Inkscape Tutorial: Neon Text Effect

[Music] this is Nick with logos by Nick comm and in today's tutorial I'll be demonstrating how you can create this neon text effect using Inkscape and in order to follow along with this tutorial you'll need to download and install this fonts that I'm using here called learning curve Pro it's a free font so just go ahead and download that and install it before opening Inkscape and then we'll be good to get started so I'll go ahead and open up Inkscape here on my screen by the way if you'd like to know how you could update ink scapes appearance with this dark theme and these new icons I'll have a link to that information in the description of the video so the first thing I'm going to do is set up the document so I'll go to file document properties I'm gonna set the display units to pixels and I'm gonna turn off the page border for now and where it says background color I'm gonna click on that and I'm gonna set this so I'm gonna take this elbow and slide this to the left a little bit maybe it'll like one I'd say like 170 just so like the background then they are not the background the canvas itself is gray like that and then we can close out of that and close out of this and what we want to do now is go to view we'll want custom selected and then we'll zoom in at 1 to 1 open up the align and distribute menu with this button over here we're gonna want last select and chosen from this drop-down and that will open up the Edit objects colors gradients and Stroke menu with that button right there and up here we want to make sure we have snapping enabled and where it says snap to custom nodes we want that enabled as well and the first thing we're gonna do is create our text so I'm gonna grab the text tool I'm gonna click on the canvas to get the cursor blinking and I'm just gonna write neon for the sake of this tutorial you could write whatever you'd like I'll come up here to the text editor and let me just grab that went into my other screen there we go that's gonna open up our little text editor here and from oops from the list here I'm gonna look for learning curve Pro or just learning curve go ahead and click apply it looks like I accidentally moved that okay that's better we have our text I'm going to grab this the select tool and I'm gonna hold ctrl and shift on the keyboard and clicking drag to scale this up like that and what I want to do now is I want to edit this text a little bit because it doesn't quite look how I want it to look so I'm gonna go to path before you do this you might want to create a duplicate copy of it just in case you need something to go back to so I'm just going to right click on this and go to duplicate and I'll put this copy you know out of sight for now I'll come back here the original copy and I'll go to path object to path and then I'll ungroup everything click on that a few times to make sure each individual letter is separated and then I want to unify it all together by going to path Union and one thing I in particular I don't like about how this text look is how long the tail on this letter n is it almost looks like a like an N look it says me on or meow or something so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna zoom in on this by holding ctrl and rolling up the mouse wheel I'm gonna grab the Bezier a pen the keyboard shortcut is a B and I'm just gonna create a line going through here and finish this up going around the outside and grab the Select tool hold shift click on the text and go to path difference just to subtract that and I want this to have a nice round edge just like the rest of the text does in order to match it so I'll go to the edit pads by nodes tool and I'm just gonna click and drag on that to pull that out a little bit then I'll click on that node to get this handle I'll pull that out a little bit I'll take this handle right here I'll straighten that out as well let me zoom out by the way to move the page around I'm just pressing down the mouse wheel and moving the mouse and again to zoom in and out hold control and roll up and down the mouse wheel so I'll go back to the Select tool I say that's pretty good right there the next thing I want to do is create some kind of negative space in these areas where the width lines overlap with each other to create sort of like the appearance that it's an actual neon sign made of like a glass tube a single glass tube that overlaps with each other so in order to do that I'm gonna grab the Bezier pen and I'm gonna snap the cursor onto this corner right here and click and snap it onto this corner and click I'm going to bring this line out here and then bring this out here go back to the starting point and maybe I'll make that shade of light gray similar to what we have on the background there and I'll do the same thing over here click over there and over here bring this up here and then over there you know what let me undo that there we go that's better to undo you could just hit ctrl Z that's pretty much what I just did and I want to make this the same shade or something similar so again we'll just go with a light gray what I'll do is I'll go back to the Select tool I'll hold shift click on the other shape and go to path Union and then hold shift and click on the text and go to path difference and I'll press 1 on the keyboard to zoom back out to a hundred percent you'll see what I did there I made it look like it's it's all one unit but this side it comes around and overlaps over the underside of the letter O there so I'm just gonna clean that up a little bit because it looks a little rough in there I'll go to the edit pads by nodes tool and I'll just click and drag on that line to smooth that out a little bit and the same thing over here I'll just give that a little bit of a curve so it's following suit give that a little bit of a curve as well and if you want you can even go in here and delete some of these nodes in order to get a nice smooth you can go ahead and click hold ctrl and click on each of those nodes to get a nice smooth line in there I'll do the same thing over here delete those two nodes or maybe not that was a little much maybe I'll eat just this one to delete it I'm just highlighting and pressing delete on the keyboard and again I'll just hold ctrl and click on that node to smooth that out and that looks pretty good if you want you could do the same thing over here let me go back to the Select tool where the letter e goes over and under over here but I'm just gonna leave that as it is for now I think that's pretty good so I'll press 1 on the keyboard to zoom back out to a 100% and what I want to do now is create the actual background that I'll be placing this on so I'm gonna grab the squares and rectangles tool and I'll just click and drag to create a rectangle let me just make that a different color for now so I can see it oops there we go let me just make that like uh let me click on that make that like a shade of black or something that's pretty good I'll go to the Select tool I'm gonna change the side of the size of this versus with I'm just going to make this the same size that the thumb the hell was for the video I'll just change this to 1280 and I'll make the height 720 yeah might have to zoom out a little bit oops so there we have our background and our text sitting separately so what we want to do is select them both and we want to make both of them the one shade that you want to work with like I'm I want to make this one like you saw the thumbnail like a neon pink so I'm gonna make that a neon pink right there oops there we go if you want to use something blue go ahead and use like a neon blue don't use anything too light or too dark we want a nice bright vibrant shade we're gonna we're gonna edit it going going further based on the color we choose here so for this one I'm choosing under the HSL the RGB a is FF 0 0 6 6 FF in case you'd like to follow along with precisely what I'm doing so once we've done that I'm gonna take our text right here our neon text I'm going to duplicate that by hitting ctrl D and then I'll hold ctrl and I'm just clicking drag this up here and I'm gonna make that copy white so I'll just change that to white move that up a little more and what I want to do is select both of these and go to extensions generate from path interpolate and up here I want to set everything to what you see here on my screen exponent 0 interpolation steps to interpolation method to duplicate n paths and you see are both unchecked and interpolate style this is very important we want that checked interpolate style so once you've done that go ahead and click apply and it's gonna create two more variations in there that we can close out of that and what I want to do now is just click on these two right here and just ungroup them just like that and what I'm gonna do next is I'm gonna zoom in on this one right here I'm gonna grab the dropper which is right here I just like to press D on the keyboard well not D yeah D on the keyboard to grab that and I want to give this an outline that's the same color as the fill color so I'm gonna hold shift with that text selected and the dropper I'm going to hold shift and just click on that color area like that and it's gonna put an outline going around there now the size of the thickness of yours may vary based on what you previously used but we're gonna we're gonna fix that right now go over here to the stroke style tab let me just change this to pixels so everything's uniform I'm gonna change this to like maybe 25 or something like that something really thick like that we're gonna want a rounded join and a rounded cap just like that let me go back to the Select tool I'm going to click on this I'm gonna do the same thing go back to the dropper hold shift click on the color to give that an outline but for this one we want rounded again round to join rounded cat for this one we're gonna make this slightly less thick I'm gonna go with maybe most we have a little bit of an artifact in there I'm gonna go to the edit pads by nose tool I'm just gonna get rid of that artifact just like that I'll go back to the Select tool I'm gonna change the width of this one to something much smaller like maybe something like twelve and I should do better I'll do the same thing over here click on that grab the dropper tool hold shift click on the sample of the color there and for this one we want this one to be even smaller so I'll change this to light maybe like three I'd say that's pretty good I'll go back to the Select tool and let me just zoom out a little bit and what I want to do now is I want to click on this third one down and I want to right-click that actually know what I want to go over here to where it says Rays selection to the top and I want to do the same thing to this one here click that one in this order Ray's selection to the top and then click on this one Ray's selection to the top and what I'm gonna do next is I'm gonna click on this object here and I'm gonna give this a blur go ahead and click on blur I'm gonna give this a blur of like I know maybe 20 see how that looks we'll try 15 we're gonna go back and adjust this a few times so it's whatever you do here it's not permanent I'm gonna do the same thing over here but maybe less and instead of 20 I'll go with like maybe 10 something drastically less then over here I'll take this one and I'll go for something even less I'll go for like what did I use for the previous one 10 this one will be I'll use like maybe like 4 or even 4 you'll see how 3 looks and what I want to do now is click and drag over all four of these items and just Center them up on the vertical and horizontal axis like that now I want to bring it over to the back shop over here you know what let's group them all together first and then hold shift and click on the backdrop and just Center that up on the vertical oops we want both of those selected scene clicking the wrong button there we go Center them up on the vertical and horizontal axis click off of that to deselect everything and I want to take this pink backdrop and duplicate that by hitting control D on the keyboard or you can just right click it and go to duplicate I want to make that black and then lower that one step where it says lower selection one step click on that to bring that beneath the text and I'm gonna come up back up here to the fill tab and give this a radial gradient like that and then I want to press G on the keyboard to get the gradient tool click on this node right here and bring the opacity of that all the way up and then I want to double click this line right about here to put a new stop in there and then I want to click on this stop I want to bring the opacity of that down it's like maybe 94 percent and I'll click on this this stop right here I'll bring the opacity that down to maybe like 86 and then I'll click on this one and I'll bring the opacity back down to maybe like 70 or 62 or something like that that looks pretty good right there and now I'm gonna click off of that to deselect everything go back to the Select tool then click off with the deselect everything now I want to just go ahead where it says enable snapping let's turn that off temporarily I want to take this white text up top here or you know what we have to unrep it first so let's click on that and then group it click off with the deselect everything and take just this white text right here we're gonna duplicate that by hitting ctrl D and I will make that black and then I'll hold ctrl on the keyboard I'll take this top node this top arrow and just scale that down maybe about that much then I'll hold ctrl and just bring this down maybe to about there maybe I'll make that a little bigger this is just going to be the shadow that the actual neon sign is casting on the wall and I'll lower that one step so it goes beneath just the white text right there and I'll bring the opacity of that down like that and as you can see that's kind of like if you envision this being a neon sign on a wall that's like casting a shadow onto the wall you could even make it a little less visible if you want by adjusting the opacity I think right there looks pretty good and from there that pretty much does it for this tutorial about how to make your neon text the only thing you might want to do from here is try to adjust some of the different like the blurs and everything like here I used a blur of ten you might want to try something like maybe eight see how that looks I don't quite I don't quite like how that looks you know what you could even try making it bigger where it says the width of the stroke is twelve you could even try making it maybe like 20 see how that works you can undo it and ctrl Z and you pretty much get the idea if you want to know the difference between which one you're selecting like here like it's gonna be hard to know which one you're selecting what you could do is just click on the white one first and it'll show you the color and then hold alt on the keyboard and click again and then it'll select the next one it'll show you down here the color of black that means you have the shadow selected and again hold alt and click again this one you have the next one down and then you got the next one down and if you click again you'll notice you'll have the very bottom one right there and you'll notice because the selection bounding box gets larger each time because the blur is larger for each one but if you use oom out or pretty much just take a look you'll see we're we're done for this tutorial we've effectively created our neon text using Inkscape so if you have any questions let me know and as always thanks for watching [Music] [Music]

Channel: Logos By Nick

Views: 138,702

Keywords: inkscape, inkscape tutorial, inkscape neon text, neon text effect, inkscape text effect, nick saporito, logosbynick, logos by nick

Id: fE-gKcJC8M8

Length: 14min 58sec (898 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 26 2017