if i'll bring it back to where it was and if we hit the escape key we click on it once and then click on it again while it's selected just select it a second time and that's how you'll get those rotate that rotation option for how you can rotate it you'll see also there's a little plus sign in the middle of this object if we move it down to the bottom for example now the rotation axis is going to be wherever that little plus sign is so we can rotate from here for example and it doesn't even have to be within the shape it can be over here and we can still rotate around that point so that's really cool i'm going to move it back here by default it's in the center and so i'll move it back here to roughly to the center if i want to draw a second object i just come over here to square again or rectangle tool and draw a second rectangle and you'll notice there's a couple different things so if i hit escape so that nothing is selected we have a green it's called a fill the color in the middle is called the fill color and around the outside is a stroke color and we actually have a black stroke color if you look closely you'll see that another way we can tell is by coming back up here to the selection tool clicking on the object and going down and turning the color to white and you'll notice that it still has that black border that's because our fill color is black to change the fill color from this screen here if you just hit if you hold shift down and click on the color it'll change that fill color so if you want to change the fill color just hold the shift key and click on a color and if you want to change i'm sorry the fill if you want to change the stroke color you hold down the shift key if you want to change the fill color just click without holding down any key that's how you change the different different parts of these objects we're going to go a lot more into drawing different objects and changing there's a lot more settings we can change the thickness of that stroke we can put gradients or patterns within the colors but in this video i don't want to go too long i just want to show you drawing these objects and then let's say we wanted to export this picture if we go to file and save maybe sometimes you think you might want to save so just go we can save this to the desktop we'll call it drawing.svg that'll actually save our project our vector project so we can close out of this and then reopen it again here's our drawing that we just barely saved it will reopen our project but this isn't this is not something that we would this file isn't something you'd want to send to one of your friends in like an email unless they have inkscape or adobe illustrator or some vector program that can interpret it so if we just want to send this as a picture to someone we go to file and then we go to export png image and when we click export png image it brings up some options here on the right hand side it says what do you want to export the export area page drawing selection or custom so we want to export if we export page it'll export over here if i hit the minus key it'll export this entire page as a picture if i have it under selection it'll export just the part i have selected and if i do drawing i think it'll export just the vis whatever is drawn whether it's within the page boundaries or not i believe that's what it'll do i'm just going to do page for example though and then we'll choose a nice place so it's exporting the file name is to our desktop and it's going to be called drawing.png so i can just click export and we'll minimize this so now we have our nice picture we can see that it did indeed export this entire page and it looks a little bit different here is because it has a there's no white because it really has a transparent background but we'll talk about that in future videos but we see these shapes that we drew got exported out in an image and here they are on the desktop so i feel like we're kind of just diving in there's a probably have a lot of questions but keep watching more tutorials and we'll solve those questions and we'll be able to draw some really complex and cool things using inkscape so thanks for watching

Channel: TJ FREE

Views: 1,869,029

Keywords: inkscape how to, free download, getting started, drawing software, vector program, free software, illustrator alternative, intro to svg, svg basics, learn inkscape, svg editor, inkscape tutorials, adobe illustrator, digital art, free illustrator, how to draw

Id: 8f011wdiW7g

Length: 9min 31sec (571 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 25 2018