Inkscape Tutorial: Mesh Gradient Background

this is Nick with logos by Nick comm and in today's tutorial I'll be demonstrating how you can create these mesh gradient backgrounds using Inkscape and if you'd like to learn more about how Inkscape works be sure to check out the Inkscape master class which is a collection of over 50 videos where i go over every single tool and feature in Inkscape and I explain motive days and demonstrate how it works I'll put a link in the description if you want to check that out so we'll go ahead and get started here with xscape the first and you want to do is just make sure we're working with a similar workflow here on this screen just go to view make sure you have custom selected and then we'll zoom in at 1 to 1 and then I'm gonna open up the align and distribute menu with this button up here we're gonna want last selected chosen from that drop-down and then I'll open up the Edit the edit objects colors gradients arrowheads and strokes menu with that button right there and what we're gonna do now is create a rectangle so we're gonna grab the squares and rectangles tool and I'm gonna click and drag on the canvas to create a rectangle like that and we want to make this the same size that would whatever you'd like your background to be so like if you're designing like a wallpaper or something and your screen resolution is 1920 by 1080 we're gonna make it that size for this tutorial I'm just going to use something basic like 1200 by 1200 by 800 so I'm gonna grab the select tool up here where you see W and H that's width and height I'm gonna triple click this number up here whatever that number is I'm gonna change the width to 1200 and then for the height I'm going to change that to 800 and let me just move that to the center of the screen here so we can see that and now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna make this we're going to start coloring this thing in so for this for the example of this tutorial I'm going to start with the shade of um like this pinkish magenta sort of shade down here and now we're gonna grab the the the mesh tool down here where it says create an edit meshes if you hover your icon it's the third icon up from the bottom click on that and just make sure your presets up here match mine we want this one selected mesh rather than conical gradient you want add that enabled most importantly right here rows and columns we want both to that both of them set to 2 and everything else as you see up here and once you once you have those presets as they are as they as as I have them we're going to come over here to the fill and Stroke menu and over here where it says mesh gradient I'm gonna click on that and it's going to create a mesh gradient out of our rectangle here and what I'm going to do now is I'm gonna click on this center node right here and I'm gonna make this like a shade if you like an orange is yellow like that and I'll come down here I'll make take that node right there I'll make that like a like a deep lavender like that I'll come over here I'll make this I'll make this maybe orange like that I'll take this stop right here I'll make this I'll use the another shade of orange like that like I used up here and then I'll come up here I don't do something similar with the the purple I'll make this maybe something like that and what we can do now is I'm actually going to zoom out a little bit I'm gonna hold ctrl and roll down the mouse wheel what we could do now is we can take the center node right here and move it like that and then we could take this stop and move this like that and take this stop and move that around and the idea here is that we're just moving around these stops to get like this random you know whimsical swirling colors sort of look I'm gonna take this stop and move that up here I'll move this one down here like that I'll move this one over here you got to be careful how far you move them if you move it too far you end up with color banding like you see here you get like a hard line where it's no longer a gradient you don't want to go too far with that so I'll put that right about there do something similar down here move this around some more and you could actually take these and move them outward like that you can take these edges and move them out this one out let me move that one out I want to add some more of that purple in there [Music] and then I'll come adjust this this side over here you don't want to go if you move these nodes in the edges you don't want to come inward like that because it's gonna start erasing from the the rectangle there which we don't want to happen you move this in like this okay so as you can see I just played around this a little bit and I just it until I reached a place where I think it looks good and once you've reached that place you can just click on the select tool up here to get out of the mesh gradient setting and you can see we have our mesh gradient background right there now if you want you could finish the tutorial right here and usually this is your background otherwise if you'd like to take this further and make it more like I did in the thumbnail where we have that triangle pattern going over it what we'll do now is grab the squares and rectangles tool and I'm gonna hold ctrl + shift on the keyboard and click and drag on the canvas like that just to create a perfectly symmetrical square and then I want to convert that to a path by going to path object to path and then I want to grab the Bezier pen which is over here or you could press B on the keyboard what I want to do now is up here in the top left corner where it says enable snapping we want to turn that on and make sure you have this one enabled right here that says snap custom nodes including rectangle corners you'll notice as you hover your cursor over each of these a little tag will appear with its label on it snap a custom node that's the one we want labeled that's one we want enabled I'm gonna snap the cursor to the bottom left corner over here and click to create a point and then I'll snap to the top right corner click to create another point then over here and back to the starting point like that and what I'll do now is I'll grab the select tool click and drag over both of those objects and go to path division and it's gonna divide them up into two individual pieces like that which is what we're going for and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna click off of the graphic to deselect everything it take just this piece right here and I'm gonna make this a shade that's radically different than any of the colors we use in here so I'm gonna make this green because there's no green in there whatsoever nothing even close and I'll come down here and I'll make this one a different color maybe blue like that and what I'll do now is click and drag over both of those come up here to where we have the width and the height let's let's enable the lock right there so it locks in proportions as we scale it I'm gonna remove this I'm just gonna make this size at 100 pixels so I'll hit 100 and enter and since we have the lock icon enabled it'll change the height and then I was going to take this and put this in the corner right here until it snaps in and then I want to duplicate that by hitting ctrl D and snap that in there like that as well take this right here click and drag over all four of those ctrl D snap it in here and just keep doing that over and over again until you get to the the end of the the end of the line here horizontally same thing down here I'm going to take this I'm gonna hit ctrl D and I'm gonna put this one down here but I'm gonna flip it horizontally I'm gonna click this button right here this is flip selected objects horizontally so that it's going in a different way it's kind of like an alternating pattern now let me select all of these both rows of these hit ctrl D to duplicate put them down here control D again put this right here control D snap that right there and there you go now you can click off with the deselect everything so what we're going to do now is click on just this green triangle right here and then click the red X down here in the lower left corner to remove the fill color and now we're gonna grab the dropper tool which is over here but for this we're gonna use the keyboard shortcut because it's much quicker I'm gonna press D on the keyboard and I'm just gonna click and I'm just gonna click and drag a little portion of that area that that triangle was covering and it's gonna fill it in with that shade of orange that we'd used previously you'll notice that it's filled in when you see that orange stripe down here now we can switch back to the Select tool by pressing D again select just this blue shape right here click the red X to get rid of that fill color press D on the keyboard again to get the dropper tool and again fill that in and I'm just gonna go through and repeat that process over and over again just using the Select tool and the dropper tool by toggling I'll be toggling between those tool those tools with the the letter D on the keyboard and just removing the fill color and filling it in like that and this can be a little tedious so it may take a little while to go through this I'm gonna go through this real quick and then I'll catch up with you when I'm done okay so as you can see I've went through and changed all of the colors of the individual triangles and as you can see now we have our mesh gradient with this triangle pattern comprising it so again this this right here could be the end of the tutorial for you you could end it right here and that right there is pretty good enough to use but one last final step that I like to do just to put a little bit of a personal touch on this and I'd like to click on one of these random individual shapes right here and under the fill tab where it says HSL I'll click on that where it says L I'll take this L row and slide this to the left a little bit just to make that a little darker so it stands out more and I go through I'll go through and do that with with all of these as well just to make it just give it a little bit of a little bit of character to make it stand out a little more I just randomly take some of these some of them I'll make them darker some of them I'll make it lighter like that I'll do the same thing over here make this one lighter make this one darker and I think you should pretty much get the idea here so I'm just going to go through and adjust these real quick just to give it a little bit of a personal touch and I'll catch up with you when I'm done all right so I think I'll call it a day right there as you can see I've went through and I've adjusted the colors of all those individual triangles and I think I should that should do it for this tutorial that is how you can go about creating this mesh and gradient background using Inkscape if you have any questions let me know and as always thanks for watching [Music] [Music]

Channel: Logos By Nick

Views: 56,604

Keywords: inkscape, inkscape tutorial, inkscape mesh gradient, mesh gradient background, logos by nick, logosbynick, nick saporito

Id: YdqndZ6T3MA

Length: 10min 58sec (658 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 01 2019