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

Drawing lines and shapes from scratch

We need not start with any shapes at all. Using the Bezier Curve tool, we can simply click in multiple places on the canvas, and Inkscape will connect those points with lines for us. Furthermore, we can complete a closed shape by clicking the same node we started with. You will notice when you move the cursor over the first node that it will be highlighted in red to indicate that clicking will close the shape. Figure 5.13 shows this process:

Figure 5.13 – Making an open or closed shape with the Bezier Curve tool

Figure 5.13 – Making an open or closed shape with the Bezier Curve tool

To make an open shape, we can hit the Enter key and Inkscape will end the shape at the last place we clicked.

If you misplace a node, you don’t have to wait to correct it later. We can undo the last node we clicked by tapping the Backspace key. Inkscape will keep erasing nodes the more you tap Backspace until there are no more nodes left.

This is great for making a straight-edge polygon...