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

Editing shapes with the Node tool

Fortunately, Inkscape allows us to make virtually any shape we please with the Edit Paths by Nodes tool, which we will refer to from here on out as just the Node tool.

Before we can edit our shapes, however, we need to convert them from objects into paths, which we can then edit node by node. Take the glass we made in the previous chapter, for example – maybe we’d like to make it a bit narrower at the bottom, as shown in Figure 5.1:

Figure 5.1 – Before and after versions of our glass

Figure 5.1 – Before and after versions of our glass

Let’s begin by selecting the Node tool from the Toolbar area and selecting our glass. We’ll ungroup the glass by pressing Ctrl + Shift + G or selecting Object > Ungroup, then select our glass rectangle object. Note that we have our corner rounding handles still, which are object properties. Converting from Object into Path lets us edit all the nodes instead of just the object properties, and to do that...