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

Using blur for complex shading

Mesh gradients are a great tool for advanced control of your gradients, but the more complex your shape is, the more complex your mesh gradient may have to be to get the effect you want. Also, the more color stops you’re going to have to edit to get the gradient to conform to the shape.

Take, for example, a splotch shape made with the Star and Polygon tool, which we covered in Chapter 3, Drawing Shapes with the Shape Tools. It’s nearly impossible to get a good shadow on this sort of shape with a mesh gradient. Rather than undertake hours of tedious stop-editing, we can start using our knowledge of Booleans to create an area for our shadow.

Simply copy the splotch shape, then select Edit > Paste in Place, and then move it up and over a bit to the left. We can then select both shapes and perform a difference path operation (Path > Difference) to get a shadow shape, then select Paste in Place again to get back our original splotch...