Inkscape Spirograph Tutorial: Easy, Step-by-Step Settings for Path Effects Rotate Copies Method

i'm rick johansen and this is iron echo design in this inkscape tutorial i'm going to walk you through how to do spirograph designs and we're going to use the rotate copies tool it's one of the path effects and it's very easy to do i'm going to call this a beginner tutorial if you're just getting started with inkscape this is one of the tools built in to the software that you might not know where it is or how to use it but it's so easy once you get the hang of it you can do all sorts of stuff like this i call this thing echo suns and we'll make it at the end it's super super easy but let's walk through the basics first if you're going to follow along i'm on the template which is called a4 on the welcome screen it's 210 millimeters by 297 millimeters i'm not going to use this area but it will give you the right ratio if you're going to play along so let's go over the tool the first thing you have to do is where are path effects actually what are path effects basically it's a menu of advanced functions that you can do so if i have a path right here a circle i'll click on it go up to path path effects and you'll see in the sidebar the tab will open up but where's the menu if you have the plus down here you'll open up the menu if you don't see the plus it means you forgot to click your object so click on the plus and here is the menu now the menu is always changing depending on how wide your screen is so your rotate copies may not be in the bottom right hand corner so just look around for it these are all different functions you can do and we'll get into more of these later but for today rotate copies click on that and there you go tutorial over actually if you don't see this let's go through the defaults first on your menu method normal number of copies the default is six starting angle zero rotation angle sixty the gap is a strange negative number and you wanna make sure you have distribute evenly clicked if all that is the same it's still not looking like that it might be that your starting circle had a fill so let's say this was day one and you drew out your circle and it looked just like the way we had it go to fill and stroke if you don't have your fill and stroke menu go up to object fill and stroke on fill it looks the same but you have a white fill see your circle is opaque so to get rid of that on fill click on the x now you're see-through delete back to our original if i click on it let's try that six copies let's try 12 enter a little bit more elaborate and you can do modifications with the edit paths by node right here so if you click there you'll see some new nodes appear the ones to take note of this square up top that's going to change the original shape so if i pull it down i can make it more oval control z the center diamond is the most important one for today you can control how tightly packed the copies are you can also affect the pattern itself which is what we're going to explore next by moving the center diamond it's easy to get carried away when you're making these spirographs if you just start spinning that center diamond around so i'm going to show you three easy ways to control the overall look the first is the actual shape you're starting with the second is how many copies you make and the third is which direction you're going to pull that center diamond example one i have a circle here there is no fill just a very thin stroke so on the fill and stroke menu i'm on point two zero millimeters let's go to path effects again if you don't have it open go to path path effects the plus will bring up your menu rotate copies and i'm going to do 75 copies enter i mean i laugh because this is my favorite part of inkscape this is just math and the math gives us art on refined right now but it gives us something to play with we'll come back to this rather than modify that one let's go to this hexagon and see how shape modifies our spirograph i'll go to the plus sign find rotate copies and we'll do 75 on this one as well okay you get a lot more action so that's just the difference of shape between a circle and a hexagon now we'll do a directional change go to edit paths by node without going too in depth of all the different variations you can do let's first just go left and right and see what happens i'll hold ctrl which will lock in my horizontal axis i've got the diamond selected i go to the right it tightens everything up if i go back to center and then to the left it expands everything now if you keep going it'll go back around again so there's tight then up to expansion but just a way you can kind of visualize when you start to play with this just do left and right and see the contraction and expansion same thing for up and down if i hold ctrl to lock in the vertical axis i'll go up expansion makes a bigger diameter down it actually kind of like condenses on itself so a lot of times when you get started with spirograph it's kind of fun but you don't know where you're going with it and if you think about how the directions on a basic level work you can have more control over what you're producing i think i'll skip ahead i made more exercises here but i want to show you this if you want to screen capture this this is an oval just to show you in one shot like a screenshot even if you want to reference this this is 25 copies going to the left 50 copies to the left 100 copies to the left this is an oval going down see how it affects it just the direction you pull that center diamond and then my favorite was taking this oval or all the same oval 2550 and then 100. let me zoom in on this this is what we're going to make my artwork that i called echo suns whatever i called it it's so simple i'll take my .20 millimeter oval i'll go to my path effects plus down here rotate copies 100 copies enter there's my starting point edit paths by node i know i have to go up on a diagonal and there it is you can reproduce it's not all random anymore if you just follow your own guidelines one more exercise before we go to the final r project you can take your spirograph and change the color with the fill and stroke menu on the stroke tab i'll make it yellow or you can put a gradient on there like this which is fine pretty simple but you can also use the directionals when you pull that diamond to change how the colors appear in the spirograph so let's do this example get rid of that for now i've got three circles here a teal a red and an orange the path effects will only work if i group everything first so i've got it all selected ctrl g will group it rotate copies i said 50 copies enter and it's pretty busy go to edit paths by node if i pull it up then you'll see orange is on the outside and that can be a pretty cool pattern now if i pull it down you can see the teal goes on the outside so that's just a quick example to show if you're doing more colorful patterns you control what goes where just by the direction you pull that center diamond okay let's do some freestyle i'm taking this oval which is a 0.20 millimeter stroke we'll rotate it 75 copies so we get this my favorite spirograph clean this up and i've got from my backdrop a black rectangle i'm going to do a mesh gradient on this to make things more interesting so i'll click on it this tool right here is create and edit meshes click and drag anywhere in your rectangle and you'll see you have these gradient bars for a linear gradient if you've done that before you just get one bar with a starting color and an ending color and that's fine but this gives you more options you have a whole perimeter to play with then an x-axis and a y-axis i'm going to cheat with my color swatches so first i'm going to take this upper left i'll hold shift upper right and lower right and make those black the bottom down here i'll click there i'll do eyedropper i want this blue and i'll take this left node here the center i'm holding shift and the right are going to go with this orange a little bit ominous but then now the cool part is you can grab either these handles here or the center and bend it it becomes a cross between the radial gradient and a multi-directional linear gradient gives you more flexibility i think i want to add a little bit more orange i'll take the top hold shift and the bottom i'll do that i'll eyeball that one how about right there that's good enough all right so unclick that i'll take my original let's move this up in the corner off the edge a bit i'll do ctrl d so i have a second one i'll change this one to maybe something more yellow so stroke fade it out reduce the opacity a touch reposition these so they're just kissing right there i'm going to add a touch of blur because they're going to be kind of set back i'll take this one ctrl d duplicate it pop one down here in the corner coming off the bottom change that to white ctrl d let's make the two big ones i also want to show you that you can still modify these so if i go to edit paths by node you can modify it on the fly so i actually do like it pretty big but i do want to add a plain old linear gradient so i'll click on stroke linear gradient and now i get my handles this side right here is my full opacity i can change the color in a second so i'll put full opacity at the bottom and the end point of the gradient is going to fade out into full transparency so i click on this see how it goes to full transparency i can pull the slider for opacity transparency take it over here let's change the color to something really bright and for my starting point same thing go to some bright yellow a couple off-camera tweaks and i'll do my final spirograph control d and this will be my focal point and i want it to kiss this circle and that circle that way we have some balance among the chaos and i'll change the color again to a yellow gold and to draw the eye to this one in particular i'll add more detail here so first i'll do ctrl d to duplicate the whole thing i'm going to blur that one see i would add a little bit more interest and my final touch will be i'm going to put a glowing ring on the inner perimeter now i could draw a circle with the circle tool but i'm going to use paint bucket if you've been following along the tutorials what was once my nemesis has now become a valued tool to make it easy to see what i'm about to do is i'll change the fill to a green take the stroke off all that means is paint bucket uses whatever fill and stroke you did last so this screen will show you what i'm trying to do i'm going to drop paint bucket inside the perimeter and it's going to make this exact shape without me having to size it visually with the circle tool so i'm on visible colors threshold actually one at 35 and grow and shrink by one pixel just to be safe click it once see that now i can take this object which perfectly fits take the fill off add my stroke of whatever i choose i'll do a 1.0 millimeter and we'll make that bright white with the blur ctrl d duplicate that the top final touch will be yellow and kick that one out see where it goes it went to 53 so that'll do it there is our spirograph i hope you enjoyed it hope that was something you can take out of this and if you have ideas for future videos drop a comment in there i am kicking around a paint bucket tutorial right now but it's not there yet see you next time [Music]

Channel: IronEcho Design

Views: 11,186

Keywords: Rick Johanson, IronEcho, Iron Echo, Spiroghraph, Rotate Copies, Path Effects

Id: gzNeZvwAUU8

Length: 11min 46sec (706 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 15 2022