Inkscape Tutorial: How to Make Car Profile Vector Art

i'm rick johansen and this is the iron echo design channel in today's video we're going to do an inkscape tutorial and it's based on a couple of recent comments i've had asking if we can do vehicle profile art i think it's a great idea it's fun and it's easy so you can do any car you want if you want to follow along in this step-by-step tutorial i'm going to do this number right here and in the lin there'll be a link in the description below for this reference photo because we're going to do this maserati all right so to begin we need to get a basic idea you can trace it if you want but i want to show you how to actually build this thing from scratch so if you're new to inkscape i'll show you some of the tools along the way the first one is guidelines all right so you see you have your ruler up here if you grab anywhere on the ruler it'll pull down a guideline and this is useful in a lot of projects but in this case we're going to use it to create the proportions of the vehicle so car manufacturers they have like these ratios for the first one is the roof line the second if you grab another one is like where the door starts window starts on the door and then the third one is the chassis so if it's just a visual cue if you look at like pick your favorite car and like year to year it does follow the same ratio they'll change different stylings and details but if we're going to be making our vector art we're going to base it on these ratios so those are the first three the next two guidelines are going to be the wheels because this is the key to all the proportions so the top line there's the top of my wheel if you can't see it i'm just pulling it to the bottom of the wheel and one more thing i always do when i have lots of guidelines starts to get messy is you can change the colors on them so just double click on one and you want to go to for my wheels i'll make them black if you can't see it i'm just making this line black so i know that my wheels are the black guidelines one of my absolute favorite things about design of any type of design is when like math coincides with like the beauty of it so check this out this this is my this maserati it works perfectly with but i bet it works with any vehicle you pick if it's well designed so check this out so let's choose the circle and ellipsis tool if you hold shift and control together you can pull out a perfect circle just get something on the on the workspace there so because we're gonna i'm gonna show you this ratio because we're gonna base the whole art on it all right let's make it full black this is your fill and stroke menu if you don't have it it's this paint brush thing in the corner i'm just making my circle and actually let's change the opacity so we can see through it here down here there's opacity just bring it down somewhere so you can see through lining it up if you hold shift and control again it'll keep the proportion perfect okay that's over the wheel so there's our ratio of the wheel itself now i'm going to put the opacity full make it red just so we can see exactly what i'm talking about watch how the math comes in so perfectly here if you have it selected do control d we'll duplicate it and if you hold ctrl it'll lock in the horizontal and just bring it out ctrl d bring it out ctrl d look at that it is it's it's perfect so the wheel the two wheel bases are exactly one two three four five apart and watch this duplicate that one i'll make this one so you can see through it and you can do the same thing for like vertical guidelines that's a half and it gets even better duplicate that bring it over here and you're at a half in the front as well it's just just beautiful and we're going to use that beauty to work first so grab somewhere in no man's land collect everything ctrl g will group it then if you hold ctrl again we can slide it out give yourself some space and we will use this to build our car so let's add in the verticals we know it's about half right there and half right there and this is going to become a maserati let's begin by choosing the actual wheels now so this will become black full opacity black full opacity and if you have a selector tool we can say goodbye to the rest of them from here we're going to use the bezier pen tool to actually draw the rough like the real rough like the unmolded clay using the guidelines we'll start at the front of the car and we're going to rough out just the basic shape so we know the roofline comes up here comes up around here it drops back down i'm certain that this is the back of the car so i'll click there it comes down to around here and i've got to go down to the chassis not the black wheel the chassis comes straight across and at some point it meets back in the top so let's change the color there so it's ugly but this is like we're molding the clay also i'm going to drop it down a step here so go to selector tool this is your hierarchy let's drop it down one step two step to get behind the two wheels and let's change this clunky pinewood derby box into a beautiful italian masterpiece this is where inkscape really shines because it lets you have total control of the shapes that you want to create so i'm going to click on this clunky thing we have here and this one right here is called edit paths by node you'll see the different nodes are these little diamonds each node we can manipulate so let's say this has more of a curve here pull out a little bit of a curve this is going to be a nice gradual curve it up to where you like it if you click on a diamond and this lets you change the curve itself this one might be too far back i've got this node down here that i think is too low when i look at the reference just grab it and move it if you don't like how it affects the other parts like i know this is supposed to be a perfect horizontal you can double click and put it back this is also the part where you can do some artistic license so like if i look at the reference here this looks like it curves out then down and i kind of like how it just goes straight down but if you wanted to go more realistic you would want to adjust that it's easy to see just glancing back and forth the windshield's way off so this node right here should come back so in about a minute of the bezier pen tool modifications we went from a clunky piece of junk to a smooth piece of junk before moving on i want to show you a detail how to fine tune some of your shape here so you see how like on the hood here there's this node i need that change in curve but it shouldn't be like a hard point so there's two ways you can fix it you can click on that particular node and just push delete but then that kind of gives it like too much of a curve so ctrl z put it back or you can click on it and then choose this thing right here looks like a like a necklace make selected node smooth and that keeps the node there so i can change where the break goes and then you can use the handles to put it where you want it somewhere right in here good enough off camera i tweaked a couple more points around the shape and now it's time for the paint job so to do that go to selector tool and we will use the linear gradient for this effect the way it works is whatever your object is that's going to be the base of the gradient so click on gradient it's going to go from the base color of gray which is full opacity to full transparency that's the most basic gradient but we're going to modify this so this pencil thing if you click on that you're going to get a bar it's close to one of my guidelines here but you see a square and then a circle the square is your base color at full opacity it's going to go to circle full transparency that's the default first thing we're going to do is take your square which is the base color put it on the bottom then take the circle and make it go towards the top so we're going to use the gradient not only for color but to also add depth and contouring and to do that we'll add multiple stops so we'll start with the bottom modify that to maybe a lighter gray i'll use the guideline for the first break so to make a multiple stop do a double click on your gradient bar let's go full white on that see how it adds a little bit of contouring right off the bat and then to make the effect better we'll go directly above that go back to gray but that kind of makes it look like a like a toy car so above that we'll add another one go back to white there we go so as it's too dramatic we'll tweak it at the end and somewhere up here i either want white or gray let's see what we like and then we'll just modify it you can move them around until you like the way it looks right about there and there is a b in here quick point if you're going to use this project outside of inkscape make sure each of your stops on the gradient the opacity is full otherwise you'll come into issues if you bring this into affinity or photoshop or something all right let's move on to the wheels and the rims i'm going to keep this black circle here as a holding space because i don't want to lose my ratio so instead grab the circles tool shift to control bring out a new circle we'll change the sizing later and i need to go to full opacity black so we're gonna make a tire so instead of doing linear gradient we'll go to radial gradient which is right here same thing as before the base of the gradient will be whatever color your object is so gradient go to pencil let's modify it so the center is already black which is correct but remember it goes to full transparency change that to black but the stops we're going to put in here is first towards the end this is going to be the tire so this is like low profile tire but it still has some contour to it so near the top double-click it puts it on both of the gradient bars for you and we'll change this one to let's see what it looks like okay white walls go to somewhere in the gray and we'll add another one we're going to cover this with a rim but here i'm trying to get let's go back to black something like that but maybe less dramatic so let's lighten this one right about there so there's our low profile tire let's do the rim now so grab the circle tool shift to control makes a nice circle this will actually be behind the rim we'll use that in a second duplicate this change the color to or whatever metallic looking rim we're doing so for this you can align it up better with the align distribute menu if you don't have it it sees like bar graph thing click on that what happens is if you select the rims then shift select your tire over here if it's relative to the last selected you can then center it horizontally and then center it vertically it just puts it right in right where you want it i want to add a little ridge inside there so i'll duplicate it let's put a stroke on this thing so go to fill and stroke menu stroke activate the stroke we'll make it a dark gray stroke weight maybe 1.5 minimize and then blur so down here there's a blur that's good so i'm going to put spokes here but rather than cut this thing apart i'll just have this be the black negative space i'm going to draw new spokes on top of it so let's get the hierarchy right go to the top bring it into place and this is where the align distribute menu comes in handy again so it's selected i'll do shift select the gray align and distribute center vertical all right so now let's draw the spoke so first i need the center part shift and control just eyeball it here shift to get my other circle center vertical okay we need some lug nuts and lug nuts are going to just be another circle we'll make this darker there's five lug nuts right here there's a trick you can do you see how it has a hash mark on the center bring the hash mark down and you can use the space bar to stamp out lug nuts the hash mark becomes a rotation point so if you grab the handles it's going to rotate around that hash mark and the space bar lets you stamp stuff out so i'll go spacebar spacebar spacebar spacebar lug nuts and if they're out of order just move them not bad this is why i love inkscape all these little tools like this let's do the spokes now so i'll grab the bezier pen tool just going to draw one spoke it has to be the same color as the rim there how's that eyedropper do we want that maybe thinner if you don't like your object go to edit paths by node that's a little better all right so let's get that little hash mark again so i select it there's my hash mark now if you hold ctrl it locks in the vertical i do want to get this in the center and same thing the hash marks there that's the pivot point and the handles let you spin looks like we're about right so just stamp where you want it so you can design your own rims if you make a mistake like that one doesn't look so good just there's your hash mark which move it all right wheels and rims are done we need to group everything together before we put it into place so grab in the middle of nowhere around everything control g then we can resize right about there then control d will duplicate it again if you hold control it'll allow you to lock in the horizontal so you can slide it perfectly let's bring the other wheel all right it's coming together so i'm going to make the windows now and the last piece of the ratio we don't have on our grid here is where the door actually starts so let's go back to our wheel measurement and check the reference photo to see where we put that last vertical guideline all right so one two three four five there's our five wheels we go back to the source it's gonna come off this is the door right at the half mark so somebody put some thought into how they made this maserati come together so we know that halfway on this inner wheel is going to be where the door starts bring a guideline out and then we can remove this tank tread okay let's rough in some windows here so i'll grab my bezier pen tool i'm going to follow the guideline so i'll start bring it up come just at the door i know the car has a little bit of an angle come in like that and then there's a secondary window in the back now let's clean it up i had to go to true voice over on this part because i was trying to make the windows look right look at my face in the caption not making it look easy i'm just shaping the back window here with the handles until it looks about right let's zoom out get some perspective and i think we'll go with that at this stage we can make the windows tinted now so i'm going to go back to the fill and stroke menu this time i'll choose the radial gradient we can edit this start with the inner part being more white and then the outer parts being black need to make the opacity come back up and you can play with the effect it's only changing the object of the window it's not going to mess up the body of the car so that's too dramatic so we'll click on the center part make it more gray red we'll just go with that same thing for the back window just go to radial you can cheat and choose the same gradient you have just edit that one i'm going to add in the door lines now the back quarter panel and a couple more linear markings on the vehicle so grab the bezier pen tool and we'll draw down our door and it has a fill so on the fill and stroke menu just x out of the fill we need the stroke to be there so choose stroke for stroke weight that weight looks about right maybe we'll pump it up this part becomes like artistic personal preference if you want a hard line keep it the way it is i think i'm going to change the stroke to something more subtle a gray and add a little blur but we still have to clean it up so go to edit paths by node and i'm going to smooth some things out there's our door there's a seam at the bottom so same thing grab the bezier pen tool put some blur back in there maybe lower that one let's move to the back quarter panel there's going to be a tail light i might do the tail light off camera just to speed things up but the quarter panel comes about there blurred that baby all right through the magic of editing i did add some more details first the tail light and this was just drawn with the bezier pen tool then reshaped then a headlight with a radial gradient some vent details and i threw in a side view mirror to make this thing street legal so there we have it that is a vector art off of a source photo of this maserati you can use any vehicle you want i hope this helped if you have any questions leave a comment below any suggestions for future videos let me know thanks [Music]

Channel: IronEcho Design

Views: 1,910

Keywords: Graphic Design, Inkscape, Affinity, Photoshop, Startup, Design, Tutorials, Tips, Logo, car profile, Vehicle profile, side view, how to, Rick Johanson

Id: KBWS1fP4134

Length: 16min 42sec (1002 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 04 2021