Learning Inkscape for Design Space - Challenge #1

hey folks I'm going to start doing some videos on Inkscape and how to learn the very basics of Inkscape and be able to designs and bring them into design space and these are going to be very simple what I call challenges and they're going to be pretty quick videos and what I'd like to see people do is to follow the video these are for really beginners and you know if you've been using Inkscape for a while you might want to watch you might pick up a thing or two I don't know if I do if I do something wrong please let me know I know there were some veterans out there that know more about the application that I do but I'm going to try to do some very simple shapes simple designs and progressively increase the difficulty of the designs in order to help people learn Inkscape and how to do designs for creating SVG files especially for bringing into design space so I'm going to switch over to the computer and get started and again these these are going to be a series of what I call challenges and when you complete a challenge I would encourage people to post it out on the line and push the screen capture of it or your little things that you cut out or whatever just to show that you did it and show you your progress and what you're learning and tag me in it and I would appreciate it and hopefully this will be helpful to you so I'll switch over the computer and get started so I'm using Inkscape versions 0.40 8.5 there is a newer version on your website at the time this coming up it's 0.91 and for the most part the functions are going to be the same but want to work the same there may be some differences in how it looks or maybe where something is located so if you want to follow along exactly like I do want to look exactly like mine download the 0.45 version otherwise most things should be pretty close you shouldn't have too much difficulty finding things so real quickly the tools were going to use in this version we're going to be using a couple of menus at the top we'll be using the selection tool the node editor and a couple of the basic shape tools down here and don't let all the additional toolbars and functions that you see around the edges of the screen overwhelm you and confuse you when I'm going to mess with me of those this time we're going to do something just a couple basic shapes and we'll get started so the first thing I like to do is I like to remove this page border so I go to file document properties and uncheck the box that says show page water now a lot of people think that your design has to be within that box for it to say properly that's not the case you just turn it off I just find it annoying when I try to do it design and I like to turn it off that's just a personal preference so the first thing we're going to do is insert a square so we'll click the square root all over here and we're going to hold the control and shift keys while we draw the square now I was selected unread down here at the bottom on your color selection tool and you can tell here it says field and also at the top right where it says fill what color you're going to create by holding the ctrl shift key it allows us to make a symmetrical square so it's the same dimensions width times height I do not hold the ctrl shift key it will simply allow you to draw a rectangle or square in whatever shape or size you want so now we'll move this to the middle of the screen and when I click on it you notice that I get arrows and the first set of areas that you see are areas that you have I allow you to adjust the size and shape if you click the object the second time you get rotate errors and so you can grab those and turn your objects on the design so a couple of shortcut keys I want to share with you the plus and minus keys on your keyboard allow you to zoom in and out so plus susan- zooms out if you click on an object like this and select it you can press the number 3 key on your keyboard to go full screen with your zoom and if you make mistake let's say for example you accidentally delete an object you can press ctrl Z to undo that action and you can be undue action will keep several steps in a row so you can undo several steps and control Y is reduced so if you want to redo a step or undo a ctrl Z or control Y these are very useful keyboard shortcuts for you to learn to eat used to using so next we're going to convert this object to a pal so we'll select it we'll go path and object to path now if you remember from my first video I explained that your design needs to be all paths and that's as the path the along which the blade or the pen is going to move not to bring your design into design space so next we're going to insert a another basic object insert a circle and this time we'll again hold ctrl and shift and overall that circle and now we will go to half object to pal so now with our node editor we will click this tool here this is the node editor and when I selected it you'll see that I get these little nodes if I select this object I give those little nodes okay and I'm going to adjust the shape of this box but we're having this node with my mouse click on it and hold down I'm going to drag it down here then I'm going to do the same thing with this one and drag it over and we're going to make a trapezoid doesn't have to be exact so just drag it down there as best you can again we're just playing around and learning and next we will go back to our selection tool and we'll grab our circle moment put it right on top we're going to move it down just a little bit so that it's overlapping on the trapezoid so if I highlight both today as you can see by the bounding boxes that these two objects are overlapped and next I'm going to go to the paths menu I'm going to select Union and now as you see that is made it all when objects a union on the path when you're similar to weld in design space so now we've made this all one object and so next we're going to grab another object and we're going to use this start and this time we'll select black before we do this just so that we can see it better on top and we'll just drag it out and again we'll go path object to path we're going to put this over top of the trapezoid and next what we're going to do is I'm going to show you the layers so you have layers in Inkscape just like you do in design space now I'm not working when necessary with layers I'm working with the objects though so I don't really mess with the layers much you're working with objects so think of these objects positions as your layers just like in the site space so I can select the larger object the red object and I can come down here and say raise the top and as you see the star is behind that object so just wanted to show you that and so we will lower it to the bottom so that the star is on top again so you can see it so now I'm going to select both both of these objects and in design space you can slice if you have two objects selected no more no less so you can do the same thing in Inkscape and I'm going to cut out this star from the red object so I've highlighted both of those and I'm going to go to tap and select difference so now we have our object and we have a cutout in the Sun and I'm not sure what we will call this but it's just a shape we'll playing around with warm and one of the things that you can do in Inkscape is go to view display mode outline and this will show your paths along which your pin or your blade or it going to cut so that's a useful to tool to check your SVG file and so we'll go back to normal view and we're going to save this as a file and call it challenge one and we want to save this as a plain SVG file and we'll save it and I'll switch over to designs base we'll upload that image and we see our preview it looks just like it did in Inkscape and we'll insert it into our project I'll just sighs a little bit and click go and you'll see that it shows the paths just like it did in Inkscape when we view the outline so hopefully this has been helpful to you as your first step towards learning the very basics of Inkscape and how to do the design and bring it into design space so I'll be posting more of these and if you've gotten this far and everything worked out okay for you please post a screen capture out there in the Facebook groups and tag me in it and I would appreciate it here's a list of the things that you learned in this video challenge you learn how to use the selection tool and how to move objects around resize them and rotate them you learned how to use the node editor and how to adjust nodes and readjust the shapes of objects you learn how to insert basic objects and how to use the ctrl shift key when you're inserting objects to keep them symmetrical you learn how to convert objects to paths which is very important and you also learn some shortcut keys so you learn how to zoom in and out with your keyboard to using the plus and minus keys as well as the number three key to zoom in on an object fullscreen you learned that the ctrl z cut a combination keys and control Y or undo and redo you also learn how to use the fill color and how to know what color you are selected on you also learn how to use the path Union command to weld which is the same thing you do in design space and also the path menu difference command is the same as slice in design space you learn how to save the SVG file remember to always say to the plain SVG and you'll learn how to import the design into design space if my video has been helpful to you please subscribe to my channel and after you subscribe because sure to click the little gear and check this box so that you'll receive an email notification when I upload a new video you can also help support my channel by making its small donation on patreon.com slash troy young

Channel: TroyTube

Views: 55,483

Keywords: All, Videos, inkscape, learn inkscape

Id: P6UVQD1dVUM

Length: 10min 37sec (637 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 03 2015