Inkscape Tutorial: Vector Compass

this is Nick with logos by Nick comm and in today's tutorial I'll be using Inkscape to show you how you can design this vector compass graphic and at any point in this tutorial you could look down at the bottom left hand side of my screen to see which mouse clicks and keystrokes I'm using so let me minimize this and we'll get started here in Inkscape and by the way if you'd like to know how you can make Inkscape appear darkened with these custom icons like you see here on my screen a link to that information will be in the description of the video so the first thing we want to do is make sure that we have the view set to custom then we want to zoom in at a hundred percent then we'll open up our align and distribute menu with this button right here and we're gonna 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 so first we're going to draw a square so let's come over to the squares and rectangles tool hold ctrl and shift on the keyboard and click and drag on the canvas to create a perfectly symmetrical square like that and then we're gonna go to the Select tool just bring this over to the center of the page I'm gonna click on this a second time to bring up those rotation handles at the corners and I'm gonna grab one of those corner handles and hold ctrl and just click and drag it around so the corners are going vertically and horizontally like that and then let's bring the opacity of this down in half just so we can see through several objects as we layer them on top of each other and what I want to do now is we'll go to the edit pads by nodes tool and we're then we're going to convert this to a path I'll go to path object to path and now we have these individual nodes to work with so what we're going to do now is let me scroll up a little bit here we're gonna take this top node we're gonna hold ctrl first take this top node and while holding ctrl just click and drag it up about that much actually you know what let me grab the Select tool hold ctrl and shift and scale this down a little bit I'll go back to the Edit paths by nodes tool and again I'm gonna hold ctrl grab this top node I'm just gonna pull this up so about there and what I'm going to do next is let's go to the Select tool and I'll right-click that and go to duplicate and I'll turn that red and then I'll send that behind to the black shape by clicking the button this is lower selection to the bottom and I'm gonna give that a red outline otherwise known as a stroke by holding shift and clicking on the color red and that's gonna put a small outline around the edge of it so I'm gonna make that outline a little thicker I'm gonna go over to the stroke style tab I'm gonna change that to maybe 25 see how that looks that's pretty good 25 and once we have that set we'll go to path stroke the path path break apart path Union so we now have this shape around the outside but the problem with this shape here is it Inkscape made it flat here at the top so in order to fix this let's take this black copy right there we'll hit ctrl D to duplicate that and I'm gonna turn that green and then hold ctrl and click and drag this green copy up to about there and I'm gonna zoom in on this portion right here just so I can see what we're doing there let's press plus in the keyboard a few times to zoom in and I want to hold ctrl and move this green object up until the edges are running flush with the edges of the red shape so I'll just gonna hold ctrl bring this up a little bit and doesn't have to be exactly there it could just be somewhere close like that and once you have it close enough we could zoom back out should have press 1 on the keyboard once we have that set we could hold shift and click on the red shape and go to path Union and what we have now is we've made it a point at the top there but if you look a little closely you may not see it here on my screen but there might be like a little bit of like you know fragmentation a little bit of an error there if it's not exactly flush if the green shape wasn't exactly flush with the red shape we can fix that by going to the Edit path by nodes tool and you're gonna see these additional nodes right here so let's click and drag over those nodes there in the middle to select them and I'm gonna zoom in by pressing + in the keyboard a few times I want to select this node down here too so I'm gonna hold shift and click and drag over that node and then I'll come over here and you can move your page around by holding down the mouse wheel pressing down the mouse wheel and moving the mouse and then I'm gonna hold shift and take that note as well we don't want to select these corner nodes right here so just those and those and we're gonna leave that corner alone we're not gonna touch that one with those all selected we can just press Delete on the keyboard to get rid of them and then we can click and drag over this top node right here and turn that back into a corner make selected nodes corner click on that and we do the same thing down here I'm gonna press plus a few times to zoom in I'm gonna take this node right here and make that a corner I'll take this node right here make that a corner and let me zoom back out let me press 1 to zoom back out to a hundred percent and now we can go back to the Select tool click off of it deselect everything so don't I do now is I'm going to create the inside shape of each of these legs of the compass right here so let me turn on this snap to cusp nodes turn that on and we're gonna grab the Bezier 10 which is right here or you can just press B on the keyboard to grab that and I'm gonna snap the cursor on to this corner and click and snap it on to that corner and click and then I'm gonna finish this shape up going around the outside of the graphic and back to the starting point like that I'll go back to the Select tool I'll hold shift and click on the black shape and go to path difference and we now have that shape in there but if you look at mine you'll see I have these little like this little pattern going on the inside of that so in order to create that let's um let's go to the rectangle tool let's turn off the snap to custom nodes for now we don't need that at the moment I'm going to create a long thin rectangle going over this and you know what we might want to get rid of the red outline so let's hold shift and click on the X and it should be a thin green rectangle like that and let me go back to the Select tool I'm gonna make this a little smaller like that that's pretty good and then I'll click on this again to get the rotation handles and I'm gonna hold ctrl on the keyboard and rotate this around one two three three steps so that it's running so the edge of that is flush with the edge of this black shape right there and then I take this I'm gonna put this right about there like that and then I'm gonna duplicate that by hitting ctrl D on the keyboard hold ctrl move this up to there duplicate it again ctrl D hold ctrl move this up ctrl D hold ctrl move this up ctrl D bring that one up there ctrl D bring that up there and that's a good number of shapes right there and once you've done that let's click on the the very first green shape down here at the bottom and then hold shift and click on the rest of these so we have them all selected and we're gonna want to make sure that these are spaced out evenly by coming to the distribute panel and clicking on the button that says make vertical gaps between objects equal and that'll space them all out evenly and then we can go to path Union to unify it all together into one shape and then what we can do is I'm actually gonna move this up a little bit and the reason I'm moving it up because I want this black space right here to be about the same height as this these other black spaces in there going between the green stripes and once you've done that we could hold shift with the green shape with the green objects selected we could hold shift and click on the black object and go to path difference and now we can click and drag over all of them bring the opacity up and let's hold shift and click on the red shape that these selected so we now just have this black object selected we'll turn that white and we'll click on this this red object we can make that black or a dark shade of grey whatever you'd like to use and then I'm gonna click and drag over all of that and I'm going to group it together and I'm just gonna hold ctrl and shift and scale this down a little bit about that much and then I'm gonna turn on the snap to cusp nodes and I'm gonna duplicate this object by hitting ctrl D and then I'm going to flip it vertically and then flip it horizontally and then I'm gonna snap the corners of them together down here like that let me zoom in on that a little bit we want to snap the corners like that and again I'm gonna right click this I'm going to duplicate or you can just hit control D click on to the second time to get the rotation handles and hold ctrl and rotate this around until it's sitting horizontally flat like that and now we could snap this into the corner there and then we can duplicate that again control D flip that horizontally with this button and then flip it vertically with that button and we're gonna take this one and snap it over there you know what it's not snapping to the right position okay now it is alright so let me click off the deselect so we now have the the basis of our our little compass here but if you notice here there's these white spaces going in between the four black objects right here this is called Elias Singh and it technically it shouldn't be there but it's a problem you run into when you when you're creating vector graphics we can get we can mitigate that by clicking and dragging over all of that and let's ungroup everything and then let's hold shift and click on just the white shapes to deselect them so we have just the black shape selected and we can unify them all together by going to path Union and now that Alaia Singh is gone and let's duplicate that object we'll hit control D and I'm gonna click on this again to get the rotation handles and I'm gonna hold ctrl on the keyboard and rotate this around until it's sitting like that and I'll lower this to the bottom lower selection to the bottom click on it again to get back to the scaling handles and hold ctrl and shift and scale it down about that much so we have that part of the compass made as well and let's turn off the snap to custom nodes we don't need that anymore so we can click off of that to deselect everything and the next step is to be to create these little lines these little circles going on the inside here which is a shouldn't be too difficult we'll just grab the circles and ellipses tool hold ctrl and shift in the keyboard and click and drag to create a circle like that and we'll give that a red outline by holding shift and clicking on the color red we'll get rid of the fill color by clicking on the X now let's come over to the stroke style tab and we're gonna make this maybe a three-point stroke not a little bigger than that we'll go with a 5-point stroke and we'll bring the opacity of this down about in half just so we could see it through the I'll see the other object through this and then hold shift and click on this black object and we're going to Center it on the vertical and horizontal axis and then click off the deselect everything so I want to click on just this circle here and under the effect menu right here make sure you have this button turned off so that when you scale the object it keeps the size of the stroke the same like that so what I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna hold ctrl and shift and scale this circle up until it's almost touching the edge of the the smaller star right there as you see I as I did here in my thumbnail and then I'll lower this to the bottom bring the opacity all the way up and I'll make that the same shade of black or gray that I made the rest of the graphic I was going to hold shift and click on that shade which was 90 percent gray and I'll duplicate that by hitting ctrl D and I'm gonna make this smaller I'll make this like a two-point stroke and then hold ctrl and shift and scale that in to about there and then send that to the bottom as well so we have that part finished the next part is to create this thicker circle with the dotted pattern going through it with the dashes going through it and to do that let's click on the larger circle in the background there ctrl D to duplicate it we want to make the width of this maybe 12 see how that looks hold ctrl and shift and scale this up to about here that's pretty good we'll send that to the bottom and then we'll duplicate that by hitting ctrl D and I'm gonna change this to white so let's hold shift and click on the color of light and I'm going to change the stroke width to 1 we'll see how one looks that's pretty good and then I'll come over to dashes and I'm gonna come here to this drop down I'm just gonna pick one of these dashed patterns so there's like a dotted you know like a dash pattern going through there and again we'll send this to the bottom but we want it to be above this circle so we will raise it one step raise selection one step and there that is now so the next step would be to create this final outer border and then inner little increments here so let's create let's just use this little circle as a reference we'll just hit control D hold ctrl and shift and scale this out to almost the outer edge of the the larger star like that I think that's what I did here yeah I have this accomplished sticking out a little bit from the circle so let me bring that in a little bit and maybe even make that a little thicker maybe four that looks pretty good scale that in a little more and then finally we just have to put the little dot in increments going around the outer edge here and to do that let's click off of it deselect everything I'm just going to zoom in on this top portion right here press the plus in the keyboard a few times come up here I'll grab the Bezier penguin is right here or you just press B on the keyboard and I'm gonna start this I'm just gonna draw a line going within the padding of the white space here I'll start it like right about here and then hold shift and click and drag it down to about there click again and we can let go and just hit enter on the keyboard to create that line and I'll make that a little bigger I'll make that a two point stroke maybe and I'm gonna give this a round to join and a rounded cap so it has rounded edges like that I'm gonna put this let's make this red it's just so we could see it on top of this graphic for now I'll just hold shift and click on the color red I'm gonna put this right here and hold shift click on the star and just Center it on the vertical axis like that click off the deselect then we could take this and hit control D to duplicate it and then just hold ctrl and just drag this down to the bottom to the other side right about there let me get press 1 in the keyboard to zoom back out to a hundred percent and then let's hold shift and click on the other red object and then let's put that let's bring these over here out of the way of this stuff so we can work with this a little bit first thing we want to do is convert these strokes into a path so we'll get a path stroke the path and then we'll unify them together by going two paths Union and then I'm going to click on it again to get the rotation handles and I'm gonna hit ctrl D to make it duplicate to duplicate that and then hold ctrl and grab one of the rotation arrows and just rotate it one step like that and then we'll hit control D and hold ctrl and rotate it around one step and we're gonna do this until it creates an entire circle if it's just ctrl D and hold ctrl bring it one step and again we're just doing the same thing over and over again until we have our circle you could actually hold the ctrl key the entire time you do this if you want to make it a little quicker and one more it looks like that's pretty good now we can click and drag over all of those unless you unify them together by going to path Union and we'll make them the same shade of black or gray that we used before hold shift click on the circle right here Center it on the vertical and horizontal axis click off of it to deselect everything and let's take those increments and let's just to make sure these increments right here let's just make sure they're at the bottom lower selection to the bottom I'm gonna press 1 to zoom back out and that's pretty much it that's how you can design that compass graphic you're using Inkscape so if you have any questions let me know and as always thank you for watching you

Channel: Logos By Nick

Views: 19,468

Keywords: inkscape, learn inkscape, inkscape tutorial, inkscape logo, inkscape logo design tutorial, inkscape for beginners

Id: UV3AIJiIfIk

Length: 16min 34sec (994 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 26 2016