Inkscape Lesson 2 - Shape Tools and Options

welcome back to another Inkscape tutorial in this video we're going to be looking at some more options for tools that we have over here in the tool bar in fact in the last video we only did the selection tool and the draw rectangle tool so I have the plus sign and I'll zoom in here use the scroll wheel to kind of pan up a little bit so yeah we can draw a rectangle and if you notice when we first draw it something I didn't go over we have these little white squares that we can click on to control the size of it before we get to the selection of we can also control the size this way but when we first drew it it creates these options we have these two white squares and then a white circle and this white circle controls the roundness of the corners of the rectangle which is pretty cool so we can control that make it look more like a in fact if we were to do this and then bring it in we can make it look almost like a circle almost give it rounded corners to get to that option and it sends us there by default when we first draw the shape but if we double if we click and then we click again we know we get to the skew and the rotation but if we click very quickly double click then we get to that third option which is these we have these different handles on the corners where we can create rounded corners and we can also resize the shape that way so I show that because we're gonna be playing with some different shapes today and each shape has different options when you get to these white circles and squares these handles do different things for different shapes but these black handles with the arrows they all behave the same for every shape we draw so I'll show you what I mean by that I'm gonna hit the Delete key and delete both of these and we're gonna come here to the circle tool we're gonna draw a circle so or an oval so I'll just drag and unclick and we have this so we see we have these handles up here we can change the height of the circle and change the width of the circle Oh so see what I did there I actually drew another blue circle a teeny tiny one over top of this because my circle tool was still selected and I'm barely missed the handle so I can see if I come here to the selection tool this is what I drew I'll drag it down here so I drew this I have another circle now right here so to get back to those options though I was going to show you if we double click very quickly we get to these different handles where we can control different things and this the most important ones of the circle is this teeny little one over here controls so that we can make like a pacman style so here's how it works if you're outside I have my left mouse click or held in right now if we're outside of the circle it'll create this sort of like pie chart looking thing where we can go all the way down and create just a sliver we can come here and create a pacman if I move my cursor into the inside of the circle it'll change and then we'll create sort of like a Halfmoon type shape so there's two different ways we can create a partial circle we can do a partial like this or we can do a partial like this and it depends on where your mouse cursor is so play with that and get familiar with how that works there's a lot of times with it will you'll want to use a half circle and so you'll notice there's no half circle tool instead you just draw a circle and then control it this way and then we come back to our selection and we can change it we can move it around we can still do like the skew we can do the rotation the same way it was click a second time to get to rotation so this you know there's a time you'll want to draw an object just like this so that's how you do it and if we ever want to make this a full circle if we double-click very quickly always the options for whatever for whatever tool you whatever operation you're on with that object the options for it will be at the very top here by default and we can click this full circle and it'll complete the whole circle again or we can move yeah that's basically what we'll do and then that we can change the size the radius the units that it's in okay I'm gonna delete this circle so I had delete but one thing I want to show you too if we select our object maybe I'll resize this a little bit we have this object selected and you'll notice this one actually has look how big our stroke is on this one compared to the last one in fact if I click this Circle tool and draw another circle they're different right this one has a smaller stroke this has a larger stroke that's because what this is this one we scaled it up we drew a small circle I'll do another circle down here we do a tiny circle and then we went to the resize now we went to get our selection and we resize it using these bars and it's scaled proportionally the stroke and the also on the size of the circle so now this stroke size is gonna be a different size and we'll look at the settings to control this stroke size in a minute but you'll notice that it is a different stroke than if we just draw a regular circle this one does have a stroke we can see if we click make it white we see it has a stroke and actually the stroke color is of not even quite black it's a blue color and again to change the stroke if I have a selected to change the fill color we just left-click make this one like red for example and then to change the stroke color we hold down the shift key and click whatever we want the stroke to be so we can change it to a different color I'll just make it black though and then also we have a little bit of transparency here because what Inkscape does it remembers the settings that you were using last time and so we have a tiny bit of transparency because you can see through this shape you can see through to the shape behind it you can see that circle a little bit below if I want to bring this shape forward I can hit this raise race up a level it's not a layer necessarily where there are different layers here that we'll play with later on in Inkscape but this is just levels what level these different shapes appear on so if I want this white to appear on the very top level I can just click this one that races it all the way to the top level whatever item is selected will be raised to a top level and if I want to go down I can just raise it down one level at a time or I can raise it all the way to the top or all the way to the bottom so there are some options that we have for those for that tool I'm not gonna change the transparency yet so yours might be solid but we'll look at that in the next video we'll look at how to change transparency and and color on things like that in more detail than just using the color below here this next shape we're gonna look at is the star and polygons so we'll left-click we'll drag we can create you'll notice it just does without ever the last color we had selected was so if we select green it'll turn green and if we draw another star it'll be green the star has some different options too so if we want to click on it if we double-click very quickly we get a what we notice we get these white two handles again so these ones we can change the pointyness of the star make it like a stubby little fat star we can make it very pointy and we can also change where oops I missed this one the W key we can also change on the star where the points come together on this inner part so we can actually cross it over multiple times and create kind of an interesting shape we make it also very pointy this way are very stubby this way and then also with the star we have different options up here so right now we see we have five corners but if we wanted to make a triangle we can just go down to three corners and now we have a triangle we can make that kind of more like a triangle or we can make it yeah basically a three-cornered shape and then we can make this have more as well we can have it have lots of different corners and we can still control the pointyness of these so I'm doing I've accidentally clicked so I'm hit the Delete key I keep trying to hook on those handles and the star tool is still selected so I'm accidentally creating a second little star but what I want is to is to click on this handle right here and make that very into there or we can make it come out to there and have it be sort of like an object like this we can change and give a different yeah just different characteristics and so this is one that we can really play with a lot and make a lot of different cool shapes just by how we how we do it so it's not just a shape like I said it's not just a circle it's we can make lots of different shapes by controlling the different options of that shape so always look at the top you'll see some different options for things you do moving on we can do this spiral tool sometimes we'll use this so it's just creates a nice little spiral and then we can again move it so these black handles are always the same these black arrows always just let us resize let us rotate we can rotate the star too if we want at least click and then click a second time to get to those rotate options and this one if we double click very quickly we have options for changing this size or Canada different options for this spiral like how tight the spiral is and yeah that's really the this I just want to go over the shape tools there's more tools down here but we're not gonna go over these ones in future videos I guess with the exception that's like text we can just click on the text tool and type and start typing in you know things and then we can change I'm alpha chain of text yeah well we can change the color of the text down here and then there's a lot more options for text we'll do a whole whole separate video just on text but the rest of these we're not gonna really play with and in fact I'm gonna give you like a word of caution you if you want to play with some of these yourself you'll notice there's like an eraser tool but this is a tool that I literally never use ever inning scape and if you if you've used Photoshop or or maybe even Microsoft Paint you might be used to using this tool where you can like erase certain parts why that even did oh it's because we're erasing in blue oh so I did Dan so basically we can like cut into the shape and right like erase parts of it but it starts to get things very very messy and the reason is you're doing freehand you're doing freehand erasing and the way Inkscape works is that it creates these it creates an object it based on math so this star is a very simple object for the computer it just says alright make a star based off of these points by in this tool so now I'm editing this just just a node by node so we have like basically one two three four five six seven eight nine ten so it's basically saying here's the ten points for this star and so just draw a straight line between each of these ten points and you've got your object and that's why it doesn't matter how big it is so we can scale this incredibly large and it won't ever lose its clarity or we can scale it super super tiny as well and these objects are all just stay nice like if we zoom into the point at this point right here look at this it doesn't ever get grainy ever it just stays nice and sharp always whether we scale it up massive or shrink it down tiny and that's because it's just mathematics telling how to draw the shape it's like draw three points one here one here one here but that's why when we get into drawing or when we get into using these free hand tools and erasing it messes things up a little bit because now instead of having just a few simple points I'm gonna click this tool which is the edit node tools by path we'll use this a lot later but see now look how many points we have when we go in in the erase it creates lots of unnecessary points so if you're gonna use that tool you'll want to come in and erase these at least I think you should coming in I'm just clicking on this node and hitting the Delete key and I'm probably getting too advanced for this video anyway because we'll do that a lot later but then we can kind of clean up that line but it's just not something that I ever do anyway you don't want to do freehand there's a freehand pencil tool where you can draw you know freehand lines but it's just it just creates messy looking things like how ugly this thing is and it's just not worth it so there's better ways there's much better tools for drawing in Inkscape than doing anything freehand so that's the word of caution I would give you is don't do freehand in Inkscape anything freehand just don't do it instead there's better ways where you can draw a path and then map a line or map text to a path or map you know you can use these paths that's really the power of Inkscape if you want to do some freehand art you should use something like Krita or a Photoshop or Inkscape I mean aura or but if you want to use some if you wanted to do the power of Inkscape you really want to be learning how to use these shapes and then draw shapes to accomplish your goal and edit the different nodes of that shape instead of freehand drawing so that was kind of a rant but in this next video we're gonna be looking at we'll look at how to control more of the stroke and the fill options for these different tools so join me on that sorry I created such an ugly mess in here because see look I can and I can't erase this middle part now I can't erase this ugliness that I created because it's part of this circle now isn't that terrible we can't change it we can't it's all just part of this one object that we've drawn so it's ugly anyway I'll stop talking about that and we'll catch the next video looking at fill and Stroke

Channel: TJ FREE

Views: 621,858

Keywords: free download, learn inkscape, inkscape circle, change shape, drawing software, illustrator alternative, free illustrator, draw shapes, inkscape square, adobe illustrator, vector program, inkscape tutorials, free software, svg editor

Id: LEjlKhVnJgU

Length: 14min 14sec (854 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 24 2018