Inkscape Tutorial: How to Paint Trees with Spray Tool Custom Brushes + Color Change Clone Trick

i'm rick johansen and this is the iron echo design channel in this inkscape tutorial i want to take a closer look at the spray can tool because i think we can use it to create custom brushes as we do a study of a tree in this case i'll show you how to actually create the brushes how the tool works and specifically with the cloning feature you can then change the colors in real time to make different versions of the tree so this all stemmed from i was working on a landscape piece with fall foliage and i realized this would be a key video to include first before we all do a bigger landscape together now i know my voice is garbage right now but i feel a lot better than i sound so just bear with me let's start with the basics and do a quick refresher the spray can tool is right here in the toolbar and basically what it does is it shoots out any object you have selected so if i choose this teal triangle and i'm on spray can tool i have three choices under mode on the top i can spray objects as copies i can spray objects as clones or you can spray objects in a single path and i love spray can tool because of the capabilities it gives in this case for this tutorial we're going to use it like a paintbrush and it's going to paint based on the settings we have up here so we have a lot of control over the tool for width that's basically the spray area versus the canvas size amount is the amount of the objects to get shot out every time you hold the mouse button down rotation will be key for this project it just turns it a little bit for each spray scale changes the size of the object as you spray it scatter spreads it out more and focus has to do with the ring radius you see here this orange ring for now i've got width five amount 20 everything else is zero except for scatter the lowest you can go is one i know this teal triangle is selected because of the bounding box around it i'll hold down the mouse button and spray paint some triangles that is the first mode spray copies change the second mode spray clones i'll select this gray square make sure i'm back on the spray can mode and i'll spray out the squares so no big difference yet third mode which is going to be this one over here i'll do a single path go to spray command tool single path this is third one i'll spray it out so what is the difference they all look like we did the same thing right kind of if copies is the baseline it just shoots out individual things you can click on every single one separately single path means this whole thing is one piece which is very useful if you're trying to spray a group of things you want to control as one and clones is the key this is what makes this exercise with the tree gonna be a little bit um what's the word we'll just say useful with spray clones all of the new squares are separate but they're controlled by the original so if i change the size in the original they all change if you change the color on the original they all change and you can change it in real time which is useful when you're doing creative work all right enough theory let's put it into practice so i've got here i cheated a little bit i brought a color palette in and a friend of mine told me if you want to play along you can screen capture this right here or i'll have the exact color palette down in the description below and we're going to make each of these objects which will become our custom brushes i did base them on the way painters have very specific brushes for very specific things that they want to do and the spray can tool lets this become our palette that we can customize any way that we want let's make a tree i'm going to time stamp this right here so in future tutorials we can reference this video and you can make a basic tree if we're doing a larger landscape we'll start by blocking it in so this brush right here i'll take the bezier pen tool and draw out this odd shape almost like a bent oval it's the wrong color so i'll do the eyedropper i'll choose this green we're going with i'm going to change the opacity down to somewhere in the middle around 50 percent because this way when i spray it out when it layers it'll add more values all right let's scale it down just holding shift and control which keeps it consistent put it up here and we'll click on spray tool i did change the settings the settings for this activity are going to be 5 for the width 30 for the amount 5 for rotation because when we use the brush to spray on the leaves i want it to move a bit scale 50 scatter 20 focus 10. all right so it's selected let's block in our tree okay it doesn't look like much yet but it gives us something to hang the leaves onto so let's go on to this next brush same thing i'll take the bezier pen tool this time i'm going to make almost like an upside down v let's scale it down a little tiny bit i could use a spray can tool to spray this into the shape of the brush i want almost like a spray brush to make a spray brush but instead i'll show you another trick if you click on the object and start to move it around every time you push the space bar it's going to stamp one out so i'll push the space bar it leaves one behind and i'll add another one down here push the space bar again you could also do ctrl d and just keep moving around but it'll make more sense when i make a smaller version and rather than just spray it randomly now i'll do my spacebar specific stamping out where i want it i notice it keeps trying to snap on to a similar size up here is snapping this magnet with electricity i'm gonna turn the snapping off for now grab my little leaf and stamp out some more again it doesn't have to be perfect we're just making a custom brush here i'm gonna grab a no man's land make a bounding box around everything i'm going to do path union so now all that becomes one thing and then just out of habit when you're doing a lot of this type of spraying out you're going to get a lot of nodes every time you spray something against creating nodes all that stuff right there so just out of habit i'm going to go to path simplify so it barely changed it it warped it a little bit but that just reduced the amount of nodes and that'll make a difference the bigger and more complex your project gets especially when inkscape has a tendency to crash sometimes but i like this as my brush here let's bring it scale it down i believe it's actually a different color we'll go with the second green here and i'll change the opacity down to maybe 75 around there let's put it onto our palette to speed things up the rest of the brushes were made the same way this one is just a smooshed version of that so i'm going to just totally cheat and take this one here it's already pre-colored to show you what this one actually is i'll ctrl d duplicate it i just made a series of circles same with that one and if you notice this one is the exact same as that it's just that i made it smaller on an angle so again let's just cheat and speed things up and use the preset brushes but now you know how to make your own any style that you want you see i just want to get to the fun part let's first move our blocking a little bit down so we have some more space i'm going to choose my leafs that we made together here spray can and let's spray on our leaves just holding the mouse button down this gives us a baseline of the shape of what our tree is going to look like okay let's go to the next brush which is a squished version still around 60 percent on the opacity go to spray can add some more coloring on to the next brush i'll choose the dot pattern here this one will be full opacity because i want to add some weight choose the other dot pattern i'm going to make i'm going to use the pencil tool to make the tree trunk and the tool itself has some quirks to it you can customize it so it's always the way you want it i'm going to assume that you're using the default or at least i'm using the default so let's go with that it's going to adopt the last style used so i like to grab just a rectangle and even see what the style is we have no stroke i'll add a stroke on that and the fill i'll take away so now i'll choose pencil and there it goes okay let's put a tree trunk in here the pencil settings i have are pretty basic i'm on the first mode which is create regular bezier path and smoothing is five if you increase the smoothing quite a bit you don't get some of the natural variations which i do want so i have it low on five and the most important setting is shape triangle in so when i draw it looks like it starts with a triangle and it fades out to a thin point which is good for branches now let's cover those branches i just want to have them peeking just so slightly underneath the leaves go back to this first one try our second again go on to the highlights here so i made these little ones much lighter this is meant to add some more shape to the bunches of leaves like the sun's kind of hitting finally i'll go to the dark version to further define some of the shape if you spray it out and it looks like it's just too sharp you can change the blur so down here on blur i'll add a little bit of blur and that's why we want the clone so you can add lots of blurred it just looks like ink drops just do a little blur coming together a little bit i'm going to add some more shadow here with the bezier pen just marking in like an odd shape where there'd be some more darkness in the tree go to full black no stroke let's definitely blur that and sometimes i like to make another bezier pen shape that covers only half the tree and blur that i scribbled a random shadow down there just for kicks might as well add some more strokes to the tree trunk too then why not add some grass or weeds okay there's my ode to a tree let's get this stuff out of the way i'm gonna show you one more trick which was the inspiration for this whole video here first i'm gonna duplicate this whole thing so i grab all of it together ctrl d hopefully it won't crash inkscape and i'll slide it over so we have two but remember the key we used clones we used the cloning feature of the spray can tool and watch what that lets us do now now i know you can filter it and go to photoshop or any other tool and change colors on the fly but this is a tool that does come in handy when you're actually actively creating something plus it illustrates pretty clearly the benefits of using the clone mode right now if i change any original brushes it'll change both of these trees so let's grab the original tree group it together ctrl g then go to path object to path that sets it the way it is so it becomes its own entity here all right let's start with the blocking i'll choose the blocking original clone and we'll just turn the dial into the red and you see it goes into red no big deal let's choose the next leaf turn that it starts to become fall and you can play with it in real time back and forth right about there it's good i'll just turn everything like almost like a 90 degree turn then i cheated and used these brushes up here let's turn that you see we're going with this i'm not going to mess around with the darks choose this one and we're going let's change the inner circle too see that you can try other colors too let's go to the other side of the spectrum here let's go to the blue orange try that just flipping it around and you've got some type of alien tree it looks like i missed a brush in there somewhere maybe i didn't clone something but you get the basic idea we will come back to this i want to do more landscape work you'd like to see something or if you have a question on this tutorial or any other tutorials we've done before just let me know in the comments below and have fun with it thanks [Music]

Channel: IronEcho Design

Views: 12,799

Keywords: Rick Johanson, Iron Echo, clones, Spray Can, Tree

Id: duX1kOk9lec

Length: 12min 21sec (741 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 22 2021