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

Clips and clipping groups

We got to play with clips a little in the last chapter when we used them to clip our blur, making a hard edge at the bottom of our shape to get rid of what looked like a shadow. Let’s take another example. Say we want to subtract the background from an image. This is a common photo editing task that we can do right in Inkscape with vector precision!

As you can see in Figure 9.1, we can use our Bezier Curve tool to trace the periphery of this fetching mannequin and select both the shape and the picture, but instead of Object > Clip > Set Clip, as we did before, we’re going to right-click on our selected objects and just choose Set Clip from the context menu that pops up. Easy, right?

Figure 9.1 – Using the context menu (also known as the right-click menu) to set a clip

Figure 9.1 – Using the context menu (also known as the right-click menu) to set a clip

Note that there are other clipping options in that context menu, but before we dive too deep, let’s explore some neat tricks...