Inkscape Tutorial: How to Make Spray Tool Misty Forest Vector Design

i'm rick johansen and this is the iron echo design channel today we're going to do an inkscape tutorial it's going to be a beginner beginner intermediate level and it comes from a couple of requests one specifically a request to do a forest scene i thought that was a good idea so we'll do this number right here and the other requests i've been getting i appreciate is asking to highlight specific tools so this for actually this one over here this number is from a previous tutorial and i did use the spray tool to make these hills but i want to go into more detail specifically if you want to recreate this number right here so if you're going to play along let's begin grab the crate squares rectangles tool and draw out a rectangle roughly the size and scale that you want to work on for your project we're going to build off of this and eventually clip it at the end to the size that we want but for now let's just get that started we'll change it this is the fill and stroke menu here if you don't have it it's this paint brush thing in the corner i'm going to go very neutral i'm on color wheel just something in the grays so i can see it against the workspace and now let's go over the spray tool so spray tools down here it's very powerful it's going to allow us to take an object and then spray it almost like it's a painter's knife in this case so let's first start by drawing out one branch of a tree in the forest grab the bezier pen tool and this doesn't have to be perfect because we're going to scale this down but just get something on there that looks like a branch let's change this color to green for our pine tree something maybe darker this brings us to our first tip a beginner tip here i'm gonna make the illusion of pine needles on this branch it's going to scale down so much it may not matter but just for the detail so i've got the first object selected i go back to the bezier pen i'll be on regular path and what i'm going to do is just cut into the first object just to cut out part of it so once you have your your second object now it's hard to tell it's the same color so i'll change the color if you have both of them selected so here's selector tool the first one selected hold shift get the second one then go to path difference and that cuts it out it looks like a palm tree it's not going to matter once we have it all scaled down now you can run with this just as it is and use it with the spray tool to get the effect but i'm going to add one more detail here with the object selected do control d that duplicates it and let's change that one slightly brighter i'm gonna up arrow and all i did was create a little depth and contrast being quick and a little messy is okay that's the way creativity is but i can't have the front and the back detached so i'm going to go to the bottom one edit paths by node and then that lets me pull the nodes together once you have it the way you like it hold shift and create a box around both of the objects and control g will group it together alright now we can use the spray tool and i'll show you the settings to make it work first let's go into some open space i'm going to keep the original branch as a reference let's ctrl d duplicate it and scale this one way down and zoom in all right let's do a practice spray first so i can show you the settings i've got the object selected i click on the spray can for mode you want to be on the third one from the left which is spray objects in a single path for width 5 amount 10 that's how many it's going to spray out per click rotation 8 that varies the direction a little bit scale 30 that varies the size scatter 5 focus 0. so the object selected i'm on the spray can i'm going to hold down the left mouse button and it sprays it out it'll spray out any direction that you drag it it's going to go so you could just make trees or in this case a mess pretty easily so let's ctrl z control z clean it up okay let's make our tree i'm going to start with a thin line for a tree trunk just as a reference that we can hang the branches on so to do that i'll get the calligraphic tool i'm on dip pen with one thinning 30 tremor 10. just draw a straight line down there's our tree trunk it's the wrong color so let's go with something brown probably won't see much of it but it's a good reference point i think for speed i'm going to make a couple different sizes of my branches so ctrl d some larger branches for the bottom ctrl d maybe some smaller branches for the top and while we're at it might as well do the other side of the tree as well so ctrl d these are directional so i'll flip the direction ctrl d flip the direction let's spray them on so collect this one right here i'll go to spray can i'm just going to drag it up let's try the other side move on to the midsize branch then you look at your tree and see what branches don't belong what is unnatural that shouldn't be there some of these can come out let's group this whole thing ctrl g groups it all together maybe give it a squeeze control d duplicate so i can now use this and spray this object and just like with the branches i can make variations for my spray so this will be a skinny one and this will be a super tall one that is reverse direction now let's build our composition here so i've got the tree i want to use selected i'm on the spray can same settings as before the only change is i took the rotation down to zero because i don't want to have any slanting trees here so i'm going to go down to the bottom just hold the left mouse button down and spray some trees try some of these now if you feel compelled you don't want to spray you can always just grab it and do control d and place it in for instance i'll put this one here as my featured tree and that will do it for the foreground so i'm going to group all of these green trees control g and now i can cheat by doing ctrl d to duplicate it and then reverse it let's move the reversed version into some open space and since i can tell inkscape is kind of using a little bit more muscle than normal i don't know if that's my screen recorder i'm going to remove some of the trees to get rid of some of the computing power required okay we'll see if that helps so now i have to regroup this part ctrl g and here's a way we can make this set of trees look a lot different from this front one without doing much so i've got it all selected i'll go to filters color simple blend and this will bring up a color wheel here now i've got it set to screen these are all different options you can use but screen is going to keep it so i have my contrast change it'll just affect the overall color so in this case i've got it set to a gray which will kind of mute the colors a bit i'll go to live preview and it's okay a little lighter gray looks a bit better if you're not seeing it render unclick live preview and then click live preview again and it should show you what it will look like when you're happy with it just push apply i think i'll stretch it out mostly so i can grab it for later i'm going to add in some fog but let's move it into place the hierarchy is going to be off so the first thing i'll do is lower one step right about there is good now i'm going to add some fog in the front so i've done this effect in the past but to give you the quick version we're going to do a watercolor effect so i'll start with an oval it's set to the gray of the backdrop which is fine i'll go to filters texture watercolor and let's zoom in actually i'll just change the color so you can see it so this is the watercolor effect you're going to change the way it looks originally with the blur here so if i take the blur all the way off you can see my oval is there with the pattern the texture pattern that inkscape gives us so i'll add some blur if you want to really dive into the different settings for watercolor i have some previous tutorials on my channel that i get into it but for this one i'm going to move past that if you need to modify it more just play with the opacity and blur until you see something on there now in this case i'll show you one other thing if you touch the x you can move it around and when you get it the way you like it like right let's say i want some legs on it okay so i like it the way it looks there go to selector tool resize it and that's going to lock it in so now when you move it it won't keep changing and otherwise it'll modify it and you might lose what you're going for so now i can make it back to white and here's my fog i'll do control d to make my fog thicker and that's my fog layer on top of the foreground so i think i'll do one in between actually i won't do a watercolor if you don't feel like doing watercolor you can still do it with just a regular oval give it some gray and we'll just do a regular old blur so first get the opacity back so you see where it is i want to drop below the foreground so i'll do hierarchy i'll throw it to the bottom all the way and then i'll raise it up until it's in front of this the secondary level of trees okay so it's in front now i can change the opacity make that white and then blur off camera i tweaked the back row made a couple modifications to the fog i just wanted to make the composition look more full and now i'll make the third row with the lightest trees in the far background so to do that i'll grab one of these ctrl d i'm not going to do the spray tool this time i'll be more precise i just want three of them so ctrl d one here maybe make this one fatter something like that i'll group all of them ctrl g and for this i'm going to go very very light on opacity because i want it to just be the hint of the tree behind there maybe down to four that's too light five seven let's try seven let's sneak this over right there looks good before we go i'll duplicate that reverse it and i'll put it on this side i think it's affecting the opac i think i have to drop it down to the bottom so let's go to the bottom for hierarchy then raise it up one and that is our forest hopefully someplace cooler than the 85 degrees it is tonight here and i was going to change the background here some yellow but i don't feel like it so let's just raise this up we'll stamp it out to do that let's zoom out a bit you want to grab way out into no man's land if you have something you don't want to group you can hold shift and unclick those pieces this doesn't want to ungroup it's going to get sacrificed ctrl g will group our whole project together okay from here i can grab a rectangle tool i'm going to draw out a box that we will use for a clipping box make its color so we can see it this is to stamp out the final project in whatever proportion ratio size scale that you like right there is good with the clipping box selected hold shift get everything else object clip set and there we have it there is our forest spray tool inkscape tutorial completed i probably should have filled in some more under there but that's okay because this is all practice so good luck have fun with it if you have any questions or suggestions you'd like to see in future videos let me know in the comments below thanks

Channel: IronEcho Design

Views: 2,804

Keywords: Graphic Design, Inkscape, Affinity, Photoshop, Startup, Design, Tutorials, Tips, Logo, Forest, Mist, Fog, Spray Tool, Rick Johanson

Id: gcU9bsLcDGo

Length: 12min 36sec (756 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 28 2021