Inkscape Tutorial: Low Poly Portrait

this is Nick with logos fight Nick calm and in today's tutorial I'll be demonstrating how you can create a low poly portrait using any image with Inkscape and since I haven't yet generated the thumbnail design for this video yet the image I'm going to be using for the tutorial is this image here I'll have this linked in the description if you'd like to use this image as well otherwise you can just use any image you'd like so as you see here I already created this low poly portrait of myself I use this is like a profile picture on the Facebook page and everything so just to give you an example of what the end result will be the reason I didn't create the thumbnail yet is because this is something that takes it takes a while to do it takes a lot of time and it's fairly repetitive it's relatively easy to do it just takes a lot of time and it's repetitive like I said so let me just delete that I'll get started here at Inkscape by the way if you'd like to know how you can make these scape appear dark and with these icons here a link to that information will be in the description of the video so I'll make sure the view is set the custom and then I'm going to zoom in at 1 to 1 and I want to open up the align and distribute menu up here so we'll want last selected chosen from that drop-down and then we'll open up the Edit objects colors gradients and Stroke menu with that button and we're also going to want the layers menu view layers right there we're gonna want that opened as well so we're going to do is I'm going to take that image and just click and drag it into Inkscape click OK to embed it and if you're using Mac if you're using Inkscape on a Mac the click and drag thing doesn't work from what I've been told so you can go to file and import and you can import the image that way so what we want to do now that we have the image is we want to put this on a separate layers and what we're going to work with so we'll come up here to the layers dialog this is sitting in layer 1 we're going to lock layer 1 we'll go ahead and click the lock button and lock that and then we'll click the plus button right here that says create a new layer we're just going to name this layer polygons click Add and for this for this entire tutorial we're going to turn on the snap to pads and the snap to custom nodes button and what we want to do is grab the bezzie a pin which is right here or you can just press B on the keyboard to grab that and we're going to go around and draw a little shapes around all of the main definitive lines and fill them in with the color beneath it and I'll show you I'm going to zoom in a little bit I'm going to hold ctrl on the keyboard and roll up on the mouse wheel I'll start right here near the edge of the head click create another point right there another point right there maybe one right here and down there and right there and like that it doesn't have to be all triangles it could be like multiple sides so it's going along like the contour of like the hair and the shape of the forehead there and what we want to do now is grab the dropper tool and just click and drag to grab a color in there to make it that whole color and we can get rid of that outline by holding shift and clicking on the X and that's gone and what we can do now is go back to the bed a pen and do this again we just go along the whole image and just create polygons like this throughout the whole image and go back to the dropper but what you'll want to do is you want to use the keyboard shortcuts because you'll drive yourself crazy clicking back and forth on the toolbar a million times so what I like to do is use the keyboard shortcuts for this wrapper which is f7 go ahead and do that and then just hold shift click the X to get rid of the stroke then we go back to the bezzie a pen the keyboard shortcut for that is B so there's that create that there put another shape in here back there f7 for the dropper make it that shade hold shift click the X press B to get back to the bezzie a pen and we can just go along and create our low-poly portrait put that there grab the dropper tool hold shift click the X press the B to get back to the Bezier pen create another shape right here you kind of want to go along with like the different shades like the different shapes and everything if you notice here the hair gets darker in color as it like is it like curls right there so we want to have shapes going along there I'll show you that in just a minute so let me get back to the dropper again we're f7 and B those are the two those are the two keyboard shortcuts you're going to want to memorize when you're doing this is f7 and B on the keyboard so go back to be create another shape like that put that there f7 get rid of that press B go back here put that there back to there and what I'm going to do now is I'm going to put this video on pause I'm going to put this recording on pause while I go around and finish this up so the video doesn't end up being three and a half hours long so just a second okay so I put this back there's another thing I want to show you like I was mentioning earlier the darker shade of the hair in here we want to create shapes that go along and complement that shape so I'm going to show you as an example here I'm going to create these shapes right here to go with the event like the blonde color fill that in and what I'm going to do here I'm going to create shapes that go along the contour of that shade like that put that back there like that get rid of a stroke and I'll do that again if you put another one right here like that and you should pretty much get the idea of that from now and another thing I'd like to point out if any point you'd like to see how it's coming along without the image there you would just come up to the layers menu and click on the eyeball next to layer one to turn that off and you can see how it's coming along and there that is so I'm going to go ahead and pause this again and I'll be back with you in just a sec okay so another thing I want to point out is when you do it when you're going over the eyebrows in the eyes that could also be a little tricky it's one of those areas where you're not going to be able to get away with using really large shapes like you see I'm doing here you're going to have to use like much more smaller fragmented shapes and another thing that I didn't realize if you notice here you notice I stopped turning off the stroke while doing is because I realized they don't dummy that you don't necessarily have to do that you can go and do that all at the end with one click and I'll show you what I mean you could do is you could zoom out you grab the Select tool and click and drag over all of it and then hold shift and click on the X and that gets rid of the stroke so you don't have to go back and click that a million times I don't know why I didn't realize that sooner but that's another thing to keep in mind so I turn that off and see how that's coming so far oops coming pretty good so I'm going to go ahead and put those uh those strokes back on there like that now I'm going to show you creating the eyebrow here I'll start this here and I usually just use like one or two shapes to create the eyebrow press f7 for the dropper be for the bezzie a pen we're just going along the contour the shape of it like that fill that in and now we want to fill in the area around the eyes put that there put this here and the good thing about this is that there's no really is really no set like rules you can kind of just make this as whimsical and you can freestyle this as much as you want you can put that you can create the shapes as big or as small as you'd like and put them anywhere you want like here I'm just going off of a whim here make that like that put that there you have to excuse my voice I'm getting over being sick alright so now we're going to do the eyelashes put that there like that and I'm going to break this up into two different parts two different pieces like that back to the starting point and the white of the eyes and the actual eyeball itself so grab the bezzie a pen okay we come back here we could do the eyeball now like that and for the white part of the eyeball you could probably just go ahead and make that white you have to use the actual color in there because it might not look right let's go ahead and make that white I'll go back to the Select tool I'll click on that and make that white and that should that should be our I shouldn't look too bad you could always darken it if it doesn't look right I think that should be alright so I'll go ahead and pause the video again and I'll catch up with you once I have completed more of this you know what another thing I want to point out is that what you're dealing with large areas of a similar shade you could you could save yourself by time by using really large shapes like what I did here if you notice like when we did the eyes we had to do really small shapes which takes up more time but we can account for that by using larger shapes for like these bigger areas whether it's like all the same shade pretty much like for example I'll make this here and it's good to make the shapes going like along the contour of whatever the subject is you're drawing so I'm going along like the cheekbone here back to there make that all the same shade and I can make this all one big shape in here like that back to there and fill that in and I'll put this on pause again and catch up with you shortly another thing that would be good to keep in mind is that as you're coming up on areas where there's you're going to need small shapes and fine detail it's a good idea to create bigger shapes going outside of them around them first if you notice what I'm doing here you don't want to create shapes or like you're leaving small bits of space between that and the fine object like that because that means like this right here because that means you should have to go ahead and create another smaller shape like that and it's going to be it's not going to look very consistent so that's one thing to keep in mind when you're going through this so go ahead and pause this again and I'll be back in just a minute okay so I'm all finished up here I think I'm going to call it a day right here I think this covers enough ground here so once you're finished drawing everything what you could do is you could go ahead and unlock layer one and I'm just going to make layer one invisible just for the time being so I can go ahead and take a look at how everything looks here now what I want to do now is grab the Select tool click and drag over all of it and hold shift and click the X like I mentioned earlier to get rid of that outline now we can click off the to deselect it we can see how it came out it actually came out pretty good while you're going through and constructing this all you could think to yourself is that it doesn't look good and it's not going to look right but when but when you're finished and you actually zoom out and look at it it actually looks pretty good so another thing we want to do now is just go ahead and take a look at the spaces between each shape make sure that there's no prominent spaces sticking out that we need to fix so I'm just scanning over this real quick to do this I'm just pressing down the mouse wheel and moving around the mouse and it looks like everything looks pretty clean here like there's no gaping spaces between any of the shapes and if there is what you could do is you can grab the Edit pans by nose tool and you could just click on a shape and get the nose and just adjust those nodes however they need to be adjusted now let me go back to the Select tool one last thing I wanted to point out is that if you notice there's a lot of whitespace going between these shapes it doesn't quite look right this is called a liya singing this is something that's common with vector graphics particularly Inkscape in order to fix this for the for the low-poly sort of design anyway what I like to do is click and drag over everything and group it together and then what you do is you could right click it and go to duplicate and it should take away when duplicating it for some reason takes away a lot of that white space between there and if you noticed you really can't see any white space between those shapes anymore since we duplicated it so that's one way you can do that that's pretty much how you can create you're low-balling portrait using Inkscape so if you have any questions let me know and it's always thank you for watching [Music] [Music] [Music] Oh [Music]

Channel: Logos By Nick

Views: 166,620

Keywords: inkscape, learn inkscape, inkscape tutorial, inkscape for beginners, vector, vector design, vector graphics, vector tutorial, graphic design, learn graphic design, graphic design for beginners, low, poly, portrait

Id: JVAk_1qv_tA

Length: 14min 5sec (845 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 21 2017