Book Image

Inkscape 0.48 Illustrator's Cookbook

Book Image

Inkscape 0.48 Illustrator's Cookbook

Overview of this book

Inkscape is an open source vector graphics editor with an intuitive user interface that has enough depth to make quality graphic designs with an attractive layout comparable to what you would make using Illustrator or CorelDraw. But choosing the right tool and the best approach to creating the desired effect can be challenging. Inkscape 0.48 Illustrator's Cookbook makes it super-easy for you to make your own vector-based graphics with the powerful Inkscape editor. Inkscape 0.48 Illustrator's Cookbook provides you with the latest recipes to quickly create scalable vector graphics. Recipes in this book teach you about some of the most useful time-saving features in Inkscape accompanied by a list of keyboard shortcuts that you can easily memorize. In addition to covering use of Inkscape tools and their advanced features, examples from the recipes uncover solutions to common graphics problems. The book starts off with familiarizing you with the tools and techniques in Inkscape that you can use to draw 2D shapes, calligraphic shapes, and 3D boxes easily. It then guides you through the most common color-changing steps performed in Inkscape along with some convenient procedures that can save your time when dealing with colors. It explains drawing using linear and radial gradients, which are irreplaceable, usage of clones to create interesting effects in illustrations, and live-path effects that can help you speed up constructing a shape and make the process more natural. You will learn how to make those tweaks on some of the ready-made filters, and in the final recipe we will create a filter from scratch. This practical book also contains recipes showing how to use Inkscape as a raster editor and how to achieve photo-realistic effects in Inkscape. For each important technique and skill, you'll see some simple recipes, then some more advanced recipes followed by an explanation of how Inkscape works to produce the desired effects in your illustrations. By the end of this book you will be confident enough to create your own vector-based graphics with Inkscape.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Inkscape 0.48 Illustrator's Cookbook
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Designing plate rims using Layers


If you have worked with a raster graphics program such as The Gimp or Photoshop, you might have used the layers system to view and manipulate different parts of a picture.

In Inkscape, we will find that there is less emphasis on this concept and more on objects. Still, using layers can prove quite handy in some situations and therefore Inkscape provides a system to create and manage them.

In this recipe, our goal will be to draw a kitchen plate with two options for the pattern rim design. This is the drawing with one of the patterns active:

How to do it...

The following steps will show you how to design your plate rims:

  1. 1. Open the Fill and Stroke (Shift + Ctrl + F) and Layers dialogs (Shift + Ctrl + L).

  2. 2. Create a circle using the Ellipse tool (F5 or E) while holding Ctrl, make it as large as the page. Set its fill to none, its stroke to White (it will blend with the background), and set the stroke width to 150.

  3. 3. Duplicate the circle (Ctrl + D). Set its stroke...