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

Try it yourself

With all these great shape operation tools, we can now save ourselves loads of time making custom shapes. In this practice lesson, we’ll be making some delightful non-edible mushrooms on a cloudy day, as shown in Figure 6.33:

Figure 6.33 – An attractive set of non-edible mushrooms

Figure 6.33 – An attractive set of non-edible mushrooms

We’ll start our illustration with the clouds, which are made of circles of various sizes and a rectangle. Figure 6.34 shows the circles, drawn with the Circle tool, then a rectangle drawn with the rectangle tool:

  1. Simply select the circles and the rectangle and add them together with the Union operation in the Path menu or by pressing Ctrl + Shift + +:
Figure 6.34 – Drawing our cloud shape with the Union path operation

Figure 6.34 – Drawing our cloud shape with the Union path operation

  1. Once we have that base shape, we can make a shadow by copying the cloud (Ctrl + C) and selecting Edit > Paste in place. This will make a copy directly on top of our cloud...