Inkscape Tutorial: Vector Flame Icon

this is Nick with logos by Nick comm and in today's tutorial I'll be demonstrating how to create this vector flame icon using Inkscape and at any point in this tutorial you could look down at the bottom left hand side of my screen see which mouse clicks and keystrokes I'm using so with that being said I'll close out of this and get started the first thing we'll do in Inkscape is set our view to custom and then we'll zoom in at 100% and then we'll open up our align and distribute menu with this button right here make sure you have less selected chosen from this drop-down and then we'll come over to our edit objects colors gradients and Stroke menu with that button right there so the first thing we're going to do in Inkscape is draw a square so come over to the create squares and rectangles tool and click on that and bring the cursor over to the canvas and hold ctrl + shift in the keyboard and click and drag on the canvas to create a perfectly symmetric square and what we'll do from there is convert that into a path by going to path object to path and then we'll come back to our select tool and then we're going to click on this to get our rotation handles and then hold ctrl in the keyboard and grab one of these corner handles and just rotate this around so that it's going at a perfect 45 degree angle with the corners going perfectly up and down like that and the next step is to come over to the Edit path by nodes tool and click on that and you're going to see these four points appear on the shape and what we're going to do is we're going to bring our cursor up here to the top left and we're going to click and drag over those Center two nodes right there in the middle of those corners so we have them both selected and we'll come up to this button up here that says make selected nodes Auto smooth go ahead and click that and it's going to smooth those nodes out so they're not corners anymore and then we'll come back to our select tool and we'll grab this arrow at the bottom and just bring this up to about here so we get a shape sort of like this almost like a like an eye or a leaf and then we'll just take this shape and put this up into the left corner right here and I'm actually going to hold ctrl and shift and scale this down a little bit and what we're going to do now is with this up here we'll right click that and go to duplicate own that duplicate I'm sorry copy well right click that and go to copy so we have a copied to our clipboard and what we're going to do now is go to our freehand pen and from this drop-down up here make sure you have a from clipboard selected selected and for the mode we want to use create spiral path and we want to set the smoothing so it's at about 48 and once you have that those parameters set what we're going to do is draw a line on the canvas and I've drawn a line up here just to illustrate the shape that we're going to bring the cursor in this line right here when we're drawing this shape we want to draw going in that going in that a pattern right there so that it dips down and then it dips up and then it comes back down to about an equal plane that the starting point was on so and what it's going to do is it's going to take that shape that we copied to our clipboard and stretch it out so that it follows that path so I'm going to go ahead and take this and just delete that on the end just delete that and I'm going to go ahead and draw that shape maybe like that and once you get that if you don't quite get the shape that you like if you end up with something like this you could just press Delete on the keyboard and that will get rid of it but I like how this came out right here so I'm going to use that and then I'm going to go to the Select tool and I'm going to select this and if you go to edit pads by nodes you'll see this is not recognized as a path yet this is a this is an object that's stretched out and going along that path as you can see here and I'll go back to the Select tool if I hold ctrl and shift in this on the keyboard and scale this down it's going to make the line thicker but if I scale it up it's going to make it thinner so what I'm going to do is I want this line to be a little thicker than how this is right now so I'm going to hold ctrl and shift and scale this down a little bit maybe that much maybe I'll take that a little more we want that to be a little thicker that looks pretty good right there so once you have it set in place how you like it just right-click it and go to duplicate and then hold ctrl and click and drag this copy down here and then I'm going to hold ctrl and shift that I'm going to scale this one down a little more because we want this one to be a little thicker and that's pretty good just how that is and once our shapes are finalized we're going to finalize it by going to path object to path and if we go to the Edit path by nodes tool we'll see it's no longer an object being stretched along a path it's now an actual path with individual nodes like that so once we've done that I'll go back to the Select tool and I'll click on this original shape that we drew and go to path object to path and then we can now take this little eye shape that we drew and press Delete on the keyboard we're done with that and I'm going to take this and move this out of the way I'm going to come to this original shape right here click on that and I'll click that a second time to get our rotation handles and I'm just going to rotate this around until it's about in an upright position that I like maybe sort of like that we'll take this one and do the same thing click it a second time to get the rotation handles scale it around so it's in an upright position and then I'm going to flip that horizontally coming this button right here saying flip selected objects horizontally if you want a keyboard shortcut for that you could just press H on the keyboard and that'll do that and I'm going to bring this over here and I'm going to hold shift in the keyboard and click on the original shape on the original shape and I'm going to select align bottom edges so that they're both on the same horizontal plane down here and then I'll click off of that to deselect and then I'll hold ctrl on the keyboard and click and drag this off to the right until it's touching until until it's touching that shape right there I'll bring that over maybe about that much so you can see now we're starting to get what appears to be the whimsical shape of a flame and what I'll do now is I'll click on this original shape and right click that and go to duplicate and I'm going to turn that red just so we can see it when compared to the other shapes and I'll hold ctrl and shift and scale this down maybe about that much and I'll put this one right about here just so that maybe up here just so that the edge of it let me bring the opacity down to show you just so that the left edge of this is going over this little cross-section between those two shapes so once I get it about there maybe I'll put it right there I don't want to put it too far out otherwise this tip is going to stick out so I want to put it right about there and once we get that there we could turn that black and then as you can see we pretty much have our flame shape and what I like about this is that you get this little other shape of a flame within the negative space of this object so we could do now is we could click and drag over the whole thing and just color it in however we'd like you can make it red or you can make it a you know orange give it a gradient that you like and if you want you could unify the whole thing together and go to path Union and then if we go to edit paths by nodes we now have a vector flame icon that acts as a path with individual nodes that we can edit further so that's how you can create a flame icon using Inkscape so if you have any questions just let me know and as always thank you for watching

Channel: Logos By Nick

Views: 71,872

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

Id: UjmER3xMC0o

Length: 7min 50sec (470 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 08 2016