Inkscape Tutorial: Creating Vector Repeated Patterns

this is Nick with logos by Nick comm and in today's tutorial I'll be demonstrating how you can create repeated tiled backgrounds and patterns using Inkscape I'm going to show you how to take a graphic like this little crown icon you see here and create a pattern out of it and create it in such a way that you could use it as a background on a website or an application and it could repeat over and over and over again so let me get started here in Inkscape I'll show you what to do at any point in this tutorial you could look down at the bottom left hand side of my screen to see which mouse clicks and keystrokes I'm using and if you'd like to know how you can make Inkscape appear darkened with these custom icons a link to that information will be in the description so let's open up the align and distribute menu make sure we have less selected chosen from that drop-down and that will open up the Edit objects colors gradients and Stroke menu and we're going to want to go to view make sure we have that set to custom then we'll zoom in at 1 to 1 so the first thing I'm going to do is I'm actually going to create this little crown icon that you see here to do that I'll just grab the squares and rectangles tool hold ctrl and shift and click and drag to create a perfect square like that bring the opacity down in half and you don't want to make sure the corners are sharp on this thing so if this button is available for you to click make sure you click that so I'll go back to the Select tool I'm going to click on this again to get the rotation handles and I'll hold ctrl and rotate this around until the corners are going vertically and horizontally like that and then I'll duplicate that by hitting ctrl D and I'll hold ctrl and rotate this back around so it's sitting upright and then I'll click on it again to get the scaling handles and I'll hold ctrl and pull out this bottom arrow to make the width of this bigger than the width of the square beneath it and I'll just hold ctrl and move this down here about that far going above the corners of the square above it hold shift click on the square get a path difference I'm going to take this arrow and just move that in about that much let me hold ctrl and shift in the keyboard to scale this thing up that's a pretty good size let me pull that in a little more bring that in now what I'm going to do now is I'm going to duplicate this by hitting ctrl D and I'm going to turn that red and I'm going to go to the edit pads by nodes tool I'm going to take this node and put this over here to the left a little lower maybe over here like that and I'm going to turn on the snap the cusp nodes up here you put that down there like that that's pretty good go back to the Select tool I'll duplicate that by hitting ctrl D I'll flip that horizontally and I'll just take this and snap this onto the corner over here so you have it like that starting to look kind of like a crown now I'll click and drag over the whole thing and I'm just going to make it I'll pull that up to make it a little less high a little less tall and height and what I want to do now is I want to give this an outline by holding shift and clicking on the color black that's going to give it an outline and I can get rid of the fill color by clicking on the X over here and I'll come over to the stroke style tab and I want to make this outline pretty thick because it's going to be used as a small icon it's going to be used as small sizes so we're going to want to use heavy lines here I'm gonna go thicker than 15 I'm going to try 30 that's pretty good I'll leave it at 30 and once you have it at a size you like it may be different for you if you have it constructed at a different size and I have on my screen you may have to find the right value that makes your icon look good as far as the thickness goes so once I have that I'll go to path stroke to path click off of that to deselect everything and I'm going to take this object and just snap it to the corner over here and take this object let me zoom in a little bit by pressing plus in the keyboard I'll take this object oops I want to snap this to the corner right there I want to take this and snap that to the corner like that let me zoom out or you know what we can move the middle one out of the way and we could just make sure that these two are snapped on their respective corners like that then we can finally take this object and put it back in here hold shift click on the UH the object on the right there and align the bottom edges like that and then just click and drag over all of them and click the button that says make horizontal gas between objects equal and that's pretty good unify that together by going to path Union bring the opacity all the way up now I want to create another rectangle going down here and I'm going to make that black I'm going to hold shift and click on the X to get rid of the stroke and I believe I use 30 for these lines so I'm going to make them I want to make the height of this the same size that I use those lines so this let me change this height to 30 just move this up there hold shift click on the little crown icon make sure it's centered on the vertical axis and I'll just space this out a little bit that's pretty good we can click and drag over all of that and unify it together by going to path Union and hold ctrl and shift and scale it down alright so we have the icon now now it's time to actually create a pattern out of it so what I want to do now is I want to create a square we'll come over to the squares and rectangles tool and hold ctrl and shift and create a perfect symmetrical square like that and I'm going to bring the opacity of this down in half I'm going to turn this red for now I'll go to the Select tool click on it again to get the rotation handles and I'm going to hold ctrl and rotate this around until the corners are going up and down like that and what I want to do is want to take this crown icon raise it to the top and hold shift and click on the red square and center it on the vertical and horizontal axis click off of it to deselect and it'll take just this crown icon and I'm going to scale that down a little bit I want that to be a little smaller that's pretty good then I'll hold shift and click on the red square with both of these selected I'll right click that and go to duplicate and we again we're going to make sure that we have the snap the cuff nodes turned on for our next steps here I'm going to take this and put it right next to it like that and then I'll duplicate this by right-clicking it going to duplicate putting that right next to it right there and I'll right-click that and go to duplicate and put this on the bottom and let me click off this to deselect everything and I'm going to click on these two red squares and make them green just so you can see the difference between the four so I could explain what we're about to do so in order to create a graphic that we can use that could be repeated over and over and over again and give the appearance that it's all one graphic being repeated over and over again it's kind of tricky to explain we have to create an image we have to create a square out of these four squares if you notice where these corners touch and these corners touch these corners and these corners we got to create a square going at those corners and take the intersection of these four crowns so let me demonstrate that I'll go to the bezzie a pen I just press B on the keyboard to get that oops be on the keyboard I'll start at this corner here click go to this corner and then this corner and then this corner and then this corner and we have our square and I'm going to turn that black and I'm going to get rid of the stroke by holding shift and clicking on the X and I'll go back to the Select tool I'm going to click on these icons now I'll click on that one and then hold shift and click on the other three so we have them all selected and I want to turn them white and raise them to the top click off that to deselect everything and then I'm going to take this black square in the center I'll duplicate that by hitting ctrl D and then I'll hold shift and click on this crown icon right there and go to path intersection I'm going to do that with the other three I'm going to click on the black square control D hold shift click on the icon path intersection click the square control D click on that path intersection and one more path intersection and let me click off that's deselect everything let's take these boxes now and get rid of them we're done with them and I'll click and drag over all of this and group this together let me scale this down a little bit and what you have here is this right here is an image that can be used to create a tiled background kind of like this you can take this image and export it and set it as the background image of a website or an application and as long as the background properties are set to repeat it will appear like this repeat it and I'll demonstrate that for you here I'm going to duplicate this square by hitting ctrl D and I'll put it right here and you'll see it's repeated and let me duplicate those and put it right there oops put it the wrong spot me duplicate them again put them here and you'll notice you have the repeated pattern so let me show you another way you could do this I'll click on this object and then go to edit this is a good way to create a pattern in Inkscape if you just want to keep the graphic within Inkscape and you don't want to have to keep creating it do you have to keep duplicating the graphic over and over and over again this is a lot easier well select the graphic we'll go to edit where is it clone create tiled clones and from the create tiled clones menu we have the rows and the columns so we can create however many rows and however many columns that graphic so let's say we make 5 rows 5 columns and then hit create it just created a pattern that big let's say we change the columns to 10 because Umizoomi and you can see we have it there and you could remove it or you could just put it back and that's pretty much it that's how you can create tiled patterns using Inkscape so if you have any questions let me know and as always thank you for watching

Channel: Logos By Nick

Views: 88,997

Keywords: inkscape, learn inkscape, inkscape tutorial, inkscape for beginners, inkscape tutorials for beginners, vector, vector design, vector graphics, vector logo, vector tutorial, vector icons, vector pattern, pattern design, vector crown, crown icon, crown design

Id: MWYYi-LERVA

Length: 11min 27sec (687 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 28 2016