Inkscape Lesson 10 - Trace Images with Bezier Tool

welcome back to another Inkscape tutorial in this video we're going to quickly be showing the bezzie a tool to trace a physical object an object in like an actual real picture and we'll trace that to create some vector art of that object so I'm going to do a more complex object I'm going to do this picture that I found on pixabay if we just go to pixabay.com I can show you how I found this pixabay is a great site for finding free photos that you can use for both sometimes commercial and obviously personal purposes we'll just type in person and we can scroll down here and I've chose this picture of this guy falling so this is shared with us by the user pixels and it's under Creative Commons 0 license free for commercial use no attribution required so we'll go ahead and download this I already have it downloaded go ahead and download the nineteen twenty by twelve sixty click download here and then it'll appear in your downloads folder so that's this picture here called action it's just a guy kind of following and what we're gonna do I want to bring this in so I'll go back to my downloads and I want to actually drag this into Inkscape so we'll left-click and drag it into Inkscape we'll leave all these settings the same this just says we're going to embed the image so it's part of our project file rather than linking it externally if we link it and then we go back and delete that file out of our downloads then it won't show up here and in that you scape which is probably fine since we're just tracing it anyway but I'll just leave it here so one bed and then we'll leave everything else the same so now we have this picture and actually there's a I think there might be a faster way to do what I'm about to show you I know there is actually but I'm just gonna show you for using the Bezier tool it's a really good practice for learning how that Tool Works so I wanted to scale this up but I forgot to do one thing right now it's it'll skew it if I scale it unless I'm really really accurate so I'll hit ctrl C or I could hold the ctrl key while I scale and then it stays uniform but what I'd like to do is click this lock at the top and what it does if you hover over it it says it makes it so height and width scale the same whether you're holding the ctrl key or not and just helps when you're working with photos and when you're working with text I always like to have that checked well you don't accidentally secure something without realizing it okay so we have this picture and then we're just gonna go to our desi a tool make sure if you are playing with this playing along with the last videos you might have this on the lips or something make sure your shape is to none and make sure your mode is set to regular and then we're going to hit the plus key I'll use my control wheel to kind of pan around hit the plus key and we're going to start right at the tip of this boot and what we're doing is I want to create an outline so we're gonna draw just the outline and I'm not gonna you could come down here and click and hold and then create like that nice rounded toe and maybe that'd be an OK thing and then this one comes here and we can round that in a little bit I'm not gonna do too much of that I'm just gonna be clicking and create kind of a little bit more jagged but we're so zoomed in it's not you're not really gonna notice and I'll pause the video here in a second and speed up so we don't have to watch this whole process but essentially I'm just left clicking creating some nodes every time that there's enough contour in this image and we're going to create a nice outline like a black shadow outline of this like a silhouette of a person falling and we could use it in like a logo or we could use this silhouette for I don't know some print art or different kinds of things that we want to do so I'll pause now too but just kind of follow along and do the same thing I'll pause the video and speed it up and I'll get back with you when I'm completed with this silhouette shape [Music] okay I'm just about completing the last part of the heel of the shoe here and don't worry if you mess up I'm gonna mess up intentionally right here like if you accidentally click in there or like out here don't worry about it because we can fix that afterwards I'm just gonna complete my shape and click my very first point that I started with and then we have this nice outline and so your stroke might not be that large but if we zoom out here we can see it's a it's created an outline stroke of this whole person here so right now our fill is transparent and our stroke is completely black but if we hit black we can turn our fill to black and we can come down to our stroke we can hold down shift and hit none go to the transparent so now we have no stroke and we have just a black fill let's see that for it's kind of a cool we have a nice silhouette and then we can go in and fix any parts we messed up on by just going to the node edit tool zoom in and we can replace these nodes about where they should be we can hit the Delete key and delete a node if we think we have too many there we can grab some of these handles if there's a rounded part like we did here and we can adjust the way that this boot fits a little bit when I make it a little more big in the toe we can actually make it bigger than it really is if we want to we can we don't have to follow the outline exactly so we can check through and see but you know I went I went through pretty jagged this is like part of the shirt that I've brought in it's not really a mistake but we can bring it in if we want to if we don't like the way that looks we can kind of bring that in a little bit I don't like the way that looks at all anyway when we zoom out and so what we can do is we can grab this now and we can move it around so now we have this actual shape and then we can take left-click and we can then delete our original hit the Delete key and then we're left with just this silhouette and we can change the color of it any cover we want we can have it be we can give it a separate stroke if we hold down the shift key we can give it a like a blue stroke and have it be yellow I'll hit ctrl zieks I don't really like that blue stroke we can Espie blue and then we can yeah we can do anything that we could do with any other path so we can resize it we can click again we can rotate it if we want to have it be little bit different so it's just a really cool thing we can apply a gradient under the gradient tool here we can just draw in a gradient maybe we can let on to be kind of like that so it like goes fades into alpha and then we can put some text on here and we can grab like a you know a different color background or something and very quickly we can create a nice cool little effect and the best part is it's all vector image so I'll hit control Z ctrl Z ctrl Z when I have a source like this sometimes I want to duplicate it so I'll hit ctrl D and I'll keep my original here and that way if I make any changes to this one and ever I want to get back I can just grab my original one change you you could make for example we can go to path and go to simplify now just reduce the amount of nodes we have and kind of smooth things out that doesn't look super great now see there's not as much detail in the head anymore it's Liston's it's still I think it looks more realistic so I'll delete this one so we can hit control D on our keyboard again and get another version here and actually it's a lot of times I'll do that so if we take this I'm getting kind of carried away now but if we go ctrl D and then make this one black and push the down arrow key a couple times and the over arrow key now we have like an outline so that blue outline behind and then we can send this black one to the very back and then we kind of have a blue with a black outline is kind of cool or sometimes if I'll draw like a nice background like this and I'll select the black if I can I'll hit what's it alt alt click because I'm clicking back now because this gray was on top of it and we can turn that to white we can't see it ctrl Z ctrl Z let's take our shift let's take this and sync it all the way back to the back and then let's grab just this black one and let's make it white and then I'll go to object we'll go to or we go to path no good object yeah fill and Stroke properties and go make bring up the blur so we have like a blurred out version of it in the back it's like a full black turn the opacity all the way up to black so yeah then we have that's pretty cool right so we have a kind of a cool thing I'm trying to zoom in here yeah like this little bit darker or a darker blue so that's some pretty cool things that you can do with the with the Bezier tool you can trace any object take a picture of it bring it in here or find a picture online you can trace it and you can do some pretty cool stuff with it like this so I hope you enjoyed this video hopefully this kind of kind of spurred on some inspiration you can see maybe of some different things you can do with this we'll use this a little bit later on too in other videos but that's an example of using the Bezier tool to trace objects in a real image thanks for watching we'll catch you on the next one [Music]

Channel: TJ FREE

Views: 199,359

Rating: 4.9620185 out of 5

Keywords: silhouette trace, vector program, learn bezier, free illustrator, drawing software, inkscape bezier line, learn inkscape, how to bezier, bezier tool, free download, inkscape tutorials, svg editor, illustrator alternative, free software, draw silhouette, make silhouette, silhouette outline, adobe illustrator, trance image outline, draw bezier line

Id: sagrkdmC_BI

Length: 9min 25sec (565 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 24 2018