Inkscape Tutorial: How to Make Watercolor Star Chart | Night Sky Star Map (Stellarium Data)

i'm rick johansen and this is the iron echo design channel today we're going to do an inkscape tutorial it's now part of a series of night sky star charts this is the first one we did on this tutorial there was a comment from tom moy who says it's stunning can you also create a new one with the multi-color-like cosmic background that shows star constellation so first of all thanks and yes i think that's a great idea these are fun they're easy and i love showing you how to do them so let's do this number today this is gonna be orion for the constellation so one i'll show you how to create this backdrop we'll add some pops of color with some special effects tools and then we're gonna get the actual real star data from whatever time and place that you choose for the night sky and i'll show you some easy ways to create the constellation dots okay so let's begin we'll start by making the night sky bleed off the page so that's done with the watercolor texture effect so we'll start by grabbing the circle tool and draw yourself a circle or an oval something that you can start with and if you don't have your fill and stroke menu it says paint brush thing in the corner i'm set to full opacity and black now the texture effect is under filters texture watercolor so there there you go so i love this feature but we have to kind of modify the different parameters to make it look like this if yours isn't showing up on the first try it's probably the blur so down here there's a blur and this bar if you take the blur away you can see there's our circle object and there's the texture it's using inkscape is using so just change it till you see it filled in about where you like it so that's pretty cool right there we can use it like this but let me show you how to further modify it so if it if you have it selected go back to filters then go to filter editor all these different choices let you control the effect so the first one gaussian blur we play with the blur already on the fill and stroke part click on turbulence so this one octaves will change the amount of details so if you take away the octaves it gets kind of blurry so let's go back to five five or six usually has good detail in there composite the first composite just tap it on over color matrix i never touch displacement map for the scale down here watch what happens if you lower the scale or raise the scale it's changing pretty much how the whole thing looks i'm going to lower down into 30 25 30 or something so right there is good composite in another composite in another composite arithmetic remember this one this arithmetic one we're going to use this for another texture to put the color pops in and then finally blend just makes your own multiply all right that should bring us all pretty close together you can play with these as you want but if you can't get the effect to work just put a comment below and i'll see if i can help you out everyone's just going to look different because inkscape is processing math based on a lot of factors but as long as you can see the variations in color and how like it kind of bleeds off the edge that'll work okay so watch this so click on the object and then choose the this thing right here called edit paths by node i want to show you one more thing if you really want to really control these edges like i might use this edge and just turn it around grab one of your squares and you can really move things around to get it where you want it right there's good if you want to choose the center x grab that and you can move it around until you like the way it looks so i'm just going to go with i'm going to go with it right here so if i click on the selector tool and start to move it around i'll just show you it'll change again every time you you lift it up so i'm going to stop it right there for some reason if you resize it'll lock in this effect you have going on so i'm going to do shift and control just to keep the proportions exact and i'm going to drag it up and now it should stay locked in let's fill out some more of the night sky so this is my favorite part down here in the bottom i have it selected i'm going to do ctrl d that'll duplicate it and i like how it just enriches the color i'll do control d again but this time i'm going to move that one so i have some more depth of the night sky so ctrl d again i'm just doing just duplicating it this is all going to be clipped out to a final project rectangle but i do want to have some opacity at the top there we go that's about eight of them layered on top of each other and we're looking a little bit evil so let's go down to some color the first bit of color will be in the form of gradient i'm gonna slide underneath all this so let's grab the bezier pen tool and you can just draw a random shape doesn't have to cover everything because we're going to stamp out a rectangle in the end it's dark black so let's change this to something like that then to make the gradient this is linear gradient right here click that then this pencil thing will let you edit the gradient so a bar is going to come up and the base will always be your full opacity color i'm going to change that to the top and then i'll move the bottom this is going to be to transparency that's the default so we'll make it go transparent before the bottom somewhere so we're going to go from this blue to nothing but i want to add one more stop so double click on the bar and we'll go a little darker the top let's make it blend so what i'm doing is i'm choosing the top and i'm changing that there we go that's what i wanted to dark black now let's get this on the bottom so over here is hierarchy so you're going to drop it down to the bottom which is all the way down here there it goes so it you can barely see it but i wanted to have a little hint of color underneath everything because now i'm going to layer in with some artistic license some of the cosmo some of the colorful celestial bodies here it's similar to the watercolor effect but instead we're going to use the felt texture effect so we'll start by making a shape with the bezier pen tool and this can be anything probably abstract will work better let's go with something bright like a yellow orange as long as it's selected go up to filters textures felt doesn't look like felt but it's going to work pretty well for this project so let me just show you the parameters again so the first one you can modify is again down here on the blur if you take the blur away you can see that inkscape is using that pattern of felt filling in your object but we need some type of blur now i do like the way this looks right here but i want to show you again how you can edit it further so go back up to filters filter editor and this is a filter editor based on this felt texture so gaussian blur we just played around with the blur already for turbulence same thing as before octaves will change the amount of detail so i'm on five displacement map my scale is on 20 this changes how close everything is put together so the lower the more tight it is the higher the more displaced it is so maybe 20 27 25 looks okay we already played with the gaussian blur on the fill and stroke menu for composite this is what i was talking about before this is arithmetic k1 i'm set to 1.0 this affects the amount of light so if you go negative you're gone and if you go up to 10 it's full brightness so let's go back to one k2 affects some of the color like the red channel 0.50 is where i'm at if you want to try that k3 seems to be a combination of both the amount of light and then also one of the color channels i'm at 0.5 and k4 is one more parameter the preset is zero mine's at zero seems to be some internal contrast the second to last composite setting just have it set for operator in and the final composite setting is another arithmetic one except this one affects the entire box area so i'll show you for example the k4 is set to zero but if you change it it changes the entire box so this one's a little bit a little bit harder to play with just leave it b so it's 1.5000 this tutorial seems to be a lot more right brain left brain so let's go back to just doing some artwork so i've got my felt cosmos here i'm going to select it i'll change maybe i'll play with the let's change the scale i like it right there i'm going to cheat i'll do ctrl d which will duplicate it and over here is directional so change the direction and this one will move into a different different color so i'm going to drop this beneath this first yellow but you see how it's like the felt is tightly packed let's go change that so quickly go to filter editor turbulence and we can change it all i did was i changed the base frequency down to .038 i just wanted to have a little bit less of the texture and more just of a glow let's drop it down a step behind the yellow maybe mute the color a little bit maybe it was too bright change the opacity that looks good right there let's duplicate that i'm going to use it again even more subtly down here so i have more of a mix even less opacity and drop it down behind both of them i need one more cosmic cloud here let's go back to bezier pen tool i'll just draw something this might be off the grid anyway when we stamp it out but let's go with something red same thing go to filters texture felt and that's pretty intense let's blur this out a little bit another way you can change the way it looks besides doing the filter editor is go to edit paths by node and then you can pull pieces of it to kind of drag it out that's what i'm going for something like that i better tweak this thing a little bit more it's looking less like space and more like a different dimension so we'll go to turbulence that looks good right there displacement map that thins it out let's try the third composite this is the dangerous one whoa whoa i do like that just playing around with that part maybe red wasn't the right choice this yellow seems to match better let's see how it looks if we drop it down a step i need to tweak this this is not to scale okay off camera i tweaked that first one now that i see it all together i feel like it should be a little bit more yellow have some more contrast against the blue i definitely like this thing reminds me of that nasa photo the pillars of creation i made a couple moves off camera i just reduced some of the blue and added some more black on the bottom here all right now let's get the star data and get our star chart together here so we're going to get the information from stellarium so stellarium.org this is an open source platform and it's a way where you can look through any location and any time what the night sky looked like so it's a great tool i want to give credit to stellarium for providing this resource for free so let's say there's a specific date or time that's important to you maybe your birthday or when you met your significant other so let's start with location you can type in any location in the world here's my location and then you can type in any time so change the date time and it shows the exact night sky now these parameters we can change so for view settings get rid of milky way get rid of dss what we're doing is we're trying to get just the plot of the stars we're going to extract it and then put it into inkscape and make a vector out of it so we don't need atmosphere we don't need landscape and we don't need deep sky objects if you just scroll around it's pretty cool so you can play around with this now for speed i've queued up the view that i want with the date that i want because i want to do the constellation of orion so if you have this right here constellation select that and it'll show you if you want the actual picture it's this guy but i don't want to take that data we're going to do a line constellation so get rid of the art just the constellations don't need that i'll draw my own lines and then it used to be you could just do right click download on the first tutorial that's no longer there i did look it up they might be adding a downloadable feature but for now just do a screen capture if you need help with the screen capture just put a comment below and we'll point you in the right direction so i'm going to go with this star map here i saved it to the desktop and let's go back into inkscape create some open space and i'm just going to drag in the file image import type embed dpi from file rendering none okay and we have our stars to get the stars out we go to path trace bitmap this menu will come up so for trace bitmap you want to be on single scan brightness cutoffs what that means is it's going to look at the lightness and the darkness of the image and extract the darkness so in this case we're going to go to invert so now we're going to extract the lightness and then we'll change it back so the stars are going to come out black and then we'll change it back to white so for brightness threshold you want to be around .25 speckles smooth corners optimize all checked click update it'll give you make sure you have the item selected if the item selected then click update and then it'll give you a preview apply and here they are here's our black stars i've zoomed in here so you can see how to get rid of the words so you're going to select one of anything on the stars go to edit paths by node and if you don't want the word beetlejuice hold shift all around all those nodes and then delete so we can go around and clean up the words real quick or if there's any random stars you don't want you can delete anything you don't feel like needs to be there here it is all cleaned up now let's duplicate this because i want to save it to make the constellation control d but i can't wait any longer i want to add it to our cosmic field here we can change the color from black to nearly white i'm gonna have the bait i'm gonna have two layers one will be a glow so this will be kind of an orange glow let's put it into place there's orion let's blur this one and then duplicate that and unblur the top ones the top one will be bright white i made space let's connect the dots i'll grab my bezier pen tool i'm going to experiment on the side here just to get a feel for the color i'm going to go with just white with a little bit of a blur ctrl d and i'm just going to connect them there he is there's orion the hunter in constellation form i don't know if i would navigate to this star plot but it's good enough for now so let's go ahead and stamp this out so i've grouped everything off screen so the whole project is grouped together so now i've got here a translucent clipping box so with the clipping box selected hold shift grab everything else object clip set and here's the final project mounted with the title the night sky so if you have any questions leave a comment below if you have any ideas for a future video let me know and hopefully we can try it out and have fun with it

Channel: IronEcho Design

Views: 1,824

Keywords: Graphic Design, Inkscape, Affinity, Photoshop, Startup, Design, Tutorials, Tips, Logo, Night Sky, Star Chart, Rick Johanson, Stellarium

Id: ThusaC-Y76w

Length: 15min 10sec (910 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 20 2021