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

Masking with vector shapes and images

Vector shapes with Set Clip allow you to set the boundary cut-off of shapes. Masks let you control the transparency of those same shapes in a much more flexible way. Say, for example, we have an illustration of a fish, and we’d like to make it half… I don’t know… squirrel! Sure, why not?

We’d like to gradually fade out the squirrel half into the fish half. That would normally take a lot of complex gradients, but fortunately, we can use a simple black-to-white gradient shape as a mask to fade the squirrel into the fish, as shown in Figure 9.7.

Figure 9.7 – Fading squirrel to fish with a black-to-white gradient set to mask

Figure 9.7 – Fading squirrel to fish with a black-to-white gradient set to mask

Note that where the gradient is white, the squirrel head is more opaque and the darker the gradient gets, the more transparency we get. This is the essence of how masks work in Inkscape and many other programs. We can, of course, use radial and even mesh...