Inkscape Tutorial - Blur and Clip Technique

in this Inkscape video I'll be demonstrating how to use a blur and clip technique to create a gradient effect with shapes that do not work well with the gradient tool I'll be using Inkscape version 0.48 for this demonstration I'll be using a heart shape so let's go ahead and create the shape I'm going to select the Bezier tool and then I'm going to press and release the left mouse button and then drag this up while I'm holding the control key and holding the control key will help me to get a perfectly vertical line then I'm going to press release the left mouse button and then I'm going to pull this off to the left while holding the control key again so that I can get a horizontal line and then I'll click that with the left mouse button and then finally I'm going to drag down to my starting point and left-click on that point and so now I've made a triangle shape and next I'm going to turn this into the left side of a heart and to do that I'm going to come up here and I'm going to select the Edit nodes tool and then I'm going to place the cursor on the center of this line press and hold the left mouse button and just drag this up a little bit and then I'm going to come down here and press and hold the left mouse button and I'm going to pull this over this way a little bit and then I'll click on this node and if I go up here I can select the smooth node tool and I'll just click on that and that causes the two lines that go through this node to be straight and now you can see that I have the left side of a heart so I'm going to go ahead and fill that in with the color black right now and I also want to get rid of the stroke or border and as you can see right here I have a 1 pixel wide stroke and so I'm going to get rid of that by right-clicking and then I'm going to select remove stroke and next I want to make a copy of this so with this selected and I can just press the selection tool right here I'm going to press control D and that will create a copy of it and then I'm going to mirror it horizontally by pressing this button right here and then next I'm going to press and hold the left mouse button while I drag this over to the side and if I press the control key while I drag it it'll drag it without going up and down at all so I'm going to put it about right there next I want to bring these two sides together and I can do that by selecting the alignment dialog box here so I'll click on that so I'll select the right side of the heart first and then I'll select the left side of the heart second and then when I go to the align dialog box if I set the relative to box to first selected then I can click this button right here and it will bring those two parts together and now that I have them join together I'm going to create a single object from this and I can do that by going up to the path menu and select Union and now I have a single object so I'm going to move this down a little bit and then the next thing that I want to do is to make a copy of this so I'm going to press control D and this copy that I just made I'm going to change it to the color red in order to create the gradient effect that I'm after I need to change this red color to a blur and I can do that by opening up the fill and Stroke dialog box and I can find that under the object menu and so I'll click that and now I can come over here to this blur slider and I can just give myself a blur and as you can see with this blurred like this I have a nice bright red center but around the edge it starts getting dark because of the black background that's below it and so this is the effect that I wanted to create with the gradient will notice around the outside of the heart since I blurred this I have a lot of red that's bled over so to get rid of that I'm going to clip it off to do that I'm going to make another copy of this red top that I have right here by pressing ctrl D and then I want to select everything that I have here so far so I'm going to draw a rectangle around this whole area and that will select the black heart that's on the bottom as well as both of the blurred red hearts that are on top of it and then if I go up to the object menu I can select clip and set and when I do that it trimmed off all of the red that had bled over to the outside of the heart what happened when I selected clip and set is that it took the top object that I had and it clipped everything underneath it to that shape and you might notice that the object that I use to clip with was also blurred if I were to remove the blur before I clipped it I would actually get an ill regular gradient around the edge so it's a trick that I discovered that if you keep the clip object or the object that's on top blurred while you do the clip then you get a nice smooth gradient around the edge so let's go ahead and finish off our heart by making it look shiny and we can do that by selecting the circle tool and so I'm going to press and hold the left mouse button while I drag this and I'm also going to press the ctrl key and that will give me a perfect circle and make it about that big and then I'm going to come down here and change the color to white and then I'm going to click on the selection tool and drag this up and I'm going to go up to the path menu and select object to path and then I'm going to click on the node edit button here and then with this bottom node right here I'm going to press and hold the left mouse button while I drag this up just to change the shape of this then next I'm going to click on the gradient tool and I'm going to make sure that I have linear gradient selected by clicking this left button and then I'm going to press and hold the left mouse button while I drag this down and then I'm going to grab the top node here I'm going to pull that up a little bit and so that looks like it's shiny on the left side so I'm going to hit the selection button here and I'm going to duplicate this by pressing ctrl D then I'm going to press and hold the left mouse button while I drag this over and again if I hold the ctrl key it'll drag it completely horizontally and I'll drag it to about right there now this looks like that I have a shine on the top of this heart well this is how you use the blur and clip technique to create a gradient and this will work with many different shapes the gradient tool is a very nice tool right here but you're limited to either linear gradients or radial gradients so when you have a shape like this heart the gradient tool isn't able to give you a nice dark gradient around the edge of it so this blur and clip technique is a technique that you can use on many different shapes well thanks for watching and please subscribe and leave a comment have a great day

Channel: tutor4u

Views: 77,415

Keywords: Inkscape, tutorial, tutorials, vector, graphics, blur, clip, tips, tricks, beginners

Id: kA4fsVQMrN0

Length: 9min 28sec (568 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 19 2011