Inkscape Tutorial: Geometric Line Art Designs with Live Path Effects Tiling

I'm Rick Johansen and this is iron Echo design inkscape is always adding new features for us and we're always trying to improve our skills I want to show you how you can make geometric line art like this it's very easy to do it's actually a new method compared to the last time we did this type of art before you had to do tiled clones and make adjustments to shift scale rotation pretty complicated now it's super easy thanks to the new live path effects tiling feature I'll show you how it works right now for starters let's all get on the same page literally this is the page area go to file document properties and for the format will be on A4 it's two 10 millimeters by 297 millimeters this will just keep us all at the same scale if you want to follow along and since these type of designs look really good against a black background on page if you click here you can change the page background color to Black and I'll show you how easy it is let's go to the create stars and polygons tool on the menu the default will will be on Stars click over to polygons since we want a hexagon we'll change the corners to six now I can click and drag open my shape also if you hold Ctrl it'll help you lock in different increments so it's easier to make it straight up and down now I've got a black stroke with no fill if you need to change yours you can go to object fill and stroke on the fill tab we want it to be blank today so have the fill on X no paint and for stroke let's actually do a white stroke for right now before I bring it onto the page let me show you the absolute Basics on how the path of X tiling works first we have to make sure we have something selected like this object then you can go to path path effects you'll see a sidebar menu come up but it's empty down here on the plus that's add a path effect now you have your live path effect selector we want to find tiling usually it's on the bottom click on tiling and it still looks like there's a lot of stuff here but it's a lot easier than before it's more visual less punching in calculations for mirroring mode today stay on the very first one right here and you can see the default is rows three columns three so here's my original the trick to this type of design is to change it to one row and we'll start with 25 columns here's our one row and there's 25 of these going across a lot of the math in the old way was to try to get them to line up and stack on top of each other now it's super easy go up here to edit paths by node and you'll see these two nodes right here we can now just visually drag them all on top of each other you can get them pretty close but then you should zoom in also to help you can enable snapping this magnet with lightning inside of it if you toggle that on now when you drag the pieces together it goes right on top right like that I'll go up here to zoom to fit page bring it onto the page and let's continue we'll start with scale right here because we have one row with 25 columns we want to be on this icon so we're going to say starting from the first one let's reduce the scale every time by how much let's reduce it negative three percent every single time enter you see how it worked so it has the original and 25 iterations getting smaller and smaller let's actually change the stroke width one might be too big let's go to 0.5 millimeters back to path effects now for the rotate this is where it kind of makes that twist first you have to go to the second option so each one of our 25 rotates a little bit each time and let's try three degrees enter right there in no time once you know how to use this menu you can make something pretty cool like that instantly hit plus minus and you can keep changing the amount look at that that's like a James Bond intro graphic seven eight you can also go back up to scale maybe change that that's at negative two stay on negative three let's say you don't like how the center one ends on this angle you want to change the way that looks you can add more columns or you can take them away let's do another one delete ready for the main event back to polygons and stars we want to be on polygon six that's going to be our hexagon but I want to warp it inward so for a rounded we'll do 1.0 enter you can see it bent it in a bit with the point for fill and stroke let's go pretty thin 0.35 millimeters for stroke paint I want to add the gradient so I'm on the stroke paint tab click over to linear gradient and the default you'll see goes from full color whatever color you had to full transparency if you want this to have opacity click on it so now you can see on a for Alpha you're on full transparency slide that over to full opacity and we'll make that red like a deep red maybe bring your yellow over as well I want the predominant color to be yellow on the actual hexagon I can see I'm just past the halfway point now we can spin it back to the pathfx tab add the path effect which one tiling we'll do one row start with 25 why not edit paths by node it's going to let us stack them it's hard to do it without zooming when I was practicing this I kept forgetting you gotta push the second tab for scale and rotate or nothing happens why don't we do a negative two scale there's a lot of them and for rotate we'll try three there you go uh no it'll do four make it a little bit more aggressive and since I want less space between them we'll do negative 1.75 I like it I like it like that but let me show you some adjustments you can do first we can add some interior hexagons we'll do 40 and you might like it going from the yellow to the red spitting the way it is but if you do split elements see the difference now the colors in a twist with each individual hexagon and make it go in like that I couldn't figure this out doing the old method on the old video I never told you guys because I didn't think it was relevant but if you were looking for that specific feature it's the split elements and that's how you do it what do you think let me know in the comments if you have any questions for future videos let me know and we'll see you next time

Channel: IronEcho Design

Views: 6,552

Keywords: Inkscape, Inkscape Tutorial, Rick Johanson, IronEcho, Iron Echo Design, Geometric Line Art, Hexagon Design

Id: EpHi2_5hTdY

Length: 6min 22sec (382 seconds)

Published: Thu May 18 2023