Inkscape Watercolor Tutorial: Filter Settings Explained

i'm rick johansen and this is iron echo design in this inkscape tutorial i want to go over the watercolor effect i'll show you the settings and how to troubleshoot it when things go wrong this is a direct response to questions i've had on previous watercolor tutorials and i also want to reference this exact tutorial in future videos so we can all learn the exact settings and you can do things where watercolor is in the background like in the eiffel tower here you could make the watercolor actually be part of the design or we'll make this today in honor of the upcoming easter holiday we'll make an easter egg where the watercolor is inside the art and also part of the background so let's start if you're going to follow along i'm on the a4 template it's 210 millimeters 297 millimeters it's on the welcome screen just choose a4 and first things first you need to start with the shape we'll use an oval as an example and you'll apply the filters texture watercolor and it'll come pretty close to our target here but what often happens is it doesn't work that way so i'm going to go through slowly the settings and then we'll do the easter egg okay i just moved things up so we have our original page area here as a reference point i found that starting small does help let's open up our fill and stroke menu go to object fill and stroke you'll get your sidebar menu here i'll choose circles and ellipses i'll make an oval relatively small compared to the a4 template there it could be any color but when you're beginning or troubleshooting choose a darker color because the effect is easier to see the two key points here make sure you have no transparency so this slider here if you're on the wheel you want to be full opacity here no transparency and down here on this slider also full opacity under stroke make sure you have stroke off with your object selected the effect is found under filters texture watercolor and this time it didn't work that well so this is perfect let's bring it down to step two and see if we can fix this one cool thing you'll notice every time you drag it it's going to resample and change the effect itself so right there you could just move it from side to side to see if it affects it at all but if it doesn't your first troubleshooting is under blur so see how this works if i reduce the blur i get my this is what they're sampling from this watercolor swatch if i take the blur all the way you can see the outline of the original oval and if i do too much blur it becomes a little bit messy because we're going to fine tune things bring it down somewhere in the 60 range 62 65 maybe it's okay if you see the swatch because we're going to go to filters filter editor to fine tune it all right the first time you open the filter editor it's a little overwhelming because there's so many options so many settings just focus on the top one gaussian blur and whichever one is highlighted in blue the adjustment area is down here so for my standard deviation i can change it with the plus minus so i'm going to go plus and it brings it all together let's make this bigger so we have a better view you can also drag it dragging it down too low my swatch reappears if i drag it too far then the whole thing fades away you can also punch in an exact number i'll try 9.0 enter and that's okay for now to keep a little bit of space there because we can fine-tune more things at the next tab which is called turbulence on turbulence you have to make sure you're on fractal noise and the two areas you can adjust are base frequency if i turn this one up higher it cycles through different samples of your that one looks good what inkscape is doing is rendering it slightly differently each time you click and change that base frequency you might want to have more of a bleeding edge here or a rich area with more of a fade down here you'll know when you see the look you're going for octave seems to change the intensity of things i have it set to 5 right now if you slide the octaves down lower it gets kind of blurry and if you slide it higher the intensity of the fractal noise really picks up i'll bring it back down to the five just for a softer feel the next couple tabs you don't need to spend too much time on for composite the first composite be on operator over for color matrix add effect blend and i wouldn't change any of these effect parameters down here but what we do want is the next tab displacement map make sure you're on blend and when you go to scale this slider it will fill in any of these areas that were still vacant i now have a clean watercolor effect i like the way this looks to be thorough the last four of these tabs composite again be on blend operator in the second to last composite same thing blend operator in the last composite operator arithmetic and finally blend is on multiply all right there's the rundown of the filter editor settings now let's play with the image itself if i double click on it you'll see a center x that lets you move it around and change the actual rendering in real time and you can see where it moves it really does give you infinite possibilities you can move these nodes as well and drag it open if you had a different type of shape it had more nodes different angles to it you can play with those and make adjustments as you want i think i'll leave it right there for some reason if you want to not make changes and resample every time you move it click on it so you have the handles and slightly resize it and that way when you move it it does not change let's go to some open space and i want to dye an easter egg with you i'll go back to my fill and stroke menu i can change the color now something maybe brighter i'll go with that pink right there now with it selected i'll do ctrl d to duplicate it and see these right here these are directionals i'll flip it vertically first then i'll flip it horizontally because i want to have a two-tone egg and the top color will be more orange or yellow and here's the beauty of working with the vector i can now change the actual nodes i can even add another node i'm on the bottom one here i'm going to go to path object to path choose edit paths by node if you click on one of the nodes the handles show up if i hold shift and get a second one i can then add a node in between the two insert new node so there it is right here i'll click off of everything the reason i did that is i want to make a diagonal white stripe so i can stretch it better now because i cheated and i duplicated the bottom one when i make changes to the top it might still affect the look of the bottom one but that's okay if you don't want that to happen rather than duplicate it and flip it just start fresh with the second watercolor shape but i'm okay with it i'll go to path object to path edit paths by node now i can make that white stripe that's good it looks messy right now but that's all right let's click over here and make our egg grab our circles and ellipsis tool i will make an oval kind of a fatter oval change it to egg color gray white so you can see it path object to path edit paths by node if i grab my top node and bring it up i get my egg that's good right there minimize it a bit i'll change the opacity i want to see where it's going to go look at that that's going to be a nice easter egg right there do i want more pink we'll go balanced back to full opacity there's a couple steps here i need to duplicate things because i want to keep both of my watercolors as the background and fill in the egg so i'll do ctrl d to duplicate the egg come back for that i will grab the top and the bottom holding shift so i have the orange and the pink i don't have this egg i'll do ctrl g which groups it ctrl d will duplicate it i will move that out of the way and we'll come back to that as the background this egg becomes my clipping shape with it selected i'll hold shift and select the grouped background beneath it object clip set there it is so there is our watercolor easter egg and we don't have any vinegar smell or at least you shouldn't but we're not done for a couple of reasons if i take this out of inkscape right now there is transparency on it so it might mess up when you bring it in someplace else let's duplicate this again and make this pure white and drop it beneath or on top so we can see where it goes it should snap in these are the hierarchy steps i'll drop it down one step then grab a no man's land and ctrl g to group those two items together another small detail just for fun i don't like how it's super super crisp on the edge so there's a way to change the blur without messing up the inside because if i do blur here the whole thing gets ruined you want to go to filters blurs feather and you'll get this pop-up box with a strength bar i have it preset to 0.30 and when i click live preview see if you can tell what happens okay here's our egg with the hard edge when i click live preview you see how it's very subtle apply close now i know this is an egg you know what's an egg because we made it together but let's round it with a little bit of shading the quickest way to do that is to take that original egg shape we had if you're on fill go to radial gradient it looks like it went away but if i hit pencil i can then change it bring it down here see the shading i'm adding it's super subtle it may not even show up that well but i'll bring it right over the top and that is when it's white we don't want it as a normal blend mode we want to go to multiply off camera i tweaked it a little bit more let's slide it back in you can also change the slider at the bottom for the opacity so that's with nothing that's probably too dark something in between right there let's bring the backdrop i bet it snaps into place and we'll camouflage let's see if it does it does okay so let's change the direction and now see what happens i twisted it a tad let's widen it too maybe make that a little lighter something in 76 79 alright that'll do it i hope this was helpful i hope this answered some of your questions you might have on the watercolor effect the settings i want to reference this video in the future when we use this filter for other projects if i could 3d print this and put them out in the yard for the easter egg hunt i would but instead i'll just record a video about it share it with you and hopefully we can all have some fun with it see you next time [Music]

Channel: IronEcho Design

Views: 13,493

Keywords: watercolor, rick johanson, ironecho, iron echo, ironecho design, inkscape, watercolor effect, easter, egg, background

Id: pT5rjJjna9w

Length: 11min 9sec (669 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 15 2022