Book Image

Design Made Easy with Inkscape

By : Christopher Rogers
1 (1)
Book Image

Design Made Easy with Inkscape

1 (1)
By: Christopher Rogers

Overview of this book

With the power and versatility of the Inkscape software, making charts, diagrams, illustrations, and UI mockups with infinite resolution becomes enjoyable. If you’re looking to get up to speed with vector illustration in no time, this comprehensive guide has got your back! Design Made Easy with Inkscape is easy to follow and teaches you everything you need to know to create graphics that you can use and reuse forever, for free! You’ll benefit from the author’s industry experience as you go over the basics of vector illustration, discovering tips and tricks for getting professional graphics done fast by leveraging Inkscape's powerful toolset. This book teaches by example, using a great variety of use cases from icons and logos to illustration, web design, and product design. You’ll learn about hotkeys and take a best-practices approach developed over ten years of using Inkscape as a design tool in production. What’s more, this book also includes links to free graphics resources that you can use in all your projects. Whether you’re a new user or a professional, by the end of this book, you’ll have full understanding of how to use Inkscape and its myriad of excellent features to make stunning graphics for your projects.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
1
Part 1: Finding Your Way Around
7
Part 2: Advanced Shape Editing
13
Part 3: Inkscape’s Power Tools

The Mesh Gradient tool

Like the Gradient tool, this tool allows us to assign and edit gradients on the canvas. Instead of clicking and dragging a gradient, we simply select the Mesh Gradient tool and double-click the flat-color shape we want to assign a mesh gradient to, as shown in Figure 8.17.

Figure 8.17 – Double-clicking on a black square with the Mesh Gradient tool active

Figure 8.17 – Double-clicking on a black square with the Mesh Gradient tool active

By default, this gives us a 1x1 grid of color stops to work with. As before, we can select one of the diamond-shaped stops and click a swatch to assign it another color. Additionally, Inkscape gives us a set of little circular handles to change the curvature of the gradient between stops, so we can make whatever custom gradient shapes we like.

Figure 8.18 shows the default 1x1 mesh gradient before and after we move around the stops and handles to better fit the shape.

Figure 8.18 – A default mesh gradient edited to fit a non-uniform shape

Figure 8.18 – A default mesh gradient edited to fit a non-uniform shape...