Inkscape Tutorial: Vector Image Trace

[Music] this is thickness logos by nick.com and in today's tutorial I'll be demonstrating how you can create a vectorized tracing of any image using Inkscape so we'll go ahead and open up Inkscape here by the way if you'd like to know how you can make Inkscape appear darken with these custom icons I'll have a link to that information in the description of the video and I will also have a link to this image I'll be referencing throughout the video for this tutorial which is a picture of this bird here so just go ahead and download that and click and drag that into Inkscape and from the image type we want I mean the import type we want to choose an bed image dpi default import resolution image rendering mode none and that should be good go ahead and click OK if you're using Mac by the way you'll have to go to file import because I believe the click and drag I've been I've been told to click and drag method doesn't work with the Mac so just go ahead and do that if that doesn't work and now that we have this image imported into Inkscape we're just gonna set up the document to make sure we're all working on the same page here so we'll go to file document properties and I want to set the display units to PX and I want to turn off the page border and we can close out of that then we go to we're gonna want to go to view make sure we have custom selected and then we'll go to zoom we'll zoom in at 1 to 1 so we're zoomed in 100% like this and I'll move over here by the way if you'd like to move the page around like this you could just hold down the mouse wheel and move the mouse next I want to open up the Edit objects colors gradients and Stroke menu with that button right there and then I want to open up the layers panel with this button right here where it says view layers go ahead and click on that and then we should have our fill and Stroke dialog and the layers dialog open and that's what we will need for this tutorial so this image is placed on layer 1 up here so I want to take this image and I'm gonna bring down the opacity just a little bit just so that we can see what we're gonna be drawing on top of it and what I want to do now is I want to create a new layer going on top of this so I'm gonna click on the plus button to create a new layer and we want to leave it as above current let it be named layer-two it doesn't really matter what the name is go ahead and click Add and I'm gonna create the beak here so I'm gonna zoom in on this by holding ctrl enrolling up the mouse wheel and I'm gonna grab the bezzie a pen which is over here the keyboard shortcut for that is the letter b and i want to click on the point of the beak to create a point right there and i want to move the page around again you could press down the mouse-wheel and move the mouse to move the page i want to zoom out a little bit actually you can hold ctrl and roll up and down the mouse wheel to zoom in and out and once I put a point on at the point of the beak I want to bring it up here to the corner of the beak and then click and hold the click and then just drag and if you know if you notice as we drag there's a red line that appears and we want the curvature of that red line to match the curvature of the bird's beak there so or somewhat relatively close just like that and once you've done that you can let go of the click and press ENTER on the keyboard if you notice we now have a line curved in the shape of the beak and this is what we're gonna do we're gonna go around just creating these shapes going around each area of the bird image here so what I'll do next is I'll draw this next part of the beak I'm gonna bring the cursor over to this point and I'm gonna wait till that that node highlights red once it's ready to go ahead and click so what attaches to this line instead of it being two separate lines and I'll bring this point over here and again once I get the point to where I want it to be go ahead and hold the left click and then just drag the mouse to create a curve there and that's a pretty good curve right about there I'd say we can let go of the click and then press ENTER on the keyboard to create an extension of that line and I'm gonna do the same thing down here I'm gonna bring the cursor so it highlights the the node into red click on that and I'm gonna connect to this back to the starting point but then I'm gonna click and drag I'm gonna hold the click and drag so that we can make the curvature of the beak match the image here go ahead and click on that and we now have that shape we can go ahead and color that in black or dark gray but I'm not gonna do that just yet I'm gonna finish up the rest of the beak for so I'll come over here I'll start this next shape over here I'll come over here click and drag to catch the curvature of that line press ENTER and we're pretty much gonna be repeating these same steps over and over again I'll go ahead and click over here maybe bring this over here maybe I'll bring this through so it looks like it connects there in the image bring this over here right about here click and drag press Enter connect it to this line bring this around over here press Enter connect another line back to the starting point and again just click and drag click and hold on that point to be able to create a curve like that and if somewhere along the line you make a mistake you could just hit ctrl Z or edit undo to go back sometimes it can be a little tricky like for example when you create a line like that and you want to connect it back together sometimes like you'll click on it and you want to create a curve out of it but then you forgot to so you just you could just undo it by hitting ctrl Z and go back and do it over again and you'll have to go to the select tool and select the line so we have it selected and then go back to the bezzie a pen so you can connect the lines together so that's how you can do that let's go back to this over here I'm gonna click on this shape then hold shift and click on that shape and I'm gonna make this a dark gray and I'll just hold shift and click on the little X down here in the bottom left corner to get rid of that outline and then click off of that to deselect everything I'll take this shape right here and I'm gonna go to the edit path by nodes tool if you notice this corner right here it's a little squared off it almost looks like like like a like a polygon I want to smooth that out so I'm just gonna hold ctrl and click on that node to make it smooth like that it doesn't have to match the curvature of the image beneath it perfectly just somewhat relatively close and I'd say that's pretty good right there and once we've done that if you notice here if you toggle off the visibility of that layer we have the beak on that one layer and we have the main image on the first layer and it's a good idea to construct this entire image with each element having its own lair which we're gonna do so let me go back to the bezzie a pen I'm gonna create this white part of the bird's face here I'm gonna click on this I'm gonna create a new layer go ahead and click Add and with that new layer selected oops with that new layer selected I'm gonna go ahead and click and drag to create another shape that matches the white part of the birds feathers here just like that and again I'm just clicking on the I'm clicking on the points when it highlights red let me go back actually you want to make sure it highlights red once it highlights red and go ahead and click it come over here click and drag hit enter do the same thing over here and this one we may have to skew a little bit that's pretty good right there and for this part I'm gonna try to create shapes going in the shape of these feathers here they're not gonna be exact but something somewhat close should be good we do something like that take this one over here like that and if you couldn't tell by now this is this is the sort of thing can be a bit time-consuming but the end result comes out pretty well it's easy once you get the idea of it the only thing is it just it takes a lot of time can you hit Enter do the same thing down here and create one more going through here hit enter and if you notice I made this beak I made it dark gray instead of black because I want to be able to see these black lines coming through here as I create them so create another line here I want this to go through here and for this we just want to make sure we have the snap two cusps knows we want that icon turned on if you hover the cursor over it it'll tell you which icon is each the one that says snap cusps nodes we want that one turned on I'm gonna snap to this corner of the beak right here hit enter and then I'll just connect these back together like that and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go back I'm gonna go back to the edit path by nodes tool I'm just gonna smooth some of this out I'm gonna hold ctrl and click on that node to smooth it out hold ctrl click on that node to smooth it out that's pretty good maybe I'll even smooth out this node - that one's bothering me a little bit I'll hold ctrl click on that one and this will have to be I have to play around with this a little bit whoops maybe I'll bring that around and that should be good enough I'll leave that just as it is and what I want to do is I'll go back to the Select tool I'll click on this shape that we just drew which is up here on layer three or you know what I might have had it on layer two actually no no I'm on layer three okay yeah so we're on layer three with this I want to color this in with like a light shade maybe something like this down here like one of the lighter shades of brown maybe even like almost white and I want to hold ctrl and click the X to get rid of that outline and I want to take this layer and click and drag it beneath oops I want to click and drag it beneath you know what we don't have to click and drag we just we could just click this button over here that says lower the layer lower the current layer click on that and it'll bring that down beneath the birds beak there and what I want to do now is I want to turn off the visibility of that layer because we're gonna have to draw the eye now when I temporarily turn off the visibility of layer three I'll come back up here I'll create a new layer this one's gonna be layer four and I'm gonna create this eye right here so I'll just grab the circles and ellipses tool we don't need to use the bezzie a pen for that I'm just gonna hold ctrl and shift and click and drag to create a circle right there you go back to the Select tool I'm gonna have to bring the opacity of that up so I can see it a little more I'll make this one dark gray as well maybe make that a little bigger that's pretty good I'm gonna duplicate that by hitting ctrl D and I'll make this maybe like a a slightly off shade just to match the birds eye there and I'll hold ctrl and shift and scale that down I'll take that circle right there and duplicate that as well by hitting ctrl D and I'll hold ctrl and shift and scale that down until it matches the size of the bird's eye right there and then we can hold shift and click on all three of those objects I'm gonna bring the opacity all the way up click off of that to deselect everything and if I turn on the visibility of layer 3 you'll see we have the eye there now and this appears underneath it so let me turn the visibility of that back off because we're gonna create these lines right here now that these black lines on the bird's face and to do that I'm gonna put this on layer for the same layer that this is on to do that we're gonna use the bezzie a pen let's come back to the bezzie a pen but we're gonna change the preset up here where it says shape we want to change that to where it says none we want to change that to e Liss and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna hold ctrl and roll up to zoom in a little more I'm gonna create this line right here I'm gonna cook I'm gonna put a point right here and then another point right here at this corner and just curve it a little bit hit enter and then create another line if you notice it took an ellipse and it stretched it out into the shape of that path which is what we were going for so I'm gonna continue this line coming over here to match the image hit enter and now we have that image here and what you can do is you can go to the Edit path by nodes tool and you'll see we now have a little handle you could bring that in to change the thickness of the the line there which i think is pretty cool I don't think we had that in earlier versions of Inkscape but in version 92 or yeah 92 I think that might be a new feature and you can just edit this a little bit in case you get in like little you know hard corners there maybe you'll do something like that edit that a little more and I'll just gonna make that a little smaller with that handle and that's pretty good right there I'm gonna go back to the bezzie a pen I'm gonna create another line going right here click and drag hit enter and I'll go back to the edit path by nodes tool and scale that down a little bit just like that and I'll create another one come back over here go back to the edit pads by nodes tool scale that down we're just gonna go and create all these lines maybe not all of them just maybe like one in each main area to represent everything go back to the bezzie a pen I'm gonna speed this up now and finish this up and then I'll catch up with you once I'm done you okay so now I'm done creating the shapes to match the image here what I want to do is create this little square well it's not really a square it's more of like a like a rectangle shape over here but before we do that I want to change the shape of the bezzie a pen here with that selected we want to change this of this shape back to none and then we can go ahead and just create a little four point a little four point rectangle oops going along the shape of that I'll just make that the same dark gray that we used before I'll hold shift and click the X to turn that off and I'm gonna go back to the Select tool over here and I want to click on one of these lines that we created now I'm gonna hold shift and click on the rest of them we want to have all of them selected and we want to convert once we have them all selected we want to convert them to paths by going to path object to path and then turn on the I'll not turn on change the color to ninety percent gray to match the other items in the image and what we could do now is we could turn on the visibility of layer three and you can see we have that part of the image completed and you know what maybe uh yeah yeah that's that's pretty good what I'm going to do now is create this uh this green part of the image right here so the time-consuming part is really done for this tutorial this was the main time-consuming part right here as the birds face what I'm gonna do is just go ahead and create a new layer for this green part another one for this yellow part and then over here this looks like a darker blue almost like a purple and then come down here and finish up the rest of this so this should be pretty easy once you get the hang of it let me come back up here to the top layer add a new layer in there go ahead and click add and I'm gonna grab the Bezier a pen and I'm gonna create this green shape right here I'll click over here click and drag create a curve going around the shape again it doesn't have to match the image precisely just just something that looks okay or close enough I'll come over here continue on that shape then maybe I'll do something like this to map to match the like the shape of the feathers there over here and do the same thing let me bring this over here and maybe I'll connect this to the corner over here and just curve that out hit enter and I'll just connect this back to the starting point and I want to make this green so I'll grab a nice shade of green maybe something like this I mean you could you could grab the colors from the image directly using the dropper tool but I don't recommend doing that because whenever you grab colors from an image directly you sometimes get like a muddy shade because the the image isn't always in perfect clarity or perfect resolution and I think it's just better to go manually pick out different colors that'll you know that won't be as muddy it'll be nice and clear and it'll pop better and you can edit the shade to your own liking too like I'm doing here I'm doing this under the fill tab which is under the HSL tab so I'm gonna go with that shade of green there I like that and I'm gonna turn off the outline I'm gonna come back down here hold shift and click X to turn off the outline and I want to lower that layer until it goes beneath the white part under there and that's that's good right there and maybe I'll edit that a little more that's alright and I'm just gonna go to the edit pads by nodes to what I'm just gonna smooth out some of these lines oh wow we didn't want that effect let me change that okay that's good and I think I'll leave that as it is so what I'll do now is click on this top layer we're gonna add a new layer this is gonna be layer six and I'm gonna create the yellow part I'm gonna grab the bezzie a pen snap to this corner over here and just come over here and click and drag create another curve hit enter and for this one maybe I'll just do oops oh you know what I have to select that and connect that maybe for this one I'll just do like rough shape share I won't use as many curves something like this and then I'll just go like this and use these rough shapes I don't think it necessarily has to be all perfectly curved like that you'll do that as you see here it's not perfect I'm cutting it off a little bit but that's alright it's gonna come out looking fine regardless come over here do this I'm gonna match this curve going around the curve of the blue part of the bird's feather in the image maybe I'll do this down here hit enter match this up with the feather hit enter do the same thing maybe I'll bring this up here like that and I'm actually gonna just connect this back together and I'm gonna go straight through here and bring it back to the starting point because we're gonna create another object going in here that's gonna layer over this and once we've done that I'm gonna make that a shade of yellow I'll go with something like that maybe I'll make it a little more orange I'll take this H row and slide that to the left slightly to add a splash of red in there to make it a little more orange I'll hold shift click on the X to turn off the stroke and I'll just lower this down one two three three layers like that and what I'll do now actually is I'll turn off the visibility of that layer that was layer six that we just created I think yeah well turn off the visibility so we can create this next one here or you know what let's see let's turn that back on we can just create it right on this layer right here so let's take that object to actually and bring the opacity down a little bit and I'll grab the Bezier pen and I'll just go ahead and create another object going along the shape of this dark blue bunch of feathers right here maybe I'll do something like that hit enter bring this down here like that and I'll bring this all the way up through here bring this through here like that hit enter and then just connect it back to the starting point going through the image like that and I'll just make this a dark shade of blue maybe I'll go with a color shade like that that looks pretty good I'll get rid of the outline by holding shift and clicking on the X and now we can go back to the Select tool and click on this yellow image and bring the opacity all the way up and let me zoom out a little bit so we can get a better picture of how things are progressing you can come down to layer 1 and toggle off the visibility and you can get an idea of how things are coming along here and I'll go ahead and turn the visibility back on and continue on creating the image as you see here what I've laid out here applies to the rest of the image so you could virtually just go along and just continue creating the rest of this image like I did here I don't think you need me to go through each and every step individually so I'm gonna go ahead and finish up this image and I'll speed it up so you can get a better idea of it and I'll catch up with you then you okay so as you can see I went around and I finished up the rest of the image in fact I uh I didn't create new layers for the rest of the blue the blue here I just put it all in the same layer and just use the you know late raise or lower selection function to put things above or below each other and if you turn off the visibility layer one you can see we've created our bird we've created our vector tracing of our bird using Inkscape so that's the basics of how you can go about creating vector illustrations using another image as a reference using Inkscape so if you have any questions let me know and as always thanks for watching [Music] [Music]

Channel: Logos By Nick

Views: 788,680

Keywords: inkscape, learn inkscape, inkscape tutorial, inkscape for beginners, vector tracing, inkscape tracing, inkscape vector trace, nick saporito, logos by nick, logosbynick, inkscape image trace, vector image trace

Id: s-kPg4vYKfk

Length: 22min 50sec (1370 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 30 2017