Inkscape Lesson 7 - Drawing Lines and Paths vs Objects

welcome back to another Inkscape tutorial in this video we'll be learning how to draw lines the right way in vector art and we'll be learning about paths and objects and the difference between the two so it's a very important thing to learn and it's really what sets Inkscape and illustrator and other vector editors apart from Photoshop and bitmap editors so what I mean is if we grab this freehand tool which I've cautioned you about using in the past we can just draw whatever we want and it creates kind of it draws that line but then if we go back to our selection tool we notice that this kind of squiggly line that we've drawn behaves similar to different shapes that we drew we can click it a second time and rotate it around we can apply some skew to it if we just click it again we can just scale and rotate we can scale it on a single axis so it's kind of similar to when we drew like our rectangles right we can do all the same things to our rectangle so this is sort of drawing a freehand line but I caution you against it and the difference between these two things are one is a path well there's a lot of differences but this is a path and this is an object an object has some is anything that is I mean I guess this isn't the real way to define it but in my mind an object is something that has predetermined settings in vector art so a square is a predetermined shape and so it's like a circle as if we draw a circle here so this circle has predetermined math to make it much simpler then than just drawing a bunch of than just drawing a line so what I mean by that is if we double-click very quickly remember we got these different points we have a point here that we can determine the radius so the distance from the center of the circle on the y axis and the distance from the center of the circle on the x axis so just off of those two points using some simple math you can create a circle and so with very few instructions you can tell the computer how to recreate this circle and then also even leaving out even with this part here I it's it's a pretty simple operation to tell the computer hey just leave out this certain part of the circle so create an art from this distance to this distance and just don't draw the circle in and is to draw a line to the center of the circle here so I guess what I'm saying is it's much less intensive than if we were to grab the freehand tool and draw and draw draw and recreate this shape first of all if we try and do that it's just not going to look so pretty we can still make it green and we can try and come up here and change our stroke to make it kind of fat to match that one the difference is this the thing that we've drawn is a path anytime we freehand draw something or when we draw with the Bezier tool like we're going to be using later it creates a path not an object so the way that Inkscape is interpreting this shape that we drew we can tell by double-clicking on it very quickly and we see all these grey dots appear these are all the different nodes that it that have been created to tell Inkscape how to recreate this shape and if we click on this one would double click very quickly or if we just click while we have our right now it's defaulted into our edit pass by node tool and so now we can see this is only we have four different reference points is what Inkscape is being told here it's saying draw a circle with this X and this Y and then cut out a radius from this point to this point so it's much much simpler which means it uses less space when we're saving our file it's also what lets us allows us to rescale without losing clarity and without having our object become pixelated this one we can rescale to and it won't become pixelated but it is much more intensive because we have all these points and it's also harder to edit so if we want to edit this if we wanted to change any point of it we can zoom in here and see we can actually move any of these grey dots called nodes we can move it around and kind of change the shape of this a little bit but there's some many of them to be tedious to do one by one and that's kind of why I've cautioned against using the freehand tool anytime you would want to use the freehand tool what you really should be using is the Bezier tool and we're going to cover that more in the next video we'll go over using the Bezier tool but let's do a little bit quickly here to show you the basics of it so I'm gonna left click here on our selection I'll take this will delete this object will delete our square will delete our circle and will even delete this squiggly line that we drew first so I'm gonna click on the Bezier tool and we're just going to left-click a single point here and a single point here and then I'll just hit B well I'm gonna the Escape key I forgot so I was doing something earlier and maybe if you played with it you might be on a different setting so I'm actually on this spyro setting but I want to be on just the regular setting so make sure you have regular selected and then will you probably do by default then just left click come to a different point and left click again and hit the enter key and we've created a straight line this is the recommended way to create a line in Inkscape or any vector image Pro editing program I've come to the selection tool now we have this selected so we can rotate this line around just like we would any other just like we would an object although this is not an object it's a path and that a path just means it's made up of nodes and connecting lines between those nodes so this is a very simple path if I double click on it we see we have a node here and a node here and that's it that's this entire path it's creating a path for a line to follow we can do a little bit more advanced one if I click on the Bezier tool again we can click a couple different points and then hit enter and now we've created a little bit more tiny bit more advanced paths so we can come here and click Edit the nodes of this and we can see all right so we've got a node here a node here and it's just drawing a straight line between each of them now we can do the same thing with our square or our rectangle tool if we draw a rectangle maybe we want to change maybe we want to this kind of has 4 points right 1 2 3 4 but if we double click on it very quickly the options we have is round the corners or change the size we can't move one one point of it we don't have these different nodes that's because this is an object so we can turn an object into a path in Inkscape and it's a really important thing to learn how to do and the way we do it we just go up to object or we go up to path I mean and go object to path so while our square is selected our rectangle go to path then click object to path now the compromise is we can no longer round the corners of this like we would like we could before if we double click we don't have that rounded corner option and we can't resize like we like we could before I mean we can still resize like this like we can any drawn thing in Inkscape but if I double-click very quickly now we have these different points to control so it's kind of a subtle difference but now we can make it like a shape like this so we have four points this is how you would create this shape in Inkscape if we wanted to do that we can do the same thing it's gonna get crazy with our circle but we can do the same thing with our circle so this we can go draw it it's an object right now by default but if we go path object to path now if we click on this edit we can see the different nodes of this Oh actually it's not too crazy what it's done is its created curved lines so it only has a few more points than it did before so now we can change the center point of this which we couldn't do before we can change the arc on this by grabbing this it's kind of like a handle so we can grab this we'll learn more about this in the next tutorial about using these handles but every node has a different handle associated with it or has it has these two handles that you can change the arc so it's not just a straight line then we can create kind of a cool wacky looking shape so because it's a because it's now a path so I'd like you to play with that it's really important to learn how to do that how to change an object to a path same thing if we draw our star we can kind of control it very quickly but everything happens it Mears if we want to just create we want to just move this one point and keep the rest of it the same like let's come down here a time you might use that as like if you want the point of the star to be taller than the rest of it we can't do that right now we can do it we can stretch the whole thing or if we double-click we can make all the points more pointy but if I want to make just this top one really pointy and the rest of them kind of stubby we have to convert it to a path so we select it go to path and go object to path and now if we double-click we have every different point we can control separately so now we control just this and make this one really pointy and the rest we can keep the same or we could change the rest around to in fact we can change the shape whoa I would didn't mean to do that ctrl Z we can change the shape to any do a completely different shape altogether but we lose those options so we can no we can't go back and change the the corners now like we did when it was an object we just can't do that so that's kind of a quick introduction to paths and objects in Inkscape it'll come together more in the next video where we talked about using the Bezier tool because it's a it's kind of creates a path and we learned about how to create these arcs and learn about the differences between that oh I guess I will say too it's something important if we want to take this letter so this is also kind of an object at first if we zoom in it's an object it's a text object so I have some different parameters but if we want to we can actually if you want to edit the shape of this letter like really get down to it if we double click right now the option is keep typing right but if we want to change it we can also convert this go to object to path and then if we double click we can edit the shape of this letter individually so sometimes you'll want to do this especially if you're creating like a logo out of a certain letter you can actually kind of come in and create your own kind of thing yeah so that's another option with doing objects - path so we'll be doing we'll be doing some more cool stuff with this in future videos - hope that's made sense go ahead and ask questions comment below like and subscribe and I'll see you in the next video you

Channel: TJ FREE

Views: 326,259

Keywords: add points, inkscape tutorials, vector program, create path, illustrator alternative, draw a line, free illustrator, adobe illustrator, delete nodes, how to draw, edit nodes, what is a path, drawing software, free download, new shape, add nodes, svg path, what is an object, learn inkscape, free software, svg editor, custom shape

Id: p67XVtX07eM

Length: 11min 11sec (671 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 25 2018