Inkscape Tutorial: Spiral Text Effect

I'm Rick Johansson and this is iron Echo design Happy Thanksgiving I have a lot to be thankful for this year one is this inkscape community where we can share our techniques today I'm going to show you how to do this spiral text effect it's very easy we'll just use a gradient and a path Effect called tiling so you can expand out the text and then spin it you can choose any words you want to type out any color scheme we'll start right now first let's set up the page go up to file document properties and because I want it to be a Square the default A4 template has a height of 297 let's change the width to 297 we're going to also adjust the page color and make it black so click on page choose black X out of that X out of that and we're good to go the text tool right here is going to let you type out whatever you want I'll do grow laugh live I think it actually looks better with a heavier font up in the control area instead of normal this is aerial normal I'll go down to heavy now we need to put our right writing onto a circle so go to the circles and ellipses tool holding shift and control I can draw open A Perfect Circle to visualize what we're doing here I don't need a fill I don't need this circle to be filled so I'll hit the X to x out of the fill and if you're using the color ribbon to add a stroke hold shift and click any color you want this is a shortcut if you want to have your workspace clean and not have the fill and stroke menu open we'll use that later to put the text onto the circle click the text hold shift collect the circle go to text put on path I purposely left it open like this because here's the beauty if you deselect everything and only choose the guide circle now I can do control to keep the circle uniform and minimize it to make my text come all the way around right about there if you've seen previous tutorials to lock in this circle text click on the text itself go up to path object to path that locks it in so I can take it off and delete Del the guide circle now let's use the fill and stroke menu that's located under object fill and stroke pops up in the sidebar you can see we're on fill we don't want to be on solid flat color let's go over to radial gradient at the most basic level the left side is the center of the radial gradient it's white full opacity and the far side if you click the other Arrow it's taking that white and it's full transparency so come down to the a slider this is the alpha slider and make that full opacity and and because I want to do a blue color gradient when I have this side selected I can move my color wheel to Blue let's do something like a dark blue click over to the other side of the gradient and why don't we choose some type of lighter teal you can't see much right now because the center part if you go to edit gradients over here it's saying this lighter color starts right here let's move it so it starts closer to right there you see how it brightens up whatever color scheme you choose move it so you can see the whole gradient inside of each letter I'll go to selector tool because before we do the path effect step I want to shrink this down we're going to grow it out so I need more space I'll do shift and control let's bring it down about here and for precision up in your menu bar this bar graph this is the Align and distribute menu if you choose that I can say relative to page I'll Center my selection vertically and horizontally now with it selected go up to path path effects this is the new inkscape 1.3 path effects menu you can hit the Delta and see all the choices or you can just type in we want tiling and the default shows up 3x3 it's going to tile out our original 1 2 3 1 2 3 we want 1 by 10 to start that makes one row and 10 columns while we're here down towards the bottom choose split elements I want that so the gradient appears on each one then go to edit paths by node tool tool don't be distracted by all the nodes it's showing what we want if you zoom in is this node right here this is a path effects node that lets us move them all on top of each other I'll grab it and stack them all up once you have them lined up like that you can do a shortcut this magnifying glass with a rectangle this is zoom to page here's the settings mirror mode keep it on the first one skip everything all the way down to scale you want to choose the second button and you can type in a scale percentage that you want or hit the plus and Watch What Happens here's 1% 2 3 4 five six we'll take it out to 10 do you see each iteration of it one below is rotate same thing go to the second button and hit the plus to watch it spin here's one degree 2 3 4 I think I had it three before let's do four for kicks now if you want to play with the color scheme you have to have the original one selected go back up to to fill and stroke menu and here's what I meant before you can drag one of the sides to change the gradient or I'm going to say before I do this file save you can add another stop in the gradient by double clicking on the bar but for this it's a little bit too busy if you don't like what you just added click on it again hit delete this looks pretty nice if you want to have a nice geometric organic look but if you want to call out the text better grab the top one and do controll D that's going to duplicate it pull it aside you can't instinctively just change this top one they're all linked what you need to do is if you want to have this top one change to a different color so it's easier to read you have to go to edit clone unlink clone now it's its own piece and I can change it to something else I think of the thumbnail I did the white let's go drag it back on place that is my call time for Thanksgiving I got to run so hopefully you found this helpful and we'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: IronEcho Design

Views: 3,230

Keywords: Inkscape, IronEcho, Iron Echo, IronEcho Design, Rick Johanson, Spiral Text, Path Effects, Beginner, Tutorial

Id: yN-f42pREqc

Length: 6min 3sec (363 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 26 2023