Repeat an Object Around a Shape with Inkscape

[Music] this is Nick with logos by Nick comm and in today's tutorial I'll be demonstrating how you can use the pattern along path function in Inkscape to create some unique and interesting designs and patterns and if you'd like to learn more about how Inkscape works be sure to check out the Inkscape master class which is a collection of over 60 videos that I created where I go over all of the different tools and features in Inkscape and I explain what they are and demonstrate how they work we even have a private community where I could personally help you out and answer any questions you have I'll put a link in the description of the video if you want to check that out so we're going to get started here in Inkscape the first thing we want to do is just make sure we're all working with a similar page setup so I'm going to go to view make sure you have custom selected and then we're go to view zoom and zoom in at 1 to 1 and then I want to open up the align and distribute menu with this button up here we're gonna want last selected chosen from this drop-down and then I'm going to open up the Edit objects colors gradients and Stroke menu with this button over here so if you notice here I have this shape selected and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna use the pattern along path function in Inkscape to take this stretch to take this shape and stretch it out and repeat it around a circle now you don't have to use this shape you can use whatever shape you'd like you could use a circle or a star you can create some kind of custom shape and shape if you'd like but what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna grab the circles and ellipses tool and I'm gonna hold ctrl and shift and I'm gonna click and drag in the campus to create a perfectly round circle like that and this is the path that I want to make this shape follow along so I want to take copies of this shape and make it repeat going all along the edges of this circle right here so what I'm gonna do first is I'm just going to convert this to a path I'll get a path object to path and that's no longer a a circle or ellipse object it's now recognized as a regular path and what I'm going to do is I'm going to open up the the path the path effects menu by going to path and clicking on path effects and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna click plus over here to add a new path effect to this circle and I'm gonna look for pattern along path it should be about halfway through the list here pattern along path click Add and what I want to do now is I want to click on the shape that I'd like to apply around the circle I'm gonna grab the select tool I'm gonna click on my shape right here like I said you can use any shape you'd like you don't have to use this here I'm gonna right click this and go to copy and then I'm gonna click on this circle and over here in the pattern along path menu I'm gonna choose where it says pattern copies i'm gonna choose repeated stretched and i'm gonna click on this button over here that says link path on clipboard and if you notice it took this object and repeated it around the edge of that circle right here and now this this circle here is linked to this original shape so as i add it this shape this will edit along with it now let me zoom in let me zoom in let me scale this down a little bit let me make that back to black again i'm gonna scale this down and you're gonna notice it scales down the size of the pattern here as well you'll notice if i make this smaller there's now more of these shapes in here because the smaller size means more of these shapes can fit within this circle now it works the other way as well if i make that larger now less of those shapes can fit within that circle if you notice here start you get starting to get a little bit of a little bit of distortion in there so i'm gonna make that a little smaller and that's how the repeated stretch let me click on that again repeated stretch that's how that works now if you what you want to do is you can if you want you can add some spacing between these where it says space and then click on 5 and it adds 5 units of spacing between each object right there if you notice there and that works on the negative as well if i add negative 3 you'll notice they start to overlap with each other each of those objects now let me put that back to zero another thing you can do is nope there we go another thing you could do is you can use single stretched and if you choose single stretch what it's going to do is it's gonna take this object and it's gonna stretch it out all the way you learn all the way around the perimeter of this path here now if you know you probably it's probably hard to tell what that is but you can if you if you really look closely you can see it took this object and stretched it out like that so let me undo that let me put this back at repeated stretched and what you're done once you're happy with how this looks what you're wanting what you want to do is you want to finalize it before you finalize it if you want you can remove the path and you it'll put it back to a circle let me undo that or you can finalize it by going to path object to path and now that's no longer a pattern along path object now this doesn't just work with circles you can do this with virtually any shape and I'll show you what I mean let me scale that down put that out of the way I'm gonna grab the Bezier pen over here and I'm gonna click to create a point I'm gonna hold ctrl bring the line across the screen like this and then click to create another point and then press ENTER on the keyboard and I'm gonna grab the Edit path by nodes tool and I'm gonna edit this line a little bit give it a little bit of a curve that right there is what I'm looking for or something like that and now I'm gonna again and once again I'm going to copy this right click copy I'm gonna click on this path I'm gonna add I'm gonna come back up here to the path effects menu click the plus to add a path effect pattern a long path we want to use repeated stretched and I'm gonna go ahead and click link and if you notice here took the object and it stretched it a lot and it repeated that along that path but it took on the properties of the line that we drew where it had a one-point stroke in no fill color so I'm gonna give that a fill color and I'm gonna get rid of the outline otherwise known as the stroke by holding shift and clicking on the X right there and that right there it took this pattern and it applied it along this path here now another thing you can do with this is you can use this to create like kind of like a wreath let me show you what I mean here I'm gonna grab the circles and ellipses tool I'm gonna hold ctrl and shift to create a circle like that let me bring the opacity down a little bit grab the Select tool duplicate that by hitting ctrl D and hold ctrl move this over to the right click and drag over both of those and go to path intersection and this shape right here is what we're looking for I'm gonna right click that and go to copy and now I'm going to create another circle I'm going to hold ctrl and shift click and drag click and drag to create a circle convert that to a path by going to path object to path and now I will add a path effect to this again once again pattern along path I'm gonna choose repeated stretched and I'm going to go ahead and link it and if you notice here it's taking this object and linking it it's it's repeating it around the outside of that circle so let me grab the Select tool I want to click on this object click on it again to get the rotation handles I'm just gonna hold ctrl and rotate this to the right a couple of times like that and if you notice here on the left side we're starting to get what appears to be kind of like this this could be kind of like a reef like a of a wreath of leaves let me scale this down to show you I'm gonna add some spacing in there let me click on the on the on the path effect here I'm gonna add some spacing in there woops messed something up there there we go let's add to see how that looks maybe a little less than that maybe a little more let me rotate this around a little bit and as you rotate it it changes the position as you can see there now I like how that looks right there I'm gonna finalize that by clicking on it and going to path object to path and I'm going to create another circle inside of there let me grab the circles and ellipses tool hold ctrl and shift click and drag to create a slightly smaller circle than this one Center it up inside of here click and drag over both of those and Center them up on the center on the vertical and horizontal axis path object to path and now I'll click on this I want these leaves to go the opposite way the opposite direction of these so I'm just gonna flip this one horizontally I'll click on this button up here that says flip selected objects horizontally right click that go to copy click on this path and make that a little bit bigger and once again I will add a path effect same way as I did with the other objects repeated stretched link it and two point spacing like we did before we make that a little bigger I think I used less spacing than that let me bring that down a little bit okay that looks pretty good right about there and I will go I will finalize that by going to path object to path and now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna break this apart so what this is all individual pieces I'll go to path break apart and let me get rid of some of these extras in here I want to just keep the left side here so let me get rid of these press Delete on the keyboard to get rid of them and I'll do the same thing over here path break apart let me get rid of these extras over here like I said I'm just keeping the left hand side for now and as you can see here we have like the left-hand side of kind of like a little accent piece or a wreath like that let me bring the opacity to this up let me group it together by clicking the group selected objects button and now I can duplicate that by hitting ctrl D hold ctrl click and drag this off to the right flip this horizontally and there you go now you can put some kind of design in the middle here you can create some kind of like little law maybe like an award graphic or some kind of logo with these sorts of decorations on it but I think that should do it for this video that take and go about using the pattern along path effects with Inkscape if you have any questions let me know and as always thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: Logos By Nick

Views: 244,796

Rating: 4.9743958 out of 5

Keywords: inkscape, inkscape tutorial, pattern along path, logos by nick, logosbynick, nick saporito

Id: 3jve45Z60iU

Length: 10min 28sec (628 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 10 2020