Inkscape Repeating Pattern Interpolated Wavy Lines Tutorial

i'm rick johansen and this is the iron echo design channel today we're going to do an inkscape tutorial specifically on how to make a repeating pattern a geometric wavy lines pattern like this we're going to use a special tool that inkscape has called interpolate and here's an example of a vertical version but we're going to do this pink one today so it's kind of like pretty cool for like a math book cover or something like that but but how do what does repeating pattern even mean here's a different pattern and if you see this is it actually on a product and it actually matches up seamlessly so we're going to create a pattern on a square that you can then take outside of inkscape and put it on stuff so this is the pattern and it fits in that's about where it is so let's start by making our square so let's go ahead and grab up here in the create rectangles and squares tool we'll make some open space now if you hold shift and control together it will create an even square but that doesn't matter too much because we're going to actually type in some specifics so up here you can see if you still have your selector tool on the object you can see the height and width so for width actually let's first change it to pixels and then for width we'll do 1000 enter and then for height do 1000 enter and then i think i have this transparency make sure your transparency is is not on so we have a full 100 percent down here if you don't have this fill and stroke menu it says paintbrush thing on the corner and then for this exercise it's very important you don't have a stroke so the fill can be any color let's just go with neutral for now so you can see what we're doing but then first stroke go to stroke and turn it off and then see how that messed up our dimensions again so if you had stroke on make the stroke off and then go back and re and correct your dimensions so i'll go to 1000 enter and then 1000 enter all right so that creates the the base of our pattern and then there's another important step we're gonna make sure we can create it so it's seamless so go unto edit and then down here on preferences the dialog box should open up here and then if if nothing's open go to behavior and then steps and see here steps here we want arrow keys move by and then since we made our square 1000 the arrow keys move by should be 1000 so then enter and then just x out of that so all that did is you'll see what happens why we did that and now we can actually make our our wave so grab the bezier pen tool this thing right here then we'll go to some open space and since we had the stroke off and the fill if i make my line it's going to be just like the last thing we did so for stroke let's add a stroke back into it 1.5 and then for the fill i'll turn the fill off so now i don't want that but at least i just reset the bezier pen tool otherwise you'll be like what's going on with this so let's draw a nice flowing curve maybe two humps on it now i have a beginner's tutorial on how to use the bezier pen if you want to check that out but it doesn't even really matter in this case so let's say that that's actually fine for this project let's say you didn't like the way this is looking you can go to edit paths by node and let's say you want to draw this one out further or if you didn't like the actual angles that's that's what these little um handles do it changes them but this is fine so we'll start with that now the actual definition of interpolate is to estimate the value between two i guess in this case paths so we need we need a second path so the easiest way to do it at least the way i like to do it in this case is you click on it and then go ctrl d which duplicates it and then for simplicity we'll just flip it upside down and then we could just go forward with this but i want to make i do want to make some modifications on this bottom one i'll go to my edit paths by node i'm going to extend out a tail because i think it looks cool when the feature happened the function happens and then i'll connect this one down there and then just i'll make this part these two go together so again not very precise i just know what happens when we do this function and i think the tail looks cool so i'll show you what i mean all right so click off every everything we're going to do the actual function now so choose one shift choose the other and then go to extensions generate from path interpolate and here's your menu so exponent i'll start with zero to show you what that does so this is exponent zero and then steps is the amount of lines it's going to put in between your two paths so 25 is a lot it gets kind of bunched up but we maybe that looks good and then interpolation method two i've tried them all i can't tell the difference so just leave it at two and then don't click on any of these other options so i'm going to go to live preview all right interpolate that's pretty cool all right so i'm gonna i'm gonna i'll do apply and then close so we'll draw this one out because if this is the what you like keep it that way um i'm gonna do it again though because i'll show you exponent one and three just because i thought this was an interesting feature on it so let's make sure both are kind of collected so one two they're both selected let me zoom out and let's try it again so go to extensions generate from path interpolate and the only difference i'm changing to exponent 1.0 and then we'll try and see if live preview works there we go you see see how it has a little bit more less there's more space in between the lines up here and then less down there and it creates a harder line on the bottom it's very subtle difference but i find it works better if we're gonna drop this on top of a black background so i'm gonna go with that so i'll go apply and get out of there and then let's let's actually save this one we're going to use this one after the exercise i'll put it next to exponent one so you can see and then for kicks you can fast forward if you don't if you don't care about exponent three but maybe you will for a different project so try it again so extensions generate from path interpolate and then we'll do three i did three because you can see more of the pronounced change hey i'm not feeling this one but we'll just we'll just go with it so you can see because maybe that would be more useful later so just just to end this little exercise there's exponents 0 1 and 3. you can tell the difference let's go forward with this one i like that one now we can set up our pattern itself so the first choice is what color do you want the wave to be so this whole thing is a stroke so we'll go to stroke paint and then i think we're going to go with this pink today that's good and i'm going to add a gradient so if you have your base color selected then up here choose linear gradient and that looks cool but it's backwards if it's if you want to go the other direction this pencil thing here it's going to edit the gradient click on that and you'll get a square and a circle point so the square is where the color is and the circle is where the transparency goes so i want to make my tail kind of trail off and then be full color on this side and that is that's good so all right so let's put this on our where's our square our initial square our pattern grid let's go find that here it is and i'm going to actually increase the weight of the stroke so i'm on stroke style i'll do my millimeters here 1.5 just to give it a little bit more heaviness there and then an important step is go to path stroke to path and so what that does is now when i minimize it it doesn't affect the weighting and everything it kind of locks it in so we can connect we can now line it up and make our pattern repeat here so the reason the box is a thousand by a thousand pixels and the step value is a thousand is so that when we duplicate it ctrl d then when i hit the arrow key right once it'll automatically make it so when this box repeats on the pattern it'll be seamless so i've got the two of them here together and i'll do shift and i'll collect them both and group them ctrl g now i can i can duplicate that and now i can make my pattern and the reason i can use this as a unit is we know that the step value is a thousand so i'll move this over here that looks good i'll then duplicate that and then maybe i'll reverse the whole thing and then i'll line up the this little swoosh thing with the swoosh duplicate that come down here you could it's all personal for preference this time if you have like an idea of if you want more of these beads or if you have if you like more of the wave you can just kind of like eyeball it and then the one thing i want to show you at the end is if you get to the bottom you do have to repeat it vertically as well so i'll go here i'll do control d and then go up one so the it's still a thousand step value even if you go vertical so this this whole it's kind of a mess but it's it's going to work so then group all of the different waves and then control g that's all one then click off of it because we have to get the square control d duplicate that and then now this square will stamp out the pattern and then we'll be done so so hold shift get the the wave then go to object clip set and there okay let's get rid of this this uh what happened here let's get rid of the um that yellow thing and this is this is it this is the base of your pattern so if you have it selected ctrl d it still has the step value so push the right arrow once so you see how it goes together just looks it's like you can do a lot with this it'll also line up vertically so control d go down and then uh might as well for good measure go all the way and you can see what you created i had too many of these beads on this one but that's that's the fun part you can you can do anything make anything you want let's just group this part and i'm going to lay it on top of this black gradient i put down here just like we had in the thumbnail okay and then let's zoom in i mean look at that it goes dark right i'm just i'm just pulling the gradient it's like it's like jellyfish i feel like nature uses interpolate and now you can too so hopefully that you can have some fun with that make some beautiful patterns design some text textbooks whatever you need to do and i will see you later thanks

Channel: IronEcho Design

Views: 1,609

Keywords: Graphic Design, Inkscape, Affinity, Photoshop, Startup, Design, Tutorials, Tips, Logo, Iterpolate, Interpolated, Rick Johanson, Pattern, Repeating, Seamless, Wavy, Lines

Id: RJTjsa9CMKw

Length: 10min 28sec (628 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 24 2021