Tutorial goodness

Have been realising of late how many good inkscape tutorials there are out there that dont seem to be getting found by folks.  So thought I’d list a few of them that y’all might not have come across.

In no particular order we have:

• HeathenX’s youtube video tutorials  – Great collection of screencasts covering a variety of tricks.
• BittBoxx’s Vector Grunge tutorial – First tutorial on his site thats inkscape over illustrator, cos our tracings better 🙂 several of his others are easily doable in inkscape, and he has svg as an option on most of the downloads.
• Creating swirls in Inkscape by TentacleGuy on DA – Tutorial on deviant art about using the pattern on path extension to do fancy swirls. Look in his deviations, hes got some nice svg splatter brushes too.
• Variety of cool Inkscape tutorials by Ryan Lerch – Well worth checking out.
• Rubber Stamp Tutorial from Nicu – Personal favorite of several good tutorials by Nicu.

 Hope theres something in there that you hadnt seen before.  Let me know of any other gems you think I’m missing.

 edit: one I missed Richard Querins Screencasts – Some nice screencasts showing various effects, main blogs a pretty good read too 🙂

Filling Calligraphic Strokes

Was playing earlier with SVN, and found a far easier solution to creating fills for  closed shapes drawn with the calligraphic tool than I’d been using previously.  Simple enough I should be able to do without pics, so here gos

1. Draw the shape with the calligraphic tool
2. Duplicate it. (ctrl + D)
3. Draw another line in the region that will be filled.
4. Select this line and the duplicate of the original.
5. Do union (ctrl & + )
6. break apart (ctrl + shift + K)
7. Union again (ctrl & + )
8. Send to back (End)
9. Fill it with a whatever color you want.

Faking irregular gradients in inkscape

The question was asked in the jabber room if it was possible to make a gradient follow a path.
While strictly speaking its not, it is possible to fake it fairly well.
This is a very quick and dirty outline of how….

Step 1. Create your path.

Step 2. Duplicate it, and move it up a little (were creating a ‘thick’ version of it.)

Step 3. Connect the 2 curves – Duplicate the original again, Select both, do ctrl+K to make them into one path, then connect the nodes at either end so you have one shape.

Step 4.  Repeat the first 3 stages, but move the second line to where you want the far end of your gradient.
put the relevant fills on the 2 shapes to be the start and end of the gradient, and remove the strokes.

Step 5. Use the interpolate effect to blend between them. Use method 2 and turn on blending of styles. Make sure the thin ones on top of the thick one.

Step 6. And your done…. if you find you get messy edges like below, clip paths are a god send…

Mirror, Mirror, on the wall…

There have been a couple of discussions recently on the mail list about mirroring and tiled pattern creation etc where the features being requested were already possible using the tile clones feature. Thought I’d try to expand on how to do them a bit as it seems to be something people consider to be voodoo. (true to me to an extent, so much power in there)

Anyways, first up is doing a mirror modifier

1) create a new document and turn the grid on, i set it to 25 and turned on snap nodes, and always snap.

 

2) Create a rectangle that covers half the page. I’ve filled it green just to make it nice and visible.

3) draw a squiggle over the rectangle, and group it.

4) Open the tile clones dialog, select reflect, and do 1 row, 2 columns.

5) Select the clone thats over the original, and delete it. you should get a full page with the left mirrored to the right.

6) enter the original group, delete the squiggle. I left the stroke on the box, but removed the fill as it makes it clear what the centerline for the mirror is. Tis a good idea to save the doc as something useful like mirror.svg if your going to want to create mirrored objects regularly. just open up that as a template and skip the first steps.

7) Make sure your still in the group(double click or right click > enter group), and then draw on the left side, and it will be instantly reflected on the right. be warned, if you overlap the clone will have a higher z-order so wierdness can ensue. 

8) last thing was to remove the stroke from the box, I also shoved it one pixel toward the center as there are occasional rendering artifacts that leave a seam on what should be pixel perfect joins.

Hope thats clear enough.

 Sim

Simple Shadows…

Tutorial on using the interpolate effect in Inkscape 0.44 to fake soft shadows. Works quite nicely for those objects where linear and radial gradients arent suited. Again, svg file with objects as they are created step by step .
get it HERE (link updated 18/3/11)

Update:

If I was doing this now I’d add a blur to the shadow to smooth it out.

Inkscapification…

Saw a rather excellent tutorial for fireworks over at brownbatterystudios.com and had to have a go at it in Inkscape (which i code on now and then). Worked pretty well, with a couple of minor hacks required to get the shadow to work, so I thought I’d put it out here in its inkscapified version for anyone else to learn from. Holding true to the inkscape tradition its as an SVG so you can play with the image as its built step by step to understand whats going on.
Get it HERE

 

both the hosts I had this on have died since I wrote it, so have updated the above link. the updated one died too, so put it on google.

Note you can simply apply a blur rather than messing about with the interpolate these days.