Inkscape Ultimate Quickstart: Free Course to Learn Basic Tools and Techniques for Beginners

I'm Rick Johansen and this is iron Echo design inkscape is a free graphic design program that helps you make all sorts of complicated designs easily here's a few highlights from past tutorials that we've done on this channel if you're new to inkscape if this is your first day trying it out or if you just want a refresher or if you try to ears back and hated it I made this video for you I'm going to walk you through step by step all of the basic tools so you can get started quickly to let your creativity flow we'll go through all of the top bar menus all the icons all the control bar menus each of the basic Tools Plus I want to highlight some of the most important tips you should know when you get started with thingscape and also show you some of the best features you're going to want to play with the latest version of inkscape as of this filming is 1.2 but if you're watching this far into the future or if you're using an older version the layout might look a little bit different but the fundamentals are the same all right you ready I'm gonna assume you already have inkscape downloaded if you do need help with that let me know in the comments you're going to be greeted with the welcome screen on the quick setup tab you have canvas we'll have it set to default keyboard default appearance I'm on classic symbolic the only change that I make is I toggle over to dark mode that brings you over to the next screen which shows inkscape is free you can contribute your time or you can learn how to fund and escape with these icons here let's go to time to draw on the print tab you'll see all sorts of different default templates we'll just start with the first one A4 and here it is so you're looking at this you see a lot of icons a lot of action where do you start well let's start in the very upper left hand corner file go down to document properties click on that this allows you to set up how you want your canvas to look right here you see front page format is A4 which is two 10 millimeters width by 297 millimeters height you can change the orientation with the next button click it to landscape gives you a preview here or leave it on portrait if you do follow some of my tutorials I like to change the page color by clicking this right here and change changing it to Black that's just a preference because I think it makes the design look more Dynamic but today we'll keep it white all this space out here this gray area that's called the desk can change the color on that also if you feel like it you don't have to do all your designing inside the page it does come in handy when you export or you want to print but you can use all this area zoom out zoom in work a little bit more freely X out of that the next tab on the top menu is edit and it contains everything from the mundane cut copy and paste to clone create tiled clones which I have several tutorials on this it's not a day one activity but remember it's there why it's under edit no one knows while we're here though you want to go down to preferences because inkscape gives you a lot of control on how your actual interface looks click on the interface and on toolbars if yours are looking too small or too small to your liking you can drag the toolbar icon size to make it larger or reverse make it smaller I keep it at 150 so hopefully you can see it well enough control bar up here you can drag that larger see how it's making the icons grow or you can shrink it down I also want to point out how to find preferences because there will be times later in the tutorial and especially as you advance you're going to want to customize some of these tools and that is done with preferences for view one of the most commented things I got on the last Quick Start video was how come I have one of the toolbars on the side and that was just because of a change of inkscape since the filming and when people are watching it you might have yours defaulted to widescreen and here are the toolbars on the side if you don't want them there just take widescreen off even if the toolbars are on the side the functionality stays the same let's go to layer you see this here layers and objects click on that and you will get a sidebar this is the hardest thing for me when I migrated over from Photoshop and started using inkscape I wanted to know where is the layer bar I was so used to having everything stacked in layers and that is here too sometimes it's not as needed it in Vector design but it's here so if you feel more comfortable opening up the layers and objects tab it's under layers layers and objects and this becomes pretty intuitive this is layer one if you want to add another layer click on the plus add layer 2 above current there's Layer Two but we don't need that for now let's go to the next one which is object brings us to one of the most important menus you'll ever use fill and stroke since so far we've created nothing we have nothing on the fill and stroke menu let's literally get on the same page by zooming in at the exact same ratio you can use one of these icons this one right here that looks like a magnifying glass this pop-up that has the number five next to it the five is the shortcut so I can push the number five and now my page is centered and zoomed in if you're doing this later and you forgot that and you can't remember which of these icons is which go to view Zoom Zoom page five and actually if you don't even want to use that there's a shortcut with the mouse you can hold down control and scroll in to zoom in or scroll out to zoom out also you can hold down shift to scroll left or right if you're going for precision just hit five Zoom page not to skip ahead but I do need an object grab the create circles and Ellipsis tool I'm going to hold down control which will lock in the proportions of a perfect circle and our left Mouse click and drag open a circle one of the common questions I get from tutorials is how come I don't have the circle dial here maybe you have these bars maybe you have something funky like this when you're on the fill and stroke menu you'll see the fill tab over here this changes the way color is interpreted to hsl that's the first one and hit color wheel and you get your color wheel The Fill color here is yellow you can change that by dragging around the perimeter or you can change the values by going going inside the triangle here or if you notice in the bottom the color ribbon the rumor is this might be leaving as a default always being shown but for now it's here click any of these to change the color click on these bars here you see these three bars here's some different choices I usually have it on gold just because but they have khaki Royal topographic and you can even configure your own for today I'll keep it on inkscape default you see this black line around the circle that is called The Stroke click over to the stroke paint tab wherever you see this little white circle that is going to be the color so if you spin this around and it's not changing your stroke color move that small white circle out of the black area let's make it easier to see click over to stroke style let's make it 2.0 if you go down to click on the ribbon thinking hey I'm on stroke I'll quick a different color well that's going to change the fill so how do you make the color ribbon activate stroke first we'll put the fill back hold shift and when you hold shift and click on the color ribbon that will change the stroke let's go blue orange Back to Black this x is very useful not sure if you can see the pop-up it says None on the color ribbon if I click the X with this object selected x no fill if I hold shift and click the X there goes the stroke another thing I want to show you on the fill and stroke menu there's two ways to change transparency at the bottom see it says opacity 100 you can drag this slider it's becoming translucent or right here this a I believe stands for Alpha see how I drag that if I go to fill I have flat color here one over is linear gradient by default it's going to take it from whatever the fill color is and take it to transparency you can slide these over to change where transparency hits but when you're doing design sometimes you you don't want it to be transparent if your intention is to change this side to white instead of having it be transparent yellow down here on the alpha slider I'll change that to full opacity I would make it white color by changing the color itself or you can go to a different color I can also add more stops in the gradient if I double click I have another stop which means I can change that color and drag that around if you think it made it too busy you can also delete that stop by pushing delete this whole tangent was coming from the object drop down lots of choices here go to the very bottom align and distribute this pops up on the sidebar this is another very useful menu that's going to help you on the first tab called align you can move things around relative to it's set to page let me show you how it works if I have this off the edge by accident that's that page border when I modify it relative to page I can go to the center on a vertical axis and I can also Center it on the horizontal here's a second shape shape let's Center these up relative to the last selected if this new rectangle is the first selected I'll hold shift click on the other one which is the last selected now if I Center them up it'll be relative to this one or a line to the left edge of the last selected or the right Edge or the bottom it might seem pedestrian but this comes into play all the time as we make our way through all the tools and toolbars and everything when we get to path this is where I want to share a personal story I found inkscape specifically because I was trying to make a vector out of a image and I didn't include this on the last Quick Start video so I'm throwing it in now because it's under the path Trace bitmap also because it does explain a key difference between Photoshop Affinity photo those are raster graphic design programs and then Vector programs like illustrator or inkscape like we have here the big difference is when you have an image let's say this butterfly if I zoom in it's going to pick isolate that's an image and with a vector the biggest difference is you can scale it indefinitely larger or smaller and it always retains its Fidelity rather than working with the individual pixels inkscape is working with what's called paths basically it's using math to create the design through different shapes and Trace bitmap helps us see that so I've got the butterfly selected here under trace bitmap on single scan let's change it to actually to multi-color under detection mode Let's have it look for different colors and how many colors do we want to look for 14 smooth selected stack selected remove background selected Speckles smooth corners and optimize smooth Corners bring that down to 50 here's our preview and when I hit apply it's going to analyze this photo and create a vector for us while it thinks this image I brought in is under one megabyte if you're bringing in a huge image it might take a lot longer it might even crash inkscape if you need help resize it there it goes if you need help resizing images outside of inkscape let me know in the comments look at that with a vector image if I zoom in I can see the individual paths this little path if I double click these are the nodes that make the path here's a little path you can change and manipulate the nodes it's just different tools Photoshop has its strengths with images and photography Vector programs like inkscape will help you with logo design complex Graphics illustrations let's do one more I want to show you the single scan version here is an illustration of a cat these Source images I got they're just from public domain from rawpixel.com and if you're back on Trace bitmap single scan under brightness cutoff if you want more space drag it open the threshold all it's saying is hey I want to look at the brightness and based on the brightness make my Vector so if I want to go very very light there's your preview not good too dark it's actually okay let's go to 70 something right there apply there it is here's our cat go back to your fill and stroke menu and change the colors around blue cat what is that teal cat and that is day one Trace bitmap to finish up the top menu the next one is text I'll show you how to use this when we get to the toolbar text icon filters is not necessarily a day one activity to go over but let me just show you what's there there's different blurring options you can change the color of your overall objects or your whole project there is a built-in drop shadow feature and one that I did quite a bit in previous tutorials textures my favorite ones watercolor you can check out those if you're curious how that works going over to extensions you have a lot more complicated tools that will save for a different time interpolate here we are back centered up and remember how I said if you can't remember all these different icons they are in the drop downs let me just Breeze through them real quick if you click on this first one that is create a new document that will open up a whole nother inkscapes won't hit that you can also open up an existing document by clicking here you can save the document print I'll show you this one that's where it comes into play what type of page you defaulted with because I'm going to hit print and in the US the A4 template isn't exactly the same type of 8x11 paper that we use but it's going to work I'll hit print here and I've got my cat that's a day one print job if you're going to export this to Cricut Machine or some type of laser cutting program there's other defaults you'll want to do but for now just to show you whatever is in the page you can always print it with the print icon the next one is how you can import an image it's going to open up a file folder and you can click on the cat for instance open it brings it back in next one of the most common questions I get let's say I made my pretty design at inkscape how do I save this as a PNG so I can use it someplace else if I go to file save or save as it's just going to save it as an SVG but I can't use that there's plenty of different choices but how do I just save it as a PNG it's one of the learning curves with inkscape you have to export as a PNG in my mind it's the same as saving as a PNG but they call it export you can click on the export icon or if you forget go to file export a good habit the first thing I like to do is to make make sure I have my actual project grouped together so I clicked on the cat I hold shift I click on the circle I can go to object group and that makes it one selection if I export as a document or if I export as the whole page it's going to send out into the PNG the whole area that's probably not what you want go to selection and now my PNG will be a transparent background except for the inside the circle here's the dimensions a good practice is 300 DPI and down here this is where it's going to go to this folder it's going to put the PNG in here we'll call it cat Circle push Save which will then give me a pop-up so I can export the defaults are fine okay export in progress and here it is sitting right there cat Circle magnificent that is how to export to PNG I do have a full tutorial on that as well I have tutorials and a lot of this stuff but I want to put it in one complete free class here what's next undo everybody loves undo if I make a mistake and push delete control Z will undo it or if I move it to the wrong place you can also just hit this reverse and undo it right there the next choice pop-up says do again the last undo action also known as redo undo redo undo redo all day moving on you have copied a clipboard cut to clipboard paste clipboard that's just copy cut and paste we got that here's the zooms I was talking about if I'm zoomed way out and I want to go zoom in to just my selection I can hit this one there's the selection if I had more components to my drawing they're calling it I can go to the second one here Zoom to fit drawing and our favorite zoomed page if you don't want to affect the zooming but you want to be centered up this one right here will Center the page without zooming so Center Center the four squares with the shapes inside that's going to be group you hear me say this a thousand times in the tutorial Control G or you can hit up here group if that was a mistake on group next one is the good old fill and stroke menu the paintbrush thing in the corner pops up for you the T brings up a font menu I don't use this one a whole lot I prefer just to go with the tool goodbye for some reason my mind always sees this as plywood but it's not it's the layers and objects menu you've got your code editor which is not day one this is day thousand leave that be same thing for the next one View and edit CSS not today and we're back to align and distribute menu document properties which we know and preferences next row you still with me this is where it gets a little bit more action-packed here I've just made some squares whichever tool you're on will populate a different set of controls here we go with our rundown start with selector tool different ways you can select objects you can click and drag over an object or click and drag over multiple objects or you can click on one object hold shift and collect the rest of them or if you're in a rush you can click on this square that looks like a puzzle select all objects or nodes and you've captured everything to deselect you can double click somewhere off in the desk or you can hit Escape sometimes you might have a very intricate design going on and it's hard to get in there with your box so there's a couple other options if you hold alt and you click and drag you'll get a red line and whatever your red line touches will be selected and finally this one right here toggle selection box to select all touched objects that's going to combine the red line line that we just did with the selection box I've got it activated now I don't have to go around everything anything I touch will be included quick Interruption Rick here two days later from the edit Bay I forgot to go over the directionals while we're on the selector tool so if you have an object the first directional is rotate 90 degrees counterclockwise if you hit this Arrow next one rotate 90 degrees clockwise the Left Right One flips it horizontally and the up down one flips it up and down do you see these arrows here these are pretty intuitive if I grab a horizontal Arrow I can stretch out the object if I grab a up and down arrow I can stretch it that direction click off for a second if you click twice on the object you get a turning handle you can grab and drag around to spin the object and this hash mark this is the rotation point it's rotating around that little plus sign and you can move it I'll take the rotation in point first I'll put it down here on the corner now when I rotate it'll go around that pivot point one more trick that compelled me to come back and reshoot this here's a new rectangle if I click it twice I see the hash mark I don't have to put it on the corner I can stick it anywhere and get my Pivot Point to make a wider radius and here's the trick if I hold control it's going to limit the places it will actually rotate the default happens to be 12 increments so you know you can go to straight vertical and the stops in between might as well throw one more trick while we're here I'm not going to hold Ctrl this time I'm going to spin it across that Pivot Point anytime I push the space bar it will stamp out one of the shapes and that actually works for anything in inkscape here's my shark fin you can stamp that out it's making copies next up will be hierarchy and I'm going back to editing visually you can see how they're stacked up well these hierarchy modifiers the top one here if I want to go down one step beneath the teal one hit this one one more step down puts it on the bottom I can skip right to the Top If I go bring the selection to the top and it works for all of them so bring it up a step send it to the bottom useful back to our simple square or is it if you're not completely sure of the dimensions you can look up here here's width and height it is not Square our width is 139 millimeters our height is one four two you can change these at will let's say I want 150 by 150 now I know it's Square this brings us to one of the comments I had from over a year ago which hurt it hurt but it was right the person was right I didn't talk about this particular icon right now this Square I can make it a set 2.0 millimeters for The Stroke by default this is enabled when scaling objects scale the stroke width in the same proportion so that means if I make a second one of these Ctrl D which is duplicate if I scale it down it's going to keep the width of the stroke in proportion to the size of the object which is what you want in a lot of situations but let's say you want it to always be a 2.0 unclick the scaling stroke function and now when I duplicate it if I shrink this down it looks like it's going to go in proportion but when I Let Go it goes back to 2.0 all right next tool is edit paths by node at the most basic level since I made this rectangle directly with the rectangle tool this is where it gets a little confusing I want to point out at the bottom down here see underneath the color ribbon it's saying rectangle in root which tells me if I hit edit paths by node I don't see my nodes I still have these modification anchors a lot of what you want to do in inkscape is with paths go up to path object to path now I have four nodes this is the most basic nature of using a vector program you can manipulate this shape by dragging the nodes you can select two nodes at once and change the shape that way the more you play with inkscape the more comfortable you'll be in creating just by using the nodes and you have a lot of control at your fingertips I can choose the nodes or I can go in between them click and drag part of that line and you'll get a curve if I don't like this one that comes at a hard angle I can click on it up in the modification area this one right here looks like a necklace make selected nodes smooth and it's going to round it for me these circles coming off of the node those are the handles that allow me to affect the curve itself let's change this one into a curve quick time lapse you get the idea that's logo design not my logo not a sponsor yet let's get rid of that okay we did rectangle let's go back to circles one of the most common pitfalls people encounter when they're trying out inkscape it's how to use the path functions and I'm including this on day one because you do need to know these if you're going to be able to use inkscape the way it's meant to be used I do Ctrl D that will duplicate my object if I hold shift and control together it will scale it down in proportion around the center the larger Circle selected the one on top is also selected go to path difference and it knocked out the center I'm showing this first because it's easiest to follow this is something you might commonly want now let's go through all the path functions keep in mind path functions work on paths let's run through them got these two path selected path the first one Union that's going to combine the two elements for difference path difference that cuts out the overlap intersection is interesting it creates A New Path based on the part that intersects exclusion knocks out the center part path Division I use quite a bit so I've got two different parts here kind of cool for logo design cut path cut the bottom path stroke into pieces removing the fill similar to division but now the stroke has been chopped up and combine is very useful or has been useful for a lot of the tutorials we've done path combine when you're combining two paths that have an overlap there's two choices you have if you want to look like this when you're on the fill tab you keep it on this setting here it looks like this bent curve any path self intersection or subpath will create a hole in the fill but if you want to combine those two paths and not have that hole you click on this one and it stays all filled in for day one that may not mean much but remember that it's there I know I'm throwing a lot at you but I want to make sure this is comprehensive you can revisit this save this video revisit it maybe I'll reference it in future tutorials let's go to the stars and polygons tool up in the modification area you have a choice you can go on to polygons I can open up an even Pentagon here it's taking the last style so we want to change the color go back to something yellow and the stroke can be black after changing the color you say what happened to my polygon control area just go back to the tool icon if you're ever missing your control bar click back on the tool you have some choices you can change the number of Corners let's do eight there's your octagon maybe we'll do six for a hexagon you can round the sides let's go to 1.0 I see a node here if I grab that it's going to change the scale let's do a 0.5 rounded that's going to warp it out 2.0 rounded any time for a lot of these tools that you play with it too much and it messes up this little thing here reset parameters that'll bring it back to the default it actually defaults back to Star which is fine so we'll be on Star let's make it 25 points spoke ratio you can bring that spoke in more or bring it out with the plus minus or you can choose edit paths by node and you can pull the spokes with that new node that pops up there's a project we did where we made a vector flower and you can randomize or all these points go so we'll do just a little little bit it looks like a mess but it actually gave us that organic variation that we needed when we multiplied this 100 times next tool is the 3D boxes I'll overlay the tutorial we just did on this a couple months ago and basically if you click and drag towards center of the page you'll get a 3D shape with Vanishing points up in the control area you have angle X angle Z and angle y the default has angle Y in parallel this vertical is going to go to Infinity going straight where the two sides go to a vanishing point for today let's keep it like that if you grab the X in the center you can swing it around and see that 3D box render in real time all these different shapes and just like you'd suspect each of these nodes lets you pull the Box a different way bring it way up for a building you can also change your Vanishing points but then you're going to get into some perspective that may not be perfectly accurate but do whatever you need to do one more trick here let's flatten this down make it kind of wider if I do Ctrl D to duplicate this I can then take that one that's now on top and bring it forward control D duplicate that I can bring that one up Ctrl D and you can kind of see you've made an interesting design happening right in front of you if I want this one to slide behind there go back to selector tool drop it down a step okay what's next we got spiral let's clear this out spiral is a nice built-in thing to have this is the default just gives you a simple spiral like that you can put a fill on it let's not yet for stroke though we'll make it a little bit easier to see we'll do 2.0 maybe 1.0 and let's add to it so the number of turns default is three let's go with 20. now it gets a little bit hypnotic you can take the outside node and unwind some of it the inside node inner radius you can adjust if I want more blank space inside I might do 0.5 it opens it up if I want to put it back I can pull that inner node to wherever I feel like it should be Divergence is pretty interesting the pop-up says how much denser sparser the outer revolutions are one equals uniform so it's at one right now it's all nice and even let's see what happens if we change it to two that looks a little bit more natural like almost a seashell type thing let's go to 0.5 and this looks something more machine made let's change it to 50 turns yeah look at that happens if we reduce the width 0.75 add some color to that spiral is a nice tool to have in your Arsenal if you want to make this type of circular design on the Fly quickly delete and it's time for one of the most important tools the bezier pen draw bezier curves and straight lines I do have a dedicated tutorial to this I recommend checking that out it goes way more in depth on how to use it I actually have some exercises you can try but for now here's a day one look to start we're gonna do left Mouse click once and that's it just click and let it be you have a red square if I move the mouse without touching anything else it's going to show you where that line will go to end the line or the curve double click you made a straight line let's do a curve now click it once don't touch anything now when you bring it out if you click and drag it's going to start the curve and we'll take it just there for now double click and there you have the two simplest things you can do a straight line and a curve let's look up in the control bar now that mode the default mode is create regular bezier path go to the next one create spiral path I click it once now when I drag it out I have a blue line if I click and drag it's going to make a huge circle or if I keep clicking lots of different circles delete a more common mode you're going to be using is create B spline this is very useful if you're trying to trace something bring an image in here one way to remove a background from an image or illustration is to create a stamping shape and clip the part you want out of the image so let's do it I'm on create B spline path for clarity though I'm going to change it so it's going to have a green fill change the opacity down to 50 percent this is how it works the B spline is going to curve automatically so each time I click it bends with it and if I double click you can start to see this is what I'm creating and you don't have to do it all in one go I'm still on bezier pen I'm on the B spline if I hover over the end node I can just keep going if I feel like taking a break double click now I've got this part covered okay through the magic of editing I'll finish up rushed it a little bit but to show you what it can do now I have this green overlay if I hold shift and get the image I can clip it out by going to object clip set clip and there it is there are fish with no background that's one of the many uses of bezier pen but check out that full dedicated tutorial if you want more on to pencil pencil is a fun little tool our starting mode is the regular mode and if I just draw a line it's going to adopt looks like that green that we had from before the modification choices you have here are smoothing and shape smoothing is just what it sounds like if I draw a line with a higher smoothing let's say 50 percent I can make it Jagged and it evens it out let's go to 90 and see what happens then go real Jagged and a nice and easy curve there shape if I go to Triangle in and I draw a line straight down it's beginning the line as a full triangle and coming out to a little Point Let's make that wider for scale we'll go to 3.0 make a new line straight down and you can see the beginning of the triangle out to the point the opposite triangle out if I pull down this time it does the tail to the full beginning of the triangle I'm going to skip ellipse you can try that on your own from clipboard watch what this does now what was on the clipboard we'll find out if I click and drag looks like we had that rectangle with every pencil drawing I do it will make another object from the clipboard and if I draw it way out it'll stretch it way out that is from clipboard if I go Bend from clipboard it's going to also take the properties of let's actually see what's on the clipboard Ctrl V to paste looks like it's this what do we use that for oh the path function okay so now I'm on pencil I want to bend from clipboard NOW Watch What Happens drawing this line it's bending off of that clipboard object one of the inkscape YouTubers Adam Bellis has a very cool tutorial using this tool so check that out I forgot to mention one of my favorite Parts about pencil if you hold Ctrl and click on the mouse once you get a single Dot and that actually comes in to be useful more often than you might think all right let's move on to the brush draw Cali graphic or brush Strokes inkscape gives you a lot of freedom to customize your calligraphic pen but today we'll just stick with the presets so the first one is dip pen and it looks like this almost like an old-timey quill type pen you can still change the width and it won't change off the preset but if you play around with any of these modifications it'll kick over to no preset so for today stay on one of the built-in tools let's check out marker looks just like a marker brush this I should show you some more detail thinning negative 40. the pop-up says how much velocity thins the stroke what that means is the speed that you move your mouse will affect the thickness of the line for a brush if it starts at negative 40 let's make that positive 40 and I'll drag it slowly at first and then speed up slow fast okay so a positive thinning value will thin it with speed it's a very nuanced tool I'll let my hand go naturally there we go little flick of the wrist there okay so there's brush but you see how the second I change thinning it goes in no preset let's stay back on track let's go to Wiggly and Wiggly does this action finally splotch I wrote splotchy huge okay so that's what the 100 width don't know why that's the default try 25. kind of cool there's splotch let's move on now to the next tool create and edit text create and edit text is exactly what you think text I'm on a Google font called enter I'll change it to Ariel everybody should have that and we'll go to bold I can tell my kerning is a little tight here if I go up to the modification area under spacing click there here we can see the first box spacing between letters is set to negative 10. let's make that zero and its spaces it out better let's try 20. it gives us even more room and here's a trick I think the first video I made was this trick if you put the cursor between two letters and hold alt you can use the arrow keys to manually change the kerning adding more space or making less space you can also if I hold alt again go up or down so up Arrow if you wanted to have it offset like that get rid of this I want to show you how you can curve the text around a circle because there is one one key point I forgot in the last video when we did this first I'll make our Circle this is just going to be a guide Circle stroke will be green fill will be blank we'll write our text across the top here wrap text you can see a copy in the same style as the guide Circle which we don't want so we'll do a black fill no stroke and the kerning is crunched in again negative 10 go to zero this is how easy it is to do I'll take the text I'll hold shift and grab the circle up on the text drop down put on path and there it is it's upside down I can grab the guide Circle and twist it around the right side up and here's the part I left out if you move wrap text off if you delete the guide Circle you're going to lose the effect see so people were following along and then having that happen the way you want to lock this curve in is go to path object to path now this is independent and not linked to the guide Circle I'll do another one now and the text this time will be bent on the bottom bottom of the circle here's our new guide for the bottom Circle the way it's going to bend in on itself I actually want to space it out more so we'll do 10. I feel like the two are going to bump so we'll scale it down right about there text selected guide Circle selected text put on path same as before so how do you flip it go to object flip vertical now I can grab my guide Circle here get my handles and put it into place until I change it from path object to path I can still retype it or ADD more characters more change the kerning or turn it now the step I forgot before once you have it the way you like it path object to path get rid of that Circle let's go to the next tool create and edit gradients here's a quick rectangle now you saw before if I click over to linear gradient I can then change the gradient so it looks the way I wanted to and you have this new bar up here but the old way was to have the gradient bar which you get by clicking on the create and edit gradients now I can change the directions and Visually I can add different stops this bar will do the same as this new visual layout and that's a quick demo of the gradient but let's say you intuitively want to bend this line well then you're thinking the right direction the next tool is create and edit meshes I have a new rectangle if I go to create and edit meshes the first choice on the modification area is a mesh gradient I can drag and based on whatever you have up here that's what you'll see one row with three columns Ctrl Z let's change that to two by two that's a little bit more useful for our purposes here and the same as before each node corresponds to what color you put on it so right here it's on full white to change that to Something red sticking with the center one you can drag it around and bend that gradient or I can select one of the corner nodes hold shift get a second Corner node and they'll change color together I'll click on this upper node here you could use an eyedropper if there's a shade that you like inside of your mesh already and that's a day one look at the edit meshes next tool eyedropper or pick colors from an image I'm going to combine the eyedropper talk with something we haven't discussed yet snapping there's many uses for eyedropper and one of them is it allows you to create easily your own color palette so let's make a square give it a white fill for now and stroke will make black eyedropper is here on the fill and stroke menu or also on the toolbar hovering over the image I'll get one of the darker colors I see this dark green and it changes our Square so here's where snapping comes in up here this magnet thing with electric lightning bolt in the middle that's the snapping button if you hit this Delta it's going to give you a lot of choices but for now just consider snapping on on the most basic level if I control D duplicate my square with snapping enabled you see that it just tried to snap into the side it's going to click in it clicked right in there very useful if you're trying to line things up quickly I'll go back to eyedropper take a lighter green Ctrl D duplicate bring this up snaps in the center point snaps right onto the other one eyedropper lighter I'm going to zoom in and show you how the snapping can sometimes be too powerful if I don't want it to be perfectly bound keep saying bounding box corner to bounding box corner it's fighting me to get locked in there A lot of times you don't want snapping the Quick Fix is just unselect the snapping if you're doing something like this with precision and you do want it on but temporarily you want it off rather than fight it you can hold alt and during that time period where you're holding alt snapping will be off when I take my finger off of alt and it wants to come home right there for a different day if you click on the Delta you can see all the different ways you can snap snap bounding boxes you can snap to nodes other points different alignments all different ways to help you get things where you want them okay everybody we made it to paint bucket I used to give this tool a hard time but I actually do use it from time to time for certain situations at first glance the Highlight says fill bounded areas it's going to take on what whatever the last color was the last thing I made was this square right here so that's what it's going to dump out in the modification area I have fill by visible colors you can choose a color do saturation lightness Alpha stick with visible colors threshold 25 grow shrink zero close gaps none and I'm going to dump inside of this blank rectangle and there you go you have a new Vector shape that you made with paint bucket I put this blue circle here to show you that if you make a change on some type of object let's say I change that to something yellow and I go to paint bucket now I'm going to be dumping yellow you can Define the attributes by double clicking on the tool and make it have its own style but if you're just starting out you're going to be encountering it and say why am I dumping yellow now this right here is text live text I can instantly make a vector out of it by dumping paint on it and if you don't want the fill turn the fill off now you've got your outline there air edit paths by node and you can make adjustments another application I'm still on fill visible colors if I click inside of this area it will make a new shape based on what it sees it sees this weird blue shape click in that area ha I'm going to leave this in last thing I have was that outline of the a so that's what it dumped if I click on the circle make any type of adjustment that means the last style I use is this orange go back to paint bucket Into the Blue Area and there you go a new shape based on what it saw the visible colors paint bucket also has tracing properties if you have an image and you only want these weird blue areas I can go down to Blues threshold 25 click on a blue got these funky shapes here and you can change these as you wish do one more we'll choose the red so we'll isolate the Reds threshold 25 did really well on that one got almost all the Reds and you've got this let's go on to one of my favorites tweak tweak objects by sculpting or painting turn snapping off for tweak and sculpt and here's what you get if you click on the tool with is going to determine how big this circle is force determines how much of an effect is going to happen and here's all your modes move objects in any direction let's do this one first you do have to select the objects that you want to play with so I've got these selected here I'm on tweak move any direction and if I click they'll just shift around based on where I push them click and hold and throw them everywhere next one move objects towards cursor I'll stay on this row see how they come in they're shrinking in fascinating next one move objects in random directions jumbles them up this one shrink objects shift to enlarge with 50 Force I'm going to click and Shrink that one down hold shift to enlarge make that one bigger all right let's grab this row tweak objects rotate objects we'll skip a couple of these I do use rough in parts of paths but it does tend to crash inkscape if there's too many nodes you have too much action going on so give that one a try but save before you do it what the heck we'll just give it a try seems to be working well there's only four nodes let's actually try to crash it if I go to edit paths by node I can see the four I'll highlight all four of them and this one right here insert new nodes let's make a bunch now we've got 64 nodes now if I have it selected and go to my tweak roughen didn't even crash inkscape improving all the time last two I'll highlight this group right here Jitter the colors interesting enough for this last row we'll do the actual sculpt got it selected with 24s 50 push parts of paths any direction and we can just kind of melt them together bend it out of place got some ugly colors here let's brighten this up a bit I'm going to go to one of my favorite tools spray can spray can spray copies are clones of objects first mode says spray copies of whatever the initial selection is I'll click the teal square and the width is set to 10 that means this orange circle I can make it larger so you can see better there's the spray area now amount 25 it doesn't actually shoot 25 per click the way it says but it's going to try to 50 rotation variation 75 variation on the scale scatter one Focus one keep the eyeball open and the eye shut selected don't worry about the rest this is the selection and I'm going to spray out copies you can see their copies each one's its own individual thing the difference if I go to the second mode spray clones now the empty box is selected when I shoot these out looks pretty cool and on the fill and stroke if you change the original they all change with it if you change the size or the scale or the shape they all change those are clones the third mode spray objects in a single path it will automatically combine them all interesting shape right there a lot of cool applications let's now go to the Eraser hit the Eraser button first mode self-explanatory delete objects touched by the Eraser this is an object I touch it it's gone Ctrl Z kids asleep back from dinner let's continue on the second mode for eraser cut out from paths and shapes let's change the width to something smaller maybe 10 and when you drag you'll not only erase the part that you drew over but it will create new shapes in its place go up to path break apart and each component is a standalone part if you're used to photoshop and you want to actually erase whatever you're dragging over intuitively that's the third mode clip from objects now if I scribble over an area it will take out that part it also works on images if for some reason you wanted to clip something out go to the third mode and we'll erase this middle tree all right that will lead us to create diagram connectors I have a feeling this is someone's favorite tool from the scientific Community because I can see it being a Time Saver for specific charts flow charts or things of that nature if I go to the first mode make connections avoid selected objects when you hover over the question whatever the question is you could go to yes or no and to draw the line click on it it automatically knows to take you to the center of the other box and it puts the connector right in there as it was stated avoiding the object same thing for the other side I click on the white centered box this white centered box and we have our connector if this is your favorite tool I'm glad it's here but we can move on we'll go to ruler measure objects I actually highlighted this tool in a recent tutorial the Celtic knot it's handy in a pinch to physically measure between two points just by dragging it's going to tell you on the screen 20.44 millimeters that's good to know this one over here 31.14 I like it I like it because it's almost like having a tactile tangible ruler right on your desktop here and for day one just wanted to show you that it's there second to last tool the zoom feature zoom in or out taking us back to the Wilderness the default will zoom in when you click the more you click the more you zoom if you hold shift it'll click out the same pace and there is one key feature here if I was looking at these roots over here and I like this zoom and I zoomed out this button right here go back to previous Zoom it lets you scroll through the zoom history if you're going to be doing screen recording sometimes it helps if you zoom out in error you can get back to that previous View you can also see a repeat of the zoom icons we had here so if I want to go all the way back all the way back to the page centered up I hit that here it is there's some strokes and everything on there clean this up I'm going to give a specific shout out to Martin Owens he created this last tool create and edit document Pages simply it lets you have multi-page so if you hit the plus now you can create documents with more than one page you can move them around you can reorder them very very impressive feature added to inkscape that gives us even more control of the projects that we want want to make hopefully you found this helpful leave comments if you have questions if there's something you're stuck on if I miss something let me know I want to give my shout outs and thank yous also besides Martin Owens to logos by Nick the first channel that got me into inkscape Chris hildenbrand he contributes to the community in many ways his Channel's 2D game art Guru Davey's media design and also Adam Bellis we all learn together it's fun to do and enjoy see you next time

Channel: IronEcho Design

Views: 90,256

Keywords: Inkscape, Rick Johanson, IronEcho, Iron Echo, Graphic Design, Tutorial, Beginner, Guide, QuickStart, Course

Id: cCaYMlugQyc

Length: 49min 34sec (2974 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 04 2022