Inkscape Vector Portrait Series: How to Make Eyes with Create Tiled Clones (Pupil + Iris)

i'm rick johansen and this is the iron echo design channel today we begin our vector portrait series this is from the most common request and you can see in the comments if you follow along is for vector portrait and i've been working on it to try to break it down step by step a lot of the videos out there have excellent artists but it's like here's a portrait and they do it from like their decades of experience very quickly in front of you but in this case i want to go through it step by step and we're going to begin with something very simple the eye or actually the pupil and the iris this is going to be a beginner beginner intermediate inkscape tutorial and i want to feature the create tiled clones tool if you've never used it i'll give you the absolute basics first if you have used it want to skip to just the good part to make the eye i'll timestamp that but first we'll go over the basics and then i'll give you the exact settings you can make a tiled clones eyeball here if you want to follow along with the exact colors you can screen capture this color palette i'll also have the color codes in the description below in addition i've had the question before what is the canvas setting if you're opening up inkscape you'll have a choice on the print tab i'm going with a4 because i like to work in millimeters all right let's begin create child clones absolute beginner settings what the heck is create tiled clones let me show you so here is an object if you go to edit clone create tiled clones you're going to get a menu out on the sidebar here so there's a lot of different moving parts but for today let's stick with symmetry p1 simple translation if you look at the bottom there's a choice rows columns right now it's one to one so it's going to replicate this object by as many rows and columns as we say so let's do four four then down here create there you go so it created four rows and four columns get this one out of the way and this is the original clone to show you what it means by tiled clones if i change the color on the original so on fill and stroke menu if you don't have it it's paint brush thing in the corner with the original selected i can change it and it's going to change all the clones together you can change the color you can change the sizing you can move it around and it's going to affect all of them it's a very good tool to have in your arsenal and we'll probably revisit this in a different tutorial let's go to one more beginner setting adding a shift i just want to explain this so you can see what's happening here so here's another object let's go back to crate tiled clones on symmetry it's still simple translation but for shift we're going to tell it to shift every column over by one unit and every row down by one unit so under every row we'll shift it down so y axis is up and down by one hundred percent which is one unit and every column will shift it x axis left and right by 100 okay you with me so we got four rows four columns shifting over one unit at a time create and there we go so let me show you again what just happened to get that extra one out of the way it's still a clone so you can change it as you want we'll go with pink so we have the original went over one unit and went down one unit so these are the basics for crate tiled clones and now that you're an expert let's go to the advanced settings time stamp if you skipped ahead to come to the meat of the tutorial welcome if you're coming from a future vector portrait tutorial i'm going to go over the advanced settings of how to make the pupil and the iris without all the preamble and the basics let's get right into it so you want to go to create tiled clones symmetry will be p1 simple translation on shift you're going to go to per row shift y negative 100 per column shift x negative 100. next tab over for scale you want to go to 50 randomize rotation and this is key because we're going to be spinning our tiled clones manually but first we have to make the array with this tool so per column will be 6 degrees randomize 50 and finally down to the rows and columns let's go with one row and 50 columns don't push create yet we still have to make the object go ahead and grab the create circles and ellipsis tool right here and draw open a flat oval about like that except that it's pink the color palette if you want the color codes they'll be in the description below so i'll go to fill and stroke eyedropper i'll go with this blue and i'll take the stroke off by going a stroke x out of that now there's one more technique i have to show you to make this effect work and it's how to change the rotation point on an object so if i click off of everything this is the object i click on it once and you see these black arrows if i click on a second time there's a hash mark in the center that's the pivot point so you can pivot around it as it's in the center but you can also move that pivot point outside of the object so i'm going to draw it over here that hash mark is now here and if i pivot it's going to go around that point wherever it may be so first let's make it more horizontal i'll put the pivot point back and actually i did realize i put the cloning object at 50 transparency because we're going to create a circular array and create opacity by layering some of the transparency so back to the object i'm going to fill and we'll go to about 50 on the opacity this is a slider that changes the transparency level all right so back to our pivot point let's first make it smaller about like that and to bring the hash mark back out again just click on it one more time so you see it if you hold control you can draw the hash mark out locked in on the horizontal so even if i wiggle the mouse up and down it will not deviate from the horizontal axis which will be good for this effect here so right about there so put the hash mark just eyeball it roughly we're gonna adjust as we go and now we can finally go back to create tiled clones to the exact same settings we already did and push create not bad okay so it does change every single time because remember we have two factors that are randomized but this looks pretty good i'm going to close the crate tiled clones tab because it does force the expansion of the sidebar we lose some workspace here so x out of that then you can compact it and let's see what we have here zoom out a tiny bit let's move our color palette out of the way and the next step is to group all of this together so grab in no man's land make your bounding box around everything you'll see it all highlight and then ctrl g will group it now as one group i'm going to click on it one more time to get my handles so there's another technique to add to your arsenal here if you are moving an object rotating it or moving it you can push spacebar and it will stamp onto the workspace that object this is the method we're going to use to make our iris here so i have my finger on the spacebar i'll start rotating it just normally not pushing spacebar yet but then listen for the spacebar bar space bar space bar just do it as you please until you have it about maybe i felt like that was like six or eight right there so now i have this design almost like a kaleidoscope effect and i want to group this whole thing so grab no man's land and then ctrl g will group that since all of that is now together i'll do ctrl d which will duplicate it and i can take the duplicate and bring it over here hold ctrl and shift together and reduce the size there because i want an inner ring to layer on top of this larger ring just like that to create more of a darker inner ring i'm going to grab one of the smaller ovals which i know is that smaller ring i get my handles again and same thing i'm going to hold my finger on the space bar and start to rotate and just give that was just two let's get this out of there just two maybe three see how you feel i'll move this out of the way and let's create more of defined circle back here and add a background so i'll go back to the create circles tool shift and control let's bring it open i want a hard line around the perimeter and blurring in towards the center so first let's go back to full opacity on this we'll go with this darker blue control d will now duplicate this so it's a circle on top of a circle let's change the color to the lighter blue here so eyedropper lighter blue bring it in slightly and we'll add a blur to this lighter blue maybe go 1615 that's about good from there ctrl d will duplicate that shift and control will bring it down evenly as we reduce it we'll make that one full white and now that i can see it bring it up against closer to the perimeter of the lighter blue and blur it some more right there let's group this whole thing together ctrl g over here is hierarchy i want on the very bottom to slide underneath here so bottom and let's bring it underneath i think i just walked into a pun i eyeballed that pretty close but that's too much on the nose so we'll leave that there resize a tiny bit and let's add a pupil so back to circles ellipses shift and control can't see anything because it's white let's go black i want slight opacity on this one so maybe we'll bring it to 90 and a little bit of a blur maybe 10 hierarchy should be on top because i just made it there it is center it up ctrl d will duplicate that i want this one to be no blur and full opacity and reduce it just ever so slightly it's looking at me now if you're perfectionist you want to get this perfectly centered let's grab the inner pupil the blurred pupil ctrl g will group that to one object if you hold shift and then go to your most outer darker circle you've got the two together now if you go up to your align and distribute menu which is this bar graph thing click there it gives you a lot of choices on how to center things so we're going to align relative to last selected so it's going to take this group relative to that group and we'll center it up horizontally and center it up vertically it moved it ever so slightly but maybe it was worth the extra step okay finishing touch i want to add a bit of a glare so let's go back to our favorite tool the circles and the ellipses hold shift and control i need a circle ctrl d i'll change that to any random color this will be our clipping shape right about there i want a curved glare so first i have to make the shape for it so i'm going to knock out the center here of this bigger circle i'll grab the outer circle hold shift get the inner circle path difference that knocks that part out now you can make your glare any way you want when i looked at some reference photos you can actually see a picture of whatever is bouncing off of the eyeball but we'll just do a stylized version here so grab your bezier pen tool and we'll just make a random shape like so and i want to add a trailer to that one so i'll make another shape next to it and the two of these are going to become the clipping shape for my ring here so to do that i've got one selected hold shift to get the other one path combine that will make one unified clipping piece i can then hold shift get my ring path intersection and i've got my glare but it's black eyedropper i cheated i had it ready over here it should be on top because of hierarchy we just made it let's bring it into place for some reason the opacity went way down let's bring the opacity up until it looks like it's an eyeball looking back at you and if you're gonna use this in a project i would then group everything one of the reasons we made that background circle was so there is full opacity even though there's a lot of transparency in here control g will group it and we've got an i just for kicks ctrl d and now i have two eyes and there we go so hopefully we can use this in future vector portrait tutorials if you have questions on any of the steps or suggestions for other things we can do let me know in the comments and thanks [Music]

Channel: IronEcho Design

Views: 980

Keywords: Rick Johanson, Inkscape, Vector Portait, Eyes, How To, Make, Tiled Clones, Create, Iris, Pupil

Id: vHGDYcP6S9I

Length: 12min 34sec (754 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 08 2021