Inkscape Tutorial: Background Pattern Tiles

this is Nick with logos by Nick comm and in today's tutorial I'll be demonstrating how you can create this repeated background design using Inkscape so I'm gonna go ahead and open up Inkscape here the first thing we want to do is set up our documents that we're all working with a similar view and with a similar set up so I'll go to file document properties you want to make sure the display units are set to pixels and then I'm going to turn off the visibility of the page border and then close out of that what I want to do next is go to view make sure we have custom selected we'll go to zoom we'll zoom in at 1 to 1 and then we'll go to the come over here to where it says align and distribute open up that menu we're gonna want last selected chosen from this drop-down and then we'll open up the Edit objects colors gradients and Stroke menu with that button there and what I want to do now is only come up here to the snapping menu and I want to make sure we have this enabled right here that says snap custom nodes and then we want the one next to it enabled as well the one that says snap smooth nodes and what I'll do now is going to come over here to this little box on the left of these 4 boxes right here this one on the left that says when scaling objects scale the stroke width by the same proportion we're gonna want that turned off for the duration of this tutorial and this little lock icon right here we're gonna want that turned on so once we've done that we're good to get started I'm going to grab these circles and ellipses tool and I'll hold ctrl and shift in the keyboard and click and drag on the canvas to create a perfectly round circle like that and I'm going to convert that to a path by going to path object to path and I'm going to give this a black outline by holding shift and clicking on the color black right here to give that an outline and then I'm going to click on this red X right here to get rid of the fill color so what I want to do now is I want to come over to the stroke style tab and if you're just default units are not pixels just go ahead and set that to pixels I want the width of this stroke to be 100 so hit 1 0 0 and hit enter and then I want to come back to the select tool which is up top here and I want to change the width of this to 300 so just clear out whatever is in there hit zero zero and hit enter and then I want to duplicate this by hitting control D on the keyboard and that's gonna create a duplicate copy you can't really see it but it's there when with that duplicate copy I'm going to add 400 pixels to it so this will be 700 so I'm going to change the width of this to 700 pixels hit Enter let me just zoom out a little bit so I can see this all better I'm gonna hold ctrl and roll down the mouse wheel a few times to zoom out and then I'm gonna duplicate this again I'm gonna hit control D I'm gonna change the width of this one to what we're gonna add 400 to the 700 so it'll be one thousand and one hundred enter we'll do that again hit control D to duplicate it add another 400 making it 1500 and we'll do that one more time it ctrl D to duplicate that and make this 1900 and now we will have all the circles that we need so I'm gonna click and drag over all of these and I'm going to Center them up on the vertical and horizontal axis like that and I'm going to go to path stroke to path and then path Union now what I'm gonna do now is I'm going to come over to the Edit path by nodes tool and if you notice at the far at the quadrant of each side there's nodes there's an node on the outside there's a node on the inside all the way here to the far left to the far right to the bottom to the to the top of there and in between so this snapping up here means that we could snap the cursor onto these nodes so that we can use them as reference points for what we're about to do so I'm going to grab the draw Bezier curves the tool the Bezier a pen and I'm gonna snap to this left side over here and click and I'll snap to this right side over here I mean the inner the inner side right here and click and then I'll snap to this one right here and click and again to zoom in and out I'm just holding ctrl and rolling up and down the mouse wheel I'll snap to this one right here to the top and bring it back around to the starting point and connect it back together like that what I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna go back to the Select tool I'll hold shift click the object and go to path intersection so that we're left with this little quadrant object right there and I'm gonna bring the opacity of this down about in half doesn't have to be exactly in half just somewhere there abouts is pretty good I'm gonna duplicate that by hitting ctrl D and I'm going to flip that horizontally with this button right here flip selected objects horizontally and I'm just going to click and drag this over here and snap it onto the right side like that I meant to duplicate that shape by hitting ctrl D I'm going to flip that horizontally and vertically I'll just take this and snap this over here down there I'm going to take this object right here I'm gonna hit control D to duplicate that I'm gonna flip that vertically snap that right here and then finally what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take this object up top here hit control D to duplicate that and snap this one down here and I'm gonna make this one red just so we could differentiate it from the other shapes what I want to do now is just zoom in over this area I'm gonna hold ctrl and roll up the mouse wheel to zoom in I'm going to grab the Bezier a pen and I'm going to draw a line going through this outer black band of this shape right here so I'm gonna start outside of the red object right about there and just draw a line going through there like that and finish it up going around the outside and back to the starting point like that grab the Select tool hold shift click on the red objects and go to path difference now I'm sure to zoom out a little more I'm gonna hold shift and click on the other black objects right there and unify them together by going to path Union and if you take this shape and move it out of the way we can now take these shapes over here click and drag over them and press Delete on the keyboard to get rid of them so what we have right here this here is the individual object that you can repeat over and over and over again and it creates the design that I showed you the beginning of the video and I'll show you what I mean here I'm gonna bring the opacity all the way up I'm gonna give this some color I'm going to add I'm gonna make this like an orange an orange shade then I'm gonna right click this and go to copy and I I'm gonna come over here to the squares and rectangles too long it's gonna create a rectangle of any shape it doesn't really matter any shape any size hold shift click the red X to get rid of the outline convert that to a path by going to path object to path and then we'll go to edit paste size paste size and I'm going to make this yellow and I'm going to lower this to the bottom gonna come up here the Select tool and lower it to the bottom by clicking this button this is lower selection to the bottom click and drag over those both and just Center them up on the horizontal and vertical axis like that and now we can group them together by pressing ctrl G on the keyboard and what you could do now is you can duplicate that again hitting ctrl D and you could just snap them together like that duplicate them snap them together duplicate them snap them together duplicate these and I'm sure you get the idea the design is starting to take shape there another thing you could do is you could take this object right here you can go to edit clone create tiled clones and we're gonna choose rows and columns and we could we could dictate how many we want to create over here so if you want three rows and ten columns you want to be three long but ten wide like that you would write three for the rows 10 for the columns and hit create and there you have your repeated background right there what you could also do is you could just take this one file right here you could just take this one little piece and just upload that you could export it as a dot PNG from within Inkscape and you could upload that to let's say like a website or something like that and if you use that as the background of your site it'll just repeat over and over and over again in the web browser and it'll appear as a seamless background like that so that's pretty much how you can go about creating this sort of repeated background design using Inkscape if you haven't done so already please consider joining the logos by nic mailing list in order to receive email alerts whenever new tutorials are posted you information will be sold to or shared with anyone else and you will never receive any kind of spam or promotional offers from me whatsoever the only time you will ever receive emails from me is when new tutorials are posted and you'll get to watch them on the logos Beinecke website without any third-party advertisements interrupting your learning experience in fact you'll also get to watch some other exclusive tutorials that I don't upload here to YouTube so go ahead and check the link in the description if you're interested in that otherwise if you have any questions let me know and as always thanks for watching [Music] [Music]

Channel: Logos By Nick

Views: 33,226

Keywords: inkscape, inkscape tutorial, inkscape background pattern, background pattern tiles, logos by nick, logosbynick, nick saporito

Id: Dgsm-aqKcVs

Length: 9min 44sec (584 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 07 2018