Inkscape Essentials: Hands-on Approach

1. Course Introduction: Hi, I'm Brandon, a video game developer and graphic designer with many years of experience creating digital art with Inkscape, a free and open source vector graphics editor. In this course, we're going to use an entirely hands-on, project-based approach to learn all of the essential tools and features of Inkscape and we can use them to create beautiful artwork for things like logos, icons, and posters. In each lesson, we'll learn several completely new topics, as well as build onto the knowledge we gained in the previous lessons by reusing many of the tools and features we learned in those lessons. Throughout the course, we'll be learning a combination of basic, intermediate, and advanced topics. So whether you're a complete beginner to Inkscape or you've been using it for awhile, you will find this course to be very beneficial at helping you to build and improve your abilities to create amazing vector graphics in Inkscape. I'll also show you some unique uses of Inkscape tools and features, which I've learned about through experience, and which will take your design skills to the next level. So, are you ready to begin? Then join me now, and let's get started today. 2. Inkscape Installation: I'm currently at the Inkscape homepage, which is located at inkscape.org. On this page, we can do things like check out the Inkscape forums, take a look at some tutorials and learn how we can support the development of Inkscape. To download the latest version of Inkscape, we can go to the download menu and choose current version. At the time of recording this video, the current version is 1.2.1. I recommend using version 1.2.1 or above during this course, because earlier versions could have bugs that will cause problems when trying to follow along with the videos. Here, we can choose which operating system we're using. Windows for me. Then we can choose our system architecture. 64-bit for me. And finally, we can choose which installer format we want to download. If you already have a previous version of Inkscape installed and you don't want to replace it, you can download this compressed archive format here, which will allow you to run this version of Inkscape directly from the download folder. Otherwise, we can just choose either EXE or MSI. I'll go with EXE. It will then take us to this page and the download will begin automatically. And once it's finished downloading, we can open the file to begin the installation. When we open the installer, it brings up a setup wizard. We can click next, and here we can choose whether or not we want to add Inkscape to the system path. This is really only necessary if we're planning to use Inkscape through the command line, so I'll just leave mine on do not add. We can also check this box to add a shortcut to Inkscape on the desktop. Next, we can choose where we want to save Inkscape. Then we can choose whether or not to create a Start Menu folder for Inkscape. Finally, we can choose which components of Inkscape we want to install. Unless you're very familiar with all of this already, I recommend just leaving it on the Full installation for this course. Now because I already have this version of Inkscape installed on my system, I won't click the Install button, but once you do, Inkscape will be installed and you'll be able to open it. Okay, and I'll see you on the Welcome Screen in the next video. 3. Welcome Screen: When we first open Inkscape, it brings up this welcome screen. In the first tab here, quick setup, we can do things like change the appearance of the canvas, which is the area that we'll use for drawing. We can also change the keyboard shortcuts that Inkscape uses, which is useful if you're familiar with other vector software, like Adobe Illustrator, and you want to use the same shortcuts. For this course, however, we will be using the default Inkscape shortcuts. And we can change the appearance of the interface icons, which we can see a preview of down here. I'll leave mine on system default. Finally, we can choose whether or not to use the dark interface theme. I'll be using the default theme for this course, but feel free to use the dark theme if you want. In the next tab, supported by you, we can learn how to support the development of Inkscape. Next, in the time to draw tab, we get a list of previous Inkscape documents that we've worked on. If we want to open a previous document, we can choose it in the list and click Load down here. Over here on the left, we have various templates we can choose from. These will change the dimensions of the page, which we'll learn about in the interface overview video, coming up next. For example, under Print, we can choose from different paper sizes and business card sizes. Under Screen, we have templates for various screen sizes. And under Social, we have templates for creating artwork from different social media platforms. For this course, we'll just stick with the default template. And when we're ready to begin a new document, we can click the New Document button here. Okay, in the next video, we'll do a quick overview of the Inkscape interface. See you there. 4. Interface Overview: All of this gray area at the center of an Inkscape document is called the canvas, and it's where we do all of our drawing. This white rectangle at the center of the canvas is called the page, and it allows us to restrain our drawings to a particular area. This is useful if we're creating artwork for something like a business card or a particular screen size, and as we saw in the welcome screen video, we could chose from various templates that will change the dimensions of the page. We can also create a new document with a different page template by going to File -> New from Template. Now we can choose, for example, business card, then choose the size of the business card we want to create, and click the Create from Template button. Now we have a new document with the business card page template that we chose. I'll close out this document to get back to our previous document. We'll discuss the page a bit more at the end of this video. To the left of the canvas is the toolbox, which contains all of the tools we use for creating and manipulating objects. We can re-size the tool box by clicking and dragging at the right side here. Above the canvas we have the controls bar. The functions available in the controls bar depend on which tool we have active in the toolbox. Currently, the select tool here is active. This tool is used for selecting and transforming objects, and in the controls bar for the select tool, we can do things like select all objects, rotate and flip selected objects and resize selected objects. If we switch to another tool, for example, the squares and rectangles tool, now we have options for setting the width and height of rectangles, as well as for rounding the corners. We'll talk much more about these tools and the others in the lesson videos. Above my controls bar is the commands bar. Your commands bar might actually be over here on the right of the canvas. In this case, you're likely on widescreen mode, which we can toggle on and off from the View menu, down here. I'll have widescreen mode turned off for this course, but feel free to leave yours on if you prefer it. Anyway, the commands bar gives us easy access to basic functions. For example, we can create new documents, open existing documents, save our current document, print, import images into our document, and export our drawings. The main difference between saving and exporting is that saving is mostly used for saving our entire Inkscape document to the SVG file format, which we can reopen in Inkscape later and continue where we left off, and exporting is mainly used for converting our drawings into image file formats, like PNG and JPEG, that can be used outside of Inkscape. At the very end of this course, we'll have an entire video about exporting our drawings. Some other things we can do from the command bar are undo and redo, cut, copy and paste, zoom in and out, duplicate and clone objects and group and ungroup objects. If we click one of these six buttons here, it will open a dockable dialog over here on the right. This gives us much more control over things like setting the colors of objects. We can click another one on these buttons to open multiple dialogs. We can also click this arrow here to choose from many other available dialogs. Will discuss many of these throughout the course. We can resize the dialogs by dragging this bar here. And to close out the dialogs, we can click the x's on the tabs. Over here at the top right of the window is the snap controls. These let us snap objects together in many different ways and we'll learn a lot about them throughout the course. Below the canvas, we have the color palette. This allows us to easily change the colors of selected objects and we can see more color options by clicking these arrows on the right. If we click this button here, we can choose from different color palettes. And if we click Configure down here, we can do things like change the size of the color swatch tiles, change the aspect ratio of them, change the width of the borders between them, and add more rows of swatches. Below the color palette is the status bar. This gives us more information about any objects we have selected. And all the way on the right, we can zoom in and out on the canvas and rotate the canvas. We can also click inside one of these boxes and scroll the mouse wheel up and down to change the value more quickly. Some other ways to zoom are tp press the + and - keys; hold Ctrl and scroll the mouse wheel, which will zoom in and out around the cursor; or we can use the zoom tool, which is located here near the bottom of the toolbox and has the keyboard shortcut Z. With the zoom tool, we can left-click to zoom in to the point under the cursor, or right-click to zoom out. We can also click and drag over an area to zoom in to that area. Or if we do this while holding Shift, it will zoom out. We also now have some more options in the controls bar for zooming. Let's back to the select tool for now. If we want to pan around the canvas, we can hold Ctrl and press the arrow keys; we can hold down the spacebar and move the mouse; we can scroll the mouse wheel up and down to scroll up and down, or hold Shift while doing this to scroll left and right; or we can press down the mouse wheel and move the mouse. Okay, now let's say we want to change the dimensions of the page in our current document. One way to do this is through the document properties dialog, which we can open either by clicking this button in the commands bar or by going to File -> Document Properties. In the Display tab, we can choose a particular page format from this list here. Or we can use a custom size for the page. We can also change the orientation of the page. On the right side, we can change the display units that the canvas uses. This will change the display units of the rulers on the left and top of the canvas. Point 0,0 on the rulers is at the top-left corner of the page. I'll leave my display units on millimeters. These buttons here let us change the colors of the page and canvas. With the first one, we can change the background color of the page. This bottom bar here is the alpha channel, which controls the transparency of the color. It's on zero by default, which means that when we print or export any drawings that are on the page, the page's background color will be considered transparent and won't show up in the print or the exported image. If we raise this up, however, the page's background color will show up. Let's leave it on 0 for this course. I'll also set the color back to white. With the next button, we can change the color of the border around the page. And with the last button, labeled Desk, we can change the color of the canvas. Like with the page, the alpha channel of the canvas is by default set to 0, so its color won't show up in prints or exported images. Finally, down here, we can do things like give the canvas a checkerboard appearance and hide the border of the page. Okay, we can go ahead and close out the Document Properties dialog now. The other way to change the dimensions of the page is with the page tool, located here at the bottom of the toolbox. With the page tool, we can drag these boxes at the corners of the page to resize it. We can also change the dimensions by choosing a particular format up here in the controls bar. We can actually also create multiple pages using the page tool, either by clicking this + button in the controls bar, or by clicking and dragging on the canvas. We can also move pages around. And if we have a page selected, we can delete it by pressing the Delete key. Okay, I think that should do it for an overview of the interface. Now we're ready to start drawing. See you in the next video. 5. Super Pig Overview: In this lesson, we'll create a cute character named Super Pig. In the process, we'll learn all about how to create and manipulate shapes with the shape tools and the select tool, how to use the Fill and Stroke dialog for full control over colors, how to use the Align and Distribute dialog to align parts of our drawings in various ways, and how to group and sort our drawings on the canvas. It's going to be a big lesson and a very important one for establishing the foundation we'll need as we continue to learn more and more advanced topics throughout the course. Alright, if you're ready to begin, let's go ahead and load Inkscape and start up a new document, and I'll see you in lesson. 6. Super Pig: Let's start creating Super Pig by activating the circles and ellipses tool here in the toolbox. With this tool, when we click and drag in the canvas, we can create ellipses. After we release the mouse, we get these square handles at the left and top. With these, we can re-size the ellipse. If we switch to the select tool, we can easily move the ellipse around. We also get these handles around the ellipse's bounding box. With these, we can scale it. If we hold Ctrl, it will constrain the width to height ratio. If we hold Shift, it will scale the opposite side as well. And if we hold Shift and Ctrl, it will scale all sides proportionally. If we click a selected object with the select tool, it will switch to the rotation and skew handles. With the handles on the corners, we can rotate the object. If we hold Ctrl, it will snap the angle, and holding Shift will rotate it around the opposite corner. The handles on the sides let us skew the object. Holding Alt snaps the angle, and Shift skews around the opposite side. The point around which the object rotates or skews is called the object's rotation center. This is denoted by this cross-hair at the center of the object. We can actually move the rotation center to another point if we want, then rotate or skew around that point. All right, let's press Ctrl Z a few times to undo until the ellipse isn't rotated or skewed anymore. And we can click it again to get back to the scale handles. The color that's filling the ellipse is called the fill color. And we can change it easily by clicking one of the color swatches in the color palette. This is going to be for Super Pig's body, so let's use one of these pink colors. We can also add a stroke to an object, which is like a border around it. To do this, we hold Shift and click a color swatch. Here in the status bar, we can see the fill and stroke colors of the selected object. This number next to the colors is the stroke width. We can right-click the number for a few different stroke width options. We actually don't want a stroke on this ellipse, so to turn it off, we can hold Shift and click this red X to the left of the color palette. If we click the X without holding Shift, it will turn off the fill color. But we don't want to do that, So let's give it a fill color again. Let's switch back to the circles and ellipses tool and start creating another ellipse for the head. If we hold down the Ctrl key, it will constrain the width to height ratio. We're able to create a perfect circle this way. And if we hold down Shift as well, we can center it around the cursor starting position. Let's release to create a circle. Then switch to the select tool and move it into place. As you can see, when we create a shape, it will by default get the same color information as the previous shape we created. Let's make it a lighter color so that it doesn't blend in with the body. We could continue using the color palette, but for much more control over colors, we can use the fill and stroke dialog. To open it, we can either go to Object -> Fill and Stroke, or we can click this button in the commands bar, or we can simply click somewhere within the color information area in the status bar. And now it's docked here on the right. The first tab we have in here is the fill tab, which lets us change the fill appearance of selected objects. At the top we have different fill types. The default is flat color, and we have some other types like gradients and patterns, which we'll discuss in upcoming lessons. Next, we have some different color modes we can choose from, like RGB, which stands for red, green and blue. And CMYK, which stands for cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. The default mode is HSV, which stands for hue, saturation and value. With hue, we can change the actual color. Saturation affects how much white is in the color. And value affects how dark or bright the color is. We also have the Alpha channel here, which lets us change the opacity of the fill color. In the next tab, stroke paint, we have all the same options as the fill tab, but for the stroke color, and in the stroke style tab, we can adjust various stroke settings. We'll take a look at these a bit later. For this circle, let's make it a lighter pink than the body. We first want to set the color back to the color of the body. To do this, we can switch back to the fill tab and click this eyedropper button down here, which changes our cursor to an eyedropper icon. Now if we click a color on the canvas, it will set the selected object's fill color to that color. Now we can go in here and adjust the color a bit. Next, let's create Super Pig's nose. For this, let's switch to the squares and rectangles tool here. With this tool we can click and drag to create rectangles. Like with the circles and ellipses tool, we can hold Ctrl to constrain the ratio. This will allow us to create squares. And if we hold Shift, it will center it at the cursor starting position. Let's create a rectangle for the nose. Like with circles and ellipses, we get these square handles we can use to resize it. We also get these circular handles at the top right corner. These let us round the corners. To make the corners sharp again, we can either bring the handles back to the top right corner, or we can click this button at the end of the controls bar. We actually do want to round the corners of this rectangle though. so let's drag this handle down as far as it will go. Now let's make it a lighter pink. Let's switch to the select tool and move it onto the head. We could just eyeball the positioning of the nose, but if we want more accurate control over alignment, we can use the align and distribute dialog. To open it, we can either go to Object -> Align and Distribute, or we click this button in the commands bar. The first tab we have in here is the align tab, and in the align section of the tab, we have these buttons that allow us to align selected objects in many different ways, such as aligning their left edges, centering them vertically, and centering them horizontally. The objects will be aligned relative to the anchor, which is whatever we choose in this relative to box. The anchor can be the last selected object, the first selected object, the biggest or smallest selected object, the page, the entire drawing, or the entire selection area. With the default of last selected, chosen, if we select the head and nose by dragging a selection box over them, then hold Shift and click the body to add it to the selection, last selected now refers to the body, since we selected it last. So now if we click, for example, this button, which says align right edges of objects to left edge of anchor, the anchor stays in place and the other objects move so that their right edges are aligned with the anchor's left edge. Similarly, we can align the right edges and we can center them horizontally. Okay, now let's remove the body from the selection by holding Shift and clicking it again. And let's move the head and nose back to where we want them on the body. When we have two or more objects selected with a selection box, last selected will refer to the topmost object. So now if we click this button to center them vertically, the nose stays in place and the head moves. If we want just the nose to move instead, we can undo that with Ctrl Z, choose first selected as the anchor, which will refer to the bottom-most object, then click the button. We actually want to move the nose down a bit so that it's not quite centered horizontally on the head. To do this, we can click the canvas to de-select everything, then select the nose, and as we move it, we can hold the Ctrl key to force it to move either only horizontally or only vertically. So we can move it down here some while keeping it centered vertically on the head. Next, let's use the squares and rectangles tool to add some nostrils to the nose. Let's first create a small rectangle over here, so we can see it. Let's make it a darker color than the body. To set it to the color of the body first, we could click the eyedropper button in the fill and stroke dialog again. However, we won't always have the fill and stroke dialog open, and in any case, what this button actually does is it temporarily switches us to the color picker tool, which is located here in the toolbox. So we can just activate the tool here, then click the body to pick the color. Now we can make it a bit darker. Let's move it into place with the select tool. Now we want to make a copy of this and put it over here. One way to make a copy of an object is to press Ctrl C to copy it into the clipboard, then press Ctrl V to paste it. This will make a copy centered at our cursor. Let's delete the copy by pressing the Delete key and select the original again. Another way to make copies is by duplicating. To duplicate an object, we can either right-click it and choose duplicate, or we can click this button in the commands bar, or we can use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl D. This places the copy directly on top of the object. So now we can hold Ctrl and move it over here while keeping them horizontally aligned. Next, we want to use the Align and Distribute dialog to align the nostrils on the nose. Let's first hold Shift and click the other nostril, then the nose, and in the align and distribute dialog, let's go back to last selected as the anchor, which will refer to the nose. Now we can click this button to align the nostrils horizontally with the nose. We also want to align them vertically with the nose while keeping the same amount of space in-between. If we click the center vertically button right now, it will put both nostrils at the center of the nose. But if we undo that, we can first toggle on this move/ align selection as group button. With this on, the selected objects that aren't the anchor will be treated as a single object, so they will move together. Now clicking this center vertically button will give us the correct result. The nostrils for me were already pretty close to centered, so we can see this better if I move them over here first. Next, let's use the circles and ellipses tool to create some eyes. Let's hold Ctrl and create a small circle over here. Let's give it a black fill. Then we can switch to the select tool, duplicate the eye with Ctrl D, hold Ctrl and move it over here, then Shift-click the other eye, then the head, and with the group button still toggled on here, we can align the eyes vertically with the head. Let's work on the ears next. For this, we can use the stars and polygons tool here. By default, this tool is on star mode with corners set to five. So if we click and drag, we can create a five cornered star. If we hold Ctrl, we can snap the angle of rotation. After we create the star, we get these two handles here. The outer handle lets us adjust the tip radius of the star as well as rotate it. Holding Ctrl will stop it from rotating. The inner handle lets us change the base radius and skew the star. And holding Ctrl will stop it from skewing. We can change the number of corners of the star if we want. Spoke ratio refers to the ratio between the base radius and the tip radius. If we right-click in here, it gives us options that correspond to stars with a particular number of corners. So for this six cornered star or hexagram, I can choose the hexagram option here for the correct spoke ratio. With rounded, we can round the corners. We can also do this by holding Shift and dragging one of the handles. Randomized will randomize the positions of the corners and the angles. To do this with the handles, we can hold Alt as we drag them. This button at the end here will reset all the settings to the defaults. Let's switch to polygon mode now, which changes our object into a five cornered polygon. For Super Pig's ear, we want to use a triangle. So let's change corners to three. We can use the handle here to shrink it down and rotate it. Let's hold Shift and round the corners a bit. There we can switch to the select tool and move it into place. Let's use the color picker tool to make it the same color as the head. Let's also add an inner part to the ear. To do this, we can duplicate the ear with Ctrl D, make it the dark pink of the nostrils, then switch to the select tool and shrink it down some holding Ctrl and Shift. I'm going to adjust the positioning just a bit. Next, we want to put both of these shapes onto the other side of the head as well, but we want to flip them horizontally. To do this, we can first select them both and duplicate them with Ctrl D, then click this button up here to flip them horizontally or use the H key shortcut. Then hold Ctrl and move them over here. We can hold Shift and select the other ear parts, then the head, and with the group button still turned on in the align and distribute dialog, let's align them vertically. Okay, let's finish up the head by creating a mouth. For this, we can first switch to the circles and ellipses tool and create a small ellipse down here. We actually want to turn off the fill of this and give it a stroke of this dark pink color. To do this, let's first click the red X down here to turn off the fill color. Then switch to the color picker tool. To set the selected object's stroke color to the picked color, we can hold Shift before clicking the color. If we go back to the circles and ellipses tool, we have these circular handles at the right of the ellipse. If we drag one of these around the outside of the ellipse, we can create segments. If we drag it around the inside, we can create arcs. Holding Ctrl will snap the angle. Let's hold Ctrl and drag this one down in here until it's horizontally aligned with the other circular handle. And when we release the mouse, the stroke at the top part of the arc disappears. This gives us a smiley shape. Now we can switch to the select tool, resize it if we want, and move it into place. Then let's go to the stroke style tab in the fill and stroke dialog and adjust the width of the stroke. Another thing we can do in here is change the appearance of the caps, which refers to the ends of the stroke of an open shape, like this one. By default it's set to butt cap, which squares them off. We also have square cap, which is like an extended version of butt cap. And we have round cap, which I think looks better for this. Okay, now we can select the mouth and Shift-click the head, and in the align and distribute dialog, we can go ahead and turn off the group button and align the objects vertically. Okay, we're finished with the head now, but let's say we want to move all the pieces to another position or resize them all together. At the moment, we have to drag a selection box around them all in order to select them, which is pretty inconvenient. A better way to work with multiple objects that should be transformed together is to group them. To do this, with all the objects we want to group selected, we can either right-click the selection and choose Group, or we can click this button in the commands bar, or we can use the shortcut Ctrl G. Like with using the Group button in the align and distribute dialog, grouping objects causes them to be treated as a single object. So now we can select them as a single object and transform them as a single object. If we want to edit a particular object within a group, we can either right-click the group and choose Enter group or double-click the group. Now we can select the individual objects. We can also add another object to the group now if we wanted to. To get out of a group, we can either right-click and choose Exit group, or we can select an object that is outside the group, or we can double-click an empty area in the canvas. Now we can select the group as a whole again. To remove an object from a group, we can double-click the group to enter it, then right-click the object and choose pop selection out of group. Now if we get out of the group, we can see this object is no longer part of the group. Let's go ahead and delete it. We can also create nested groups, which are groups within groups. For example, we can enter the head group, and let's select all of the face objects and group them with Ctrl G. Now we have a face group, which we can enter into and edit the individual objects. When we're inside a group within a group, each time we double-click the canvas, it will exit the current group and move up through the group hierarchy. So if we double-click the canvas once, we're now outside of the face group and inside the head group, and if we double-click again, we're outside both groups. Finally, to ungroup a group of objects, you can either right-click the group and choose Ungroup, or we can click this button in the commands bar, or we can press Shift Ctrl G. And this will actually just ungroup the topmost group. We have to do it again to ungroup the face group. But we actually want to keep our face and head groups, so let's undo a couple of times. Alright, let's start working on the rest of the body now by creating some legs. For this, let's switch to the squares and rectangles tool and create a rectangle in here. Let's round the corners more by dragging this handle down. Let's make this leg the light pink of the nose. Let's turn off the stroke by going to the stroke paint tab in the fill and stroke dialog and clicking the X here. Now let's switch to the select tool and click the leg to get the rotation handles, then rotate it some. Next, let's duplicate the leg with Ctrl D, flip it horizontally by pressing the H key, and move it to the back of the body. I'm going to rotate this one a little more. We also want to put some legs on the other side of the body. Let's first duplicate the front leg, make it the darkest pink, and move it over here some. Now we want to put this leg beneath all these other objects. To do this, we have to change the z-order or stacking order of the objects. And in the controls bar for the select tool, we have these four buttons for just this purpose. The first one, which uses the Home key as the shortcut, raises selected objects all the way to the top. The second one, with the shortcut pgup, moves the selection up one step at a time. The third one, with the shortcut pgdn, moves it down one step at a time. And the last button, which uses the End key as the shortcut, move the selection all the way to the bottom. This is what we want, so let's go ahead and click it. Now let's duplicate the back leg, make it the dark pink, and move it into place. Now we can either click the lower to bottom button again or click the lower one step button twice to put it below the body. Okay, let's next give Super Pig a cape, so that we'll know he's a super pig and not just some normal pig. For this, let's switch to the stars and polygons tool, and with polygon mode selected, let's set corners to five, rounded to zero, then click and drag to create a pentagon. Let's make it so this point under the cursor is facing towards the right. For the fill color, I'll go with a light blue. Now let's use the select tool to move it into place and adjust the shape the way we want it. We can also flip it vertically, either by clicking this button in the controls bar, or by pressing the V key. And le'ts click the lower one step button to put it beneath the head group. Let's also add some stars to the cape. First, let's de-select the cape, then let's switch to the stars and polygons tool, click the reset button, and create a five cornered star. We can hold Ctrl and drag the inner handle to adjust the base radius if we want. Let's make the fill color a yellow. Now we can move it onto the cape, duplicate it, and move it over here. Let's shrink it down a bit while holding Shift and Ctrl. Now I'll duplicate this one and bring it over here. Okay, finally, let's give Super Pig a squiggly tail. But first, I'm going to shrink the body a bit. For the tail, we can use the spiral tool here, which lets us create spirals. In the controls bar, can change the number of turns or revolutions the spiral has. We can also do this by dragging the outer handle. Another thing we can change is the divergence. If it's greater than one, the center will be denser. And if it's less than one, the edge will be denser. We can also change this by holding the Alt key as we drag the inner handle. The last thing we can change is the inner radius, which we can also do by dragging the inner handle without holding Alt. Let's flip the spiral horizontally with the H key and vertically with the V key. And let's adjust it until we have a curly shape. I'm holding Alt here as I drag the inner handle to change the divergence. Alright, That should be good. As we can see in the status bar, spirals by default have a stroke and no fill. We can give it a fill if we want. But we don't actually want a fill for the tail, so let's turn it back off. Instead, let's switch to the color picker tool, hold Shift and click the darkest pink color to set the spiral's stroke to that color. Now let's switch to the stroke style tab of the Fill and Stroke dialog and increase the stroke width. Let's also make the caps rounded. Then let's move it into place, adjust it some if we want, and put it below everything. Alright, to finish up, let's select all of the body shapes, including the cape, and group them together. And let's move it below the head group. Then let's also select the head group and group the body and head groups together. And that should do it for Super Pig and this lesson. See you in the next one. 7. Whale Logo Overview: In this lesson, we'll create a logo with a whale and some waves. In the process, we'll learn about another type of object we can create in Inkscape called a path, and how we can create paths using the pen tool and modify them with the node tool and path operations. We'll also learn how to import images into our document, how to use the snap controls to snap objects and nodes together in various ways, and how to turn shapes into paths. Like with the shapes that we learned about in the previous lesson, knowing how to work with paths is extremely important, as we'll be using them in pretty much every lesson from here on. See you in the lesson. 8. Whale Logo: We learned in the previous lesson that we can create shape objects in Inkscape using the shape tools. Another type of object we can create is a path. A path is a sequence of line segments and/or Bezier curves, and the most common way to create paths is with the Bezier pen tool, or pen tool for short, which is located here. To use the pen tool, we can simply start clicking points in the canvas to create connected line segments. If we hold Ctrl, it will snap the angle of the segment. If we click and drag with the pen tool, we can create bezier curves, or curve segments. If we hold Ctrl as we do this, it will snap the angle of the curve's handles. And if we hold Shift, we can create a sharp point at that curve. To finish creating a path, we can either right-click or press the Enter key to have an open path, or we can click the starting point again to close the path. Now as we can see in the status bar, paths that we create with the pen tool by default have a black stroke and no fill, but we can give it a fill if we want. The segments of a path are all connected by nodes. To see the nodes, we have to switch to the node tool up here. Now we can see these square and diamond shaped handles, which denote the nodes. We can click and drag a node to move it around. And we can drag a selection box over some nodes to select multiple nodes. The nodes with diamond handles are called cusp or corner nodes and they form sharp corners. Cusp nodes between curve segments like this one have handles that move independently, allowing us to change the curvature of the segments separately. The nodes denoted by squares are called smooth nodes. The handles of these nodes rotate together, keeping the segment smooth. We can also change the curvature of a segment by clicking and dragging the segment itself. And if you do this with a line segment, it will turn into a curve segment. If we want to change a smooth node into a cusp node, we can click this button up here in the controls bar for the node tool. The next button will change the selected node into a smooth node. This button here will change the node into a symmetric node, which is a type of smooth node in which the distance between the node and each handle remain equal. The last type of node we have here is auto-smooth, denoted by a circle. This will maintain really smooth curves by automatically adjusting the handles as we move the node around. We can also cycle through the node types by holding Ctrl and clicking a node. Another thing we can do is add new nodes, either by selecting two or more nodes and clicking this + button up here or by simply double-clicking a segment. To delete selected nodes, we can either click this - button here or press the Delete key. Okay, let's go ahead and delete this path by switching to the select tool and pressing Delete. And let's start working on the whale logo by using the pen tool to trace around an image of a whale. First we need to import the image. To do this, we can either go to File -> Import or we can click this button in the commands bar The image we're going to use is this whale.png image. I've provided this image as a downloadable resource so that you can use it to follow along. After you've downloaded it, you can use this dialog to browse to the location of the image, and to import the image, we can simply double-click it. Next we get this bitmap image import dialog. Here we can choose how we want to import the image. If we choose embed, the image will become part of the document, so it won't have any connection to the original image file. If we choose link, on the other hand, it will keep a connection to the original image file. So if we change or delete the file later, it can cause problems with our document. However, we might do this if the image file is very large and we don't want our document to become very large, or if we want to be able to edit the image file later and have the changes also appear in the document. In any case, it doesn't really matter with our current document, because we'll be deleting the image after we trace it, so I'll leave mine on Embed and click OK to import the image. The image is now an object in our document and we can move it around and transform it like any other object. When we scale it, however, we have to hold Ctrl if we want to maintain the aspect ratio. Let's make it bigger. That's also flip it horizontally by pressing the H key and rotate it so it's facing this way. Okay, to trace the whale, let's first switch to the pen tool by pressing the B key, and let's zoom in on the head. Now let's start by clicking up here and click and drag here until we have the curvature of the head. And do the same here. At this point, we want to create a cusp node, so let's click and drag until we have the curvature, then, without releasing the mouse, let's hold Shift and move the handle up here, then release the mouse. Now we can click drag here to get the curvature of the lip. Then here. We're going to create the fins separately, so let's ignore them for now and click drag here. We can also undo a node by pressing Ctrl Z. And we don't have to worry about getting it perfect, because we can always fix it with the node tool later. Okay, Let's continue clicking and dragging until we reach the tail. Since we already have the correct curvature here, we can just click at this point. Click drag here. Then here. Now let's click drag at this point and without releasing the mouse, let's hold Shift to create a cusp node, release here, click drag up here, then here, normal click at this point, click drag here, then here, click this top point, click drag down here, then here we want to hold Shift to create a cusp node, release here, click drag in here, then here, then over here, click drag up here, then up here close to the top of the fin. Now let's click drag at the top point of the fin, but because it's curved here, we don't have to create a cusp node. Now let's click drag in here, then here, then over here. Now we can click drag the starting node, then release to close it off. Now if we want, we can go in with the node tool and adjust some things a bit. Let's turn the starting node here into a smooth node, either by selecting it and clicking this button in the controls bar bar, or by holding Ctrl and clicking the node. Okay, that looks pretty good. Next, we want to create some more paths for the bottom fins, as well as for the parts of the whale where it changes color. Let's start with this middle part of the whale. Let's begin down here near the tail. Okay, so what we want to do is start at the position of this node right here, then go up and work our way around. However, if we switch to the node tool right now, we can click somewhere near the node here, but not exactly on the node. If we want to be able to click at the exact position of the node, we have to enable the snap controls, which let us snap objects and nodes together in various ways. To enable them, we can either click this button at the top right of the window here or we can click this arrow next to it, then check enable snapping. This, by default, enables some bounding box snapping and some node snapping, and we also have the option to enable alignment snapping. However, there are many different options for each of these categories, as well as other categories for snapping, and to see them all, we have to click advanced mode here. We can now see that we're currently able to snap to things like the edges and corners of an object's bounding box, we can snap anywhere along the path of an object, and we can snap cusp nodes and smooth nodes. We'll be discussing many of the snap controls throughout the lessons, but for now, because this node that we want to snap to is a cusp node, we just want to make sure we have cusp node snapping enabled. Okay, so if we click up here somewhere to hide the snap controls dialog, now as we move the pen tool over an object, it will let us know next to our cursor if we can snap to that point. For example, we can snap anywhere along the path, we can snap to smooth nodes, and if we go down here to this cusp node, it lets us know that we can snap to it. This is what we want to do, so let's click the node to snap to it. Now we want to create a path following along this lighter blue part of the image. Snapping is just going to get in the way at this point, so let's turn it off either by clicking this button up here, or by using the keyboard shortcut, which is the % key. And let's create a path for this part the same way we did with the main part of the whale. I'll speed this up a bit. All right, after we create a node at this point, let's click over here outside the main whale path, then let's bring it all the way down around here until we get back to the first point, then click the first point to close the path. Later, we'll see how we can easily get rid of this extra part of the path down here. Okay, now let's do the same for this bottom piece here. First, we want to snap to this cusp node at the lip. So let's turn snapping back on with the % key and snap to the node. And now we can turn snapping back off and create the rest of the path. When we get to this part, let's click outside the main path, then bring it back around to the starting point, making sure not to go inside the main path, then let's bring it up here above the starting node, then close it off. It might seem weird to create the path this way at the moment, but it will make sense a bit later. Now let's work on the paths for the fins. Let's begin with this one by clicking at this top point, then click drag here, click drag at this point, then hold Shift to create a cusp node, release here, click drag here, then here, then click drag the starting point. We also want to create this inner part of the fin here. Let's turn snapping back on and snap to this cusp node up here, then turn snapping back off, click drag here, then here, then click down here outside the fin and bring it back around to the first node. For this fin here, let's begin by clicking here inside the main whale path, click at this point, click drag down here, click in here, and close it off. Okay, We're finished creating the paths. Now let's add some colors to them. Let's first switch to the select tool, which we can do easily either by pressing the S key or the spacebar. And we can go ahead and delete the image now. Then select the main whale path, and let's open the fill and stroke dialog. We actually don't want a stroke for our paths. So let's switch to the stroke paint tab and click the X here to turn it off. Then in the fill tab, let's give it a flat fill color, and let's make it a dark blue. Now let's select the next path here, turn off the stroke, and give it a lighter blue fill. For the next path, let's turn off the stroke and make it a very light blue, almost white. For this fin here, let's turn off the stroke, and let's use the color picker tool to make it the darkest blue. For the outer part of this fin, we can turn off the stroke, and let's make it the darkest blue as well by simply clicking the flat color button in the fill tab. For the inner part, let's turn off the stroke, and use the color picker tool to make it the lightest blue. Let's now see how we can go about getting rid of the unneeded parts of these paths. For this, we need to use a path operation. The path operations are all located here in the Path menu, and they let us do things like combine paths together and cut paths out of other paths. We'll be discussing most, if not all of these throughout the lessons, but the one we're looking for at the moment is Intersection here. If we have two or more paths selected, Intersection will leave only the parts of the bottom-most path that is being overlapped by all the paths above it. So if we only want the part of this middle path that is within the main whale path, we first need to go to the select tool, and let's select the main path and duplicate it with Ctrl D. We have to create a duplicate because this whole path is going to be deleted when we do Intersection. Now we can hold Shift and select the path we want to cut and go to Path -> Intersection. Now we have just this part of the bottom path that was being overlapped by the top path. We can do the same with this light blue path here. First select the main path, and duplicate it. Then Shift-click the other path, and we can do Intersection with the shortcut Ctrl *. And let's move it above the middle path. Let's do the same for this part of the fin here. Let's duplicate the main fin path, Shift-click the bottom path, and do an Intersection. For this fin, Let's select it and click the lower to bottom button up here to put it below the rest of the whale. You might not be able to see it on the video, but if you're following along, you can probably see that a tiny bit of the bottom paths are showing along the edges here. I believe this is due to anti-aliasing. If we want to get rid of this, we have to remove the parts of the bottom paths that are being overlapped by the top path. To do this, we can use another path operation, Difference. Difference will use the top selected the path to remove any parts of the bottom selected path that it's overlapping. So we can duplicate this light blue path here, then Shift-click the middle path and go to Path -> Difference. Now we're left with just this part of the middle path. Let's do the same for the main path by duplicating the light blue path again, Shift-clicking the main path, and we can do a Difference with Ctrl -, leaving us with this. Now we don't see the darker blue parts at the edge anymore. Let's also do this with the fin. Duplicate the light blue part, Shift-click the main part, and do a Difference. Alright, the only thing missing on our whale now is the eye. So let's switch to the circles and ellipses tool by pressing the E key, hold Ctrl and create a circle in here. Let's make it black. Then let's switch to the select tool, duplicate the circle with Ctrl D, make it white, and scale it down while holding Shift and Ctrl Let's move it off center just a bit. Okay, we're finished with the whale for now, so we can select it all and group it with Ctrl G. And let's move on to creating the waves. Before we start drawing the waves, let's switch to the squares and rectangles tool really quick by pressing the R key and create a random rectangle. If we switch to the node tool now, which we can do with the N key, we can see that we don't have access to the rectangle's nodes. We still just have the handles for resizing it and for rounding the corners. That's because the rectangle isn't a path and we only have access to the nodes of paths. However, we can change a shape object into a path, either by clicking this button in the controls bar for the node tool or by going to Path -> Object to Path. Now we can see and modify the nodes. We can also drag out the line segments to create curves. And we can add new nodes by double-clicking a segment. It's important to know about the difference between paths and other types of objects in Inkscape, because the path operations will only work on paths or objects that can be turned into paths. Some types of objects, like the ones created from imported images, can't be turned into paths, so we can't use the path operations on them. Okay, with that in mind, let's delete this path we created, then switch to the circles and ellipses tool, hold Ctrl, and create a large circle that we'll use as the main shape for our logo. Let's give this circle kind of a turquoise fill. For the waves, we're going to use a bunch of small, overlapping circles. So let's go ahead and create one a little above the center line of the big circle. Let's make it a different color just so we can see it, and let's create another circle overlapping some of the right side of this one. As you can see, we now have this wave shape at the bottom here. Let's create some more all the way across the big circle. We also want to cover over this top of the big circle because we want to cut off all but the bottom part of the circle and give it a wavy top. To cover the top area, we can simply switch to the squares and rectangles tool and create a rectangle starting above and to the left of the big circle and bring it down inside the smaller circles. Next we want to cut this rectangle and all the small circles out of the big circle. As we learned with the whale, we can do this with the Difference path operation. The only problem, however, is that Difference only works correctly with two selected paths. So we can't just select all of these objects and do a Difference because it won't give us the result we want. Instead, we want to turn the rectangle and all the small circles into a single path. And that's exactly what the Union operation here does. And by the way, most of the path operations will actually convert shape objects into paths automatically. So for the most part, we don't have to change them into paths ourselves. Okay, so let's switch the select tool and drag a selection box over the rectangle and all the small circles, then go to Path -> Union. We can see that this is now a single object because of the single bounding box around it. And if we go to the node tool, we can see it's all one big path. Okay, now we can go back to the select tool, shift- click the big circle, and go to Path -> Difference. And now we have the result we want. Let's next create a front layer of waves and give it a white border on the top. First, let's duplicate this path with Ctrl D, make it white, then let's hold Ctrl and move it down here. Now let's duplicate this one, give it a cyan fill, hold ctrl, and move it down just a little bit, so it looks like it has a white border. Next, let's use duplicates of this bottom path to cut out the parts of the top two paths that we don't need. So first let's duplicate the bottom path, Shift-click one of the other paths, and let's do an Intersection with Ctrl *. Let's do the same for the other path. Now we can move the whale onto the waves. Let's click the raise one step button to put it just above the bottom wave path. We can also resize and rotate the whale a bit. The last thing we want to do is make it so we can see the parts of the whale under the top layers of waves. Let's first select this topmost path and make it partially transparent so we can see through it. To do this, we have to change the object's opacity, which we can do either by changing the value in this box labeled O on the status bar, or by using this opacity slider at the bottom of the fill and stroke dialog. Around 50% should be good. The problem now is that the white path is blocking us from seeing the whale. So what we can do is get rid of all of the area of the white path that's within the area of the top path. To do this, we can duplicate the top path, Shift-click the white path, and do a Difference with Ctrl -. There we go. Finally, we can select all of the logo objects and group them together with Ctrl G. And that should do it for our whale logo. Thank you very much for watching, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 9. Orange Juice Logo Overview: In this lesson, we'll create an orange juice logo with some text. In the process, we'll learn how to use the text tool to create and modified text objects and change font attributes; we'll learn how to turn text objects into paths and modify individual letters; we'll learn how to use the Put on Path feature to curve text around a path; and we'll learn some more path operations, including Break Apart and Dynamic Offset. The things we learn in this lesson will be very useful every time we want to create custom typographic logos. See you there. 10. Orange Juice Logo: To begin, let's switch to the circles and ellipses tool by pressing the E key, hold Ctrl and create a circle on the Canvas. Now let's open the fill and stroke dialog with this button up here, and let's give this circle an orange fill. Okay, now let's switch to the select tool with the S key, duplicate the circle by pressing Ctrl D, then move the duplicate over here. We're going to use this one to create a slice of an orange. First, let's make it a bit darker than the other circle. Now let's duplicate it with Ctrl D, make this one a very light orange, almost white, then let's hold Shift and Ctrl and scale it down some. Next we want to create some segments in here, like the inside of an orange. Let's first de-select everything, then we can switch to the squares and rectangles tool by pressing the R key, choose a random color for the moment, and let's create a rectangle that doesn't quite touch the top of this circle and make it kind of long. Okay, now let's take this circular handle at the top-right and drag it down as far as it will go to round the corners all the way. Let's make this a lighter orange than the first circle over here. To do this easily, we can click this eye dropper button at the bottom of the fill and stroke dialog, which will temporarily switch us to the color picker tool, then click the circle over here. Now we can make it a bit brighter. Now let's switch to the select tool and Shift-click one of these circles to add it to the selection, open the align and distribute dialog with this button, and with last selected chosen in the relative to box, let's align them vertically. Next, we want to be able to work on the nodes of this rectangle. As we learned in the previous lesson, we first turn it into a path by selecting it, then going to Path -> Object to Path. Now we can switch to the node tool with the N key to see the nodes. Let's first select these three bottom nodes. We want to join these nodes together, which we can do by clicking this button in the controls bar. And let's turn the node into a symmetric node by clicking this button. Now we can grab this handle here, hold Ctrl and drag it down and to the right some until the handles are aligned horizontally and the segments are a bit rounded. And we want to make sure we have enough space between this node and the center of the circle. If we click the circle, we can see this x at the center. I'm going to select the path again and bring this node up just a bit more while holding Ctrl. Okay, now let's select these two nodes near the top, hold Ctrl and bring them up some more. We also want to spread them out a little more to make the path wider. To do this, we can toggle on this button up here that says show transformation handles for selected nodes. Now we can hold Shift and drag out one of these scale handles to spread them out evenly. And we can go ahead and turn the transformation handles back off. Next we're going to put duplicates of this path spaced evenly around the circle. To do this, let's turn snapping on, click the arrow here, go to advanced mode, and we want to enable snapping to object rotation centers here. Now we can switch to the select tool and click the path to get the rotation handles, and drag its rotation center down until it snaps to the circle's rotation center. This will let us rotate around the center of the circle. Let's turn snapping back off for now. Okay, as we learned before, we can duplicate objects with Ctrl D. However, a faster way to duplicate is with stamping. To demonstrate, let's create a rectangle over here. Let's go ahead and make the corners sharp with this button up here, then switch to the select tool. To stamp, we move the object to where we want a copy and press the spacebar. We can do this very quickly. Okay, so let's delete these objects, and let's select the path here again, and click it again to get the rotation handles. Now let's hold Ctrl and grab one of the rotation handles, but before we rotate, let's go ahead and press the spacebar to put a copy here. And let's rotate clockwise three times. It should say in the status bar that it's rotated 45 degrees. Now, without releasing, let's press the spacebar to stamp, rotate again, stamp, and let's continue around the circle. For the last one, we can just release the mouse without stamping. Okay, now let's select all of the segment paths, which we can do easily by right-clicking one, then going to Select Same -> Fill Color. And let's group them together with Ctrl G. Now let's select all the parts of the slice, and let's scale it in some by dragging in one of the side scale handles. Now let's Shift-click the circle over here, and align them vertically and horizontally. Let's select just the segment group and the really light ellipse, hold Ctrl, and move it to the right just a bit. Okay, now we want to remove the right half of this circle. To do this, let's first turn snapping back on, and when we have snapping to smooth nodes enabled here, it also lets us snap to the quadrant points of ellipses. So we can switch to the squares and rectangles tool, snap to the circle's top quadrant point, and reate a rectangle covering the whole right half of the circle. Let's turn snapping back off, switch to the select tool, hold Shift and click the circle. To get rid of this part of the circle under the rectangle, we use a Difference operation, which has the shortcut Ctrl -. All right, now let's give the orange a shadow and highlight. For the shadow, let's duplicate this semicircle here with Ctrl D, and let's switch to the color picker tool by pressing the D key, then click the dark orange ellipse here. Now let's switch back to the select tool, duplicate again, make this one any color, and let's bring it up and also rotate it some. Now let's Shift-click the path under it and do a Difference with Ctrl -. We now have a path here with two subpaths. To separate these subpaths into separate object, we can use another path operation called Break Apart. The paths are now separate, so we can select just this one by holding Shift and clicking the other one to de-select it, and now let's delete this path. Let's move the shadow path under the front objects by pressing the pgdn key a couple of times. For the highlight, let's duplicate this semicircle again, and let's use the color picker tool to make it the brightest orange. Now we want to shrink this path some. However, if we switch back to the select tool, hold Shift and Ctrl and shrink down the path, we can see it doesn't shrink it evenly. So let's undo that. To shrink or grow a path evenly, we have a path operation we can use called Dynamic Offset. If we click it, then switch to the node tool, we now have this handle at the top right of the path. With this we can inset or outset the path evenly. Okay, let's inset this path. So this is actually a dynamic offset object now and not a path anymore, which is why we don't have access to the nodes. So when we have it at the size we want, we can turn it back into a path by going to Path -> Object to Path. Now we have access to the nodes. Okay, next let's switch back to the select tool and duplicate the orange semicircle again, and let's bring it down and to the left a bit, Shift-click the highlight path and do a Difference with Ctrl -. We actually want to cut off some of the highlight path so that it doesn't touch the dark ellipse here. For this, we can duplicate the ellipse, do Dynamic Offset on it, and let's make it a bit transparent so we can see everything. Now let's switch to the node tool and outset this path. Now we can turn it into a normal path, switch to the select tool, Shift-click the highlight path, then do a Difference. All right, Let's select everything and group it all with Ctrl G, then duplicate it, flip it horizontally with the H key and bring it down here. Let's also scale it in a bit, so it doesn't look like an exact copy of the other one. Now let's rotate them both. Okay, let's add some leaves to the top path. To start, let's switch to the circles and ellipses tool, hold Ctrl and create a circle here. Let's raise the opacity all the way up and give this a green fill. We actually do want to lower the opacity some again for the moment. Now switch to the select tool, duplicate this circle, hold Ctrl and bring it to the right some until we have a leaf shape in the center. Now let's select both circles, and to get just the overlapping part, we can do the Intersection operation with the shortcut Ctrl *. Okay, Now we can raise the opacity all the way up. And let's switch to the node tool. First, let's select this node on the left, and let's hold Ctrl and click it to turn it into a smooth node. Then let's adjust the handle here on the top node to give the path more of a natural shape. Next we can give the leaf a shadow and highlight, like we did with the orange. For the shadow, let's switch to the select tool and duplicate the path, and let's make it darker. Let's duplicate again, make this one any color rotate it counterclockwise, and let's move it up a bit as well. Now let's Shift-click the path under it and do a Difference with Ctrl -. We actually have a small piece left here. So we can do Break Apart with Shift Ctrl K and delete the extra piece. For the highlight, let's duplicate the lighter green path again and make it a bright green. Now let's perform the Dynamic Offset operation, which we can do with the shortcut Ctrl J. Then switch to the node tool and inset it. Now let's turn it into a normal path with the shortcut Shift Ctrl C, and switch to the select tool. Let's duplicate this path, make it any color, then rotate it counterclockwise. Now we can select both paths and do a Difference, then do Break Apart with Shift Ctrl K and delete this extra piece down here. We can select all of these pieces, rotate them, and scale them if we want, then put them into place. Let's put it all underneath the orange by clicking this button up here. For another leaf, let's select just the main leaf path and the highlight, duplicate them, rotate and scale them down some, move them over here, and put them beneath everything. We also want to put a shadow between the two leaves. For this, let's duplicate the main path of the top leaf, make it a different color, lower the opacity some, and move it to the right. Now let's duplicate the main path of the bottom leaf, Shift-click the transparent path, and do an Intersection with Ctrl *. Let's press pgdn a few times to put it under the top leaf, raise the opacity all the way up, then use the color picker here to choose the dark green. Now let's select all of the leaf parts and the top half of the orange and group them with Ctrl G. Okay, we're finished with the orange. So now let's see how we can add some text. To create text, we use the text tool, located here in the toolbox. With this tool, we can click in the canvas and start typing, and it will create a text object. If we press enter, it will start a new line. In the controls bar for the text tool, we can change things like the font family, the font style, and the font size. Another way to change the font size is by using the select tool to scale the text object. We can hold Ctrl to maintain the width to height ratio of the letters. Back in the text tool, which we can get to easily by double-clicking a text object, we can change the spacing between baselines of the text, we can change the alignment of the text, we can creat superscripts and subscripts, and if we drop down this spacing box, we can change things like the spacing between letters and the spacing between words. We can also change the kerning, which refers to the spacing between individual pairs of letters. For this, we can click between two letters and change the horizontal kerning and the vertical kerning. We can also rotate either the letter to the right of the cursor position or all selected letters. Finally, we can change the direction of the text with these boxes. We can also set the color of a text object the same way as with other objects. We can give the letters a stroke as well. Another way to create a text object is by clicking and dragging with the text tool, which creates a box. When we type now, the text will stay within the box. This is called flowed text. We can resize the box with this handle at the bottom right, and the text will flow accordingly. We can also use justified text alignment with flowed text. Okay, let's switch to the select tool and delete these texts objects. And let's create some text for our logo. First, let's switch to the text tool by pressing the T key, then click in the canvas. And I'll type "Orange Juice." Alright, let's go back to the select tool, hold Ctrl and scale this up. And let's switch back to the text tool. For the font family, we can choose pretty much anything we want. I'll go with Bemio here. For the color, let's use the color picker tool to choose the main orange. Then switch to the select tool. Okay, so at the moment the text looks kind of boring. Instead of having it go straight across like this, let's make a wavy. To do this, we can a feature located in the Text menu called put on path. First, let's move the text out of the way, then switch to the pen tool by pressing the B key, and let's create a wavy path here. We can right-click to finish the path. Now switch back to the select tool, Shift-click the text object and go to Text -> Put on Path. All right, that looks better. And this is actually still a normal text object. So we can add more text to it if we want. And we can still change things in the controls bar, like maybe add some more spacing between the letters. We can also transform the path, and the text object will update automatically. Okay, when we have the text the way we want it, we want to be able to delete this path. We can't delete it right now, however, or the text object will go back to being straight across Instead, we have to turn the text object into a path first by selecting it and going to Path -> Object to Path. Now we can delete the wavy path. When we turn a text object into a path, it gives us a group of paths. We can double-click the group to enter it and modify the individual letters now. Let's select all the letters for Juice, and let's use the color picker tool to make them the main green of the leaves. Let's also give all of the text a border, so we can see it better. To do this, let's first get out of the group by selecting an object outside the group, then let's select the text group again and duplicate it with Ctrl D. Let's make this the brightest orange. And we want to turn all the letters of this duplicate into a single path. To do this, first we have to ungroup the letters with Shift Ctrl G, then Union them together with Ctrl +. Now we can put this path under the other text by pressing the pgdn key. Let's do the Dynamic Offset operation with Ctrl J, then switch to the node tool and outset the path. That should be good. So now we can turn it back into a path with Shift Ctrl C. If we want, we can also close in these gaps showing in the border of some of the letters like the G, the E, and the A. To do this, we can use the Break Apart operation with Shift Ctrl K. As you can see, Break Apart not only separates subpaths, as we learned earlier, but it also creates new paths to fill in any enclosed, empty areas. Okay, now we can turn all of this into a single path by doing Union with Ctrl +. Okay, to finish up our logo, we can add some drops of juice splashing out. First, let's switch to the circles and ellipses tool and create an ellipse here. Let's turn off the stroke and give it the same fill color as the segments inside the orange. Now let's turn it into a path with Shift Ctrl C, switch the node tool and adjust the nodes and curves some to give it a liquid drop shape. Alright, to give it a highlight, let's switch to the select tool and duplicate the path, make it the lightest orange, scale it down some while holding Shift and Ctrl, then move it down here. Now we can select both paths and transform them however we want. Let's create some more, different-sized drops with duplicates of these paths. Let's put some at the top right as well. We can duplicate one of these drops, flip it vertically with the V key and horizontally with the H key and move it up here. For these, we want to put the highlight at the bottom-right. Let's add a few more. Finally, we can select everything with Ctrl A, and group it altogether with Ctrl G. Now our orange juice logo is finished. Thanks for watching. I'll see you in the next lesson. 11. Camping Poster Overview: In this lesson, we'll create a camping poster. In the process, we'll learn how to apply linear and radial gradients to objects and modify them with the gradient tool; we'll learn how to use layers to separate objects on the canvas and how to hide and lock them; we'll learn some special features of the pen tool, including how to use different modes, like the spiral mode, and how to use the shape setting; and we'll learn some more text features, including how to use Flow into Frame to flow text inside a shape, and how to use the Lorem Ipsum extension to create placeholder text. This is going to be our biggest lesson yet, and we'll be learning a ton of very useful information. See you there. 12. Camping Poster: Part 1: In this lesson, we're going to be using a lot of linear and radial gradients. So before we begin creating the poster, Let's quickly go over how these work. First, let's create a shape. It doesn't really matter which kind, so I'll just go with a rectangle. Now, if we open the fill and stroke dialog, in both the fill tab and the stroke paint tab, we have two color options called linear gradient and radial gradient. If we click the linear gradient option, our selected object gets a gradient that by default goes from the fill color at fully opaque on the left to the fill color at fully transparent on the right. We can also see this on the gradient line that now appears in the fill and stroke dialog. These two points on the ends of the line are called stops. We can move the stops around on the line. And we can change their colors by selecting one and adjusting the color in here. We can also bring this stop's alpha channel all the way up to make it opaque. Another thing we can do is add stops, either by clicking this + button down here, or by simply double-clicking the gradient line. We can move this one around and change the color. If we want to delete a stop, we can select it, and either click this - button or press delete. Another way to work on gradients is with the gradient tool, located here in the toolbox. We can use this tool to select and move stops. And we can change the color of a stop either in the fill and stroke dialog or through the color palette. To add a stop with the gradient tool, we can double-click the gradient line on the object. And if we select a stop, we can remove it by pressing Delete. One thing we can do with the gradient tool that we can't do through the fill and stroke dialog is rotate and reposition the gradient line. Also, if we double-click the object with the gradient tool, it will reset the position of the gradient. In the controls bar for the gradient tool, we can choose the type of gradient to use, we can select from different gradients that we've created in our current document, we can reverse the gradient, and we can change the repeat method of the gradient. We can really only see the difference between these two methods if we move the first and last stops inside the object. Here's what the reflected method looks like. Here's direct. We can also use the fill and stroke dialog to reverse the gradient and change the repeat method. The other type of gradient we'll look at in this lesson is the radial gradient. We can either choose it in here or, with the gradient tool, we can choose it in the controls bar, then double-click the object. Radial gradients start at the center and move out to two ending stops. These two ending stops share the same color information. We can also rotate the gradient using the ending stops. The lines will maintain a 90-degree angle between them. If we hold Ctrl, it will snap the angle of rotation. We can stretch out the lines as well. The inner stops on the line share the same offsets and the same color information. If we double-click a line to add a new stop there, it'll add one on the other line as well. Similarly, deleting one will delete the other. With the center stop, we can change the position of the gradient on the object. We can also of course change the color of this stop. If we hold Shift and drag the center stop, it will let us change the focus of the gradient. The focus is denoted by this x here. If we don't hold shift, we can drag the focus back to the center stop. Okay, that should be a pretty good overview of linear and radial gradients. So we can go ahead and delete this object and start working on the poster. Now, for the dimensions of the poster, we're going to use the page here. We'll begin by creating a rectangle that covers it. So first, let's turn on snapping. Then let's drop this down and go to Advanced Mode. And with snapping to page borders enabled down here, we can close this, switch to the squares and rectangles tool with the R key, then we can snap to the top left corner of the page and click and drag down until it snaps to the bottom-right. Let's turn snapping back off for now. If we deselect the rectangle, we can see that the page border is still showing here, making it look like the rectangle has a stroke. If we want to hide this, we can click this button up here to open the document properties dialog. Then, in the Display tab, we can uncheck border down here. Okay, we can go ahead and close this out now. This rectangle is going to be for the sky. The whole bottom two-thirds or so is going to be covered up by things like mountains and the ground. So we really only have to worry about what it looks like in this top area. We're going to make it look like the sun is setting behind the mountains. We want to have it start out orange in here and become more and more blue as it moves out. We also want it to be rounded. This means that our best option is a radial gradient. So let's select the rectangle again and in the fill and stroke dialog. let's click this button to give it a radial gradient fill. Okay, let's first work on the position. We can switch to the gradient tool by pressing the G key, then select the center stop, hold Ctrl and move it up some. Now let's grab this stop at the top, hold Ctrl and drag it down. Then let's hold Ctrl and drag out the right stop some. Alright, for the colors, let's first raise the alpha channel of this stop all the way up. And let's make it a desaturated cyan. Then select the center stop and make it an orange. We can adjust it all again later if necessary. Okay, now let's work on the mountains. For this, we'll use the pen tool, which we can get to by pressing the B key. When we draw the mountains, we only want to use straight line segments, without curves. Sometimes, however, it's easy to accidentally click and drag with the pen tool, creating curves. Fortunately, if we look up at the controls bar for the pen tool, we have these five different modes we can choose from. And the fourth one here makes it so we can only create line segments. The default, which you've been using, lets us create line segments and curve segments. I recommend trying all of these out when you get a chance, and we'll actually be going over the second one here when we draw the fire later in the lesson. Anyway, with the straight line segment mode chosen, let's start creating some mountains. For the first layer of mountains, I'll start out here and create some jagged lines like this. After clicking outside the border over here, we can bring it down around the bottom and back to the first point. And don't worry, we'll be cutting off the excess later. Okay, Let's turn off the stroke of this path. Then go back to the fill tab. We're actually going to give this a linear gradient. But first, let's give it a flat fill and make it a dark blue. Now let's give it a linear gradient. Okay, so we want the top of the mountains to be partially transparent so we can see the sky through them. So let's the gradient tool, grab the transparent stop at the right and bring it up here. Now let's grab the opaque stop, hold Ctrl and bring it down here. Alright, to cut off the excess parts of this path, let's go to the select tool with the S key, select the sky object and duplicate it with Ctrl D, Shift-click the mountain path and go to Path -> ntersection. Okay, now let's go back to the pen tool and create another layer of mountains on top of this one. Okay, Let's turn off the stroke, give it a flat fill for now, make it a bit darker, then let's give it a linear gradient and switch to the gradient tool. We won't be using transparency for this layer, so we can bring the first stop up here, then hold control and bring the other stop down here. For this one, let's raise the alpha channel all the way up and tweak the color. Okay, now we can go to the select tool, duplicate the sky, Shift-click the mountain path, and do an Intersection with Ctrl *. I'm going to hold Ctrl and bring this stop up some more. And the bottom one as well. Now I'll go to the node tool with the N key and adjust the nodes a bit. Let's create one more layer of mountains. Let's turn off the stroke, and for this one, we can just give it a flat, dark blue fill. Then let's duplicate the sky and do an Intersection with the mountain path. We can also add some clouds if we want. For this, let's first zoom in some, then we can switch to the circles and ellipses tool with the E key and create an ellipse in here. And let's make it white. Then let's create some more overlapping ellipses. We're going to be making the bottom of this cloud flat in a minute. Now, let's select all of these ellipses and turn them into a single path by going to Path -> Union. To make the bottom flat, we can go to the squares and rectangles tool and create a rectangle covering some of the bottom, switch to the select tool and select both objects and go to Path -> Difference. We can readjust the size and positioning if we want. Let's give it a linear gradient fill, switch to the gradient tool, move the opaque stop to the top, then hold Ctrl and move the transparent stop to the bottom. Then we can simply add duplicates of the cloud to other parts of the sky. I'll flip this one horizontally with the H key and adjust the sizing a bit. For this cloud, I'll press the lower one step button up here to put it behind the middle layer of mountains, but still in front of the bottom one. To cut off the excess parts of these clouds, we can duplicate the sky, Shift-click one of the clouds and do an Intersection with Ctrl *. Then do the same for the other cloud. Okay, the next thing we'll do is add a couple of layers of trees down here. If we go to the pen tool, in the control bar, we have this Shape setting which we can use to affect the shape of the paths the tool will create. The triangle in and triangle out options let us easily create triangular paths and is a great way to draw simple trees. To see how it works, we can choose triangle in, for example, click in here, hold Ctrl and click up here, then right-click to finish the path. As you can see, this creates a triangular shaped path with the base at the first node and the tip at the last node. And the cool thing about this is we can change the width of the triangle either with the scale setting up here, or by switching to the node tool and dragging this pink handle. We can actually create a diamond shape with this as well. We can also still move the nodes around. Let's undo the moving, then let's hold Ctrl and move this top node down some. To be able to modify this further, we need to turn it into a normal path by going to Path -> Object to Path. We can hold Ctrl and drag this bottom center node up some. This will be for the top part of a tree. Let's now go back to the pen tool and create another one of these by clicking down here, holding Ctrl and clicking up here. Let's go to the node tool by pressing the N key, and let's increase the width. I'll hold Ctrl and bring this node up some as well. Let's turn it into a normal path with the shortcut Shift Ctrl C, hold Ctrl and bring up the bottom center node. Let's go back to the pen tool and create one more. Let's make it wider. But this time we'll leave it triangular. Now we have a simple tree shape. Let's now select all of these parts, then open the Align and Distribute dialog with this button up here, and let's align these vertically. Then we can turn them into a single path by going to Path -> Union. And let's make it a dark blue. And by the way, we can use this Shape setting for paths with more than two nodes, as well as with curves. Just to demonstrate, I can switch to the pen tool, put the mode back on bezier, and create a path with some curves over here, and it will also give it a triangular shape. Okay, back on the poster, let's move this tree over here, duplicate it with Ctrl D, hold Ctrl and move it to the right some. We can adjust the size of this one. Let's create some more all the way across the poster. Next, we'll create an even darker layer of trees in front of this layer. So first, let's duplicate this first tree again and make it darker. Then reposition and resize it and create more duplicates across the poster. Now we want to select all the trees in the front and turn them into a single path. Because we don't have any other objects on our canvas that match the fill color of the trees, an easy way to select them all is to right-click one, then go to Select Same -> Fill Color. Now we can turn this into a single path by going to Path -> Union. Let's cut off the excess by duplicating either the sky object or one of the mountain objects, then Shift-clicking the tree path and doing an Intersection with Ctrl *. Let's do the same for the trees in the back. Right-click one, go to Select Same -> Fill Color. Do a Union with the shortcut Ctrl +, duplicate one of the big paths, Shift-click the tree path and do an Intersection with Ctrl *. I'm going to select both of the tree paths, hold Ctrl, and move them up a bit. Okay, we're finally finished with the background, so now let's work on the foreground. 13. Camping Poster: Part 2: Before we begin working on the foreground, we want to be able to lock all the objects in the background so that we don't accidentally change or move them around. This is where layers come in. Layers allow us to keep certain objects, such as foreground and background elements, separate from each other. And they also allow us to lock or hide many objects at once. If we look down here in the status bar, we actually start out with one layer called Layer 1. And to easily add and work with multiple layers, we can open the layers and objects dialog either by going to Layer -> Layers and Objects or Object -> Layers and Objects. In the list here, we can see all the layers in our document. If we click this arrow to the left of a layer's name, we can see all of the objects in the layer. If we select one of the objects in the list, it also selects it on the canvas. Next to an object in the list, we have an eye icon here for hiding and showing the object and a lock icon for locking and unlocking it. If we lock an object, we won't be able to select or modify it. We have these icons for the layers as well, letting us hide and lock entire layers. Now we can't select anything in this layer, which is what we want. Another thing we can do in here is rename a layer by double-clicking its name and typing something else. Let's name this one Background. We can name the objects as well if we wanted, but it's not really necessary at the moment. Let's now add another layer for the foreground elements. To add a layer, we can click this button at the top with the + sign. Here we can give it a name such as Foreground, and choose where we want the layer to be positioned. We can either put it above the current layer, below the current layer, or make it a sub-layer of the current layer. Because we want all of the foreground objects to appear on top of the background objects, let's choose above current and click Add. And now in the list, we have a Foreground layer above the Background layer. And actually we can reposition layers and objects in this list by clicking and dragging them. Okay, for the foreground, we're also going to work with sublayers. Sublayers will allow us to keep certain parts of the main layers separate so that we're able to lock them. To add a sub layer to the foreground layer, let's click the Add button again, name this one Ground, choose as sublayer of current for the position, and click Add. Now if we click the arrow next to the foreground layer, we can see that we have a ground layer inside it. Let's select the ground layer. Let's create an object inside it for the ground. For this, Let's turn on snapping, then switch to the squares and rectangles tool, snap to the bottom left corner of the page, then drag over until it snaps to a point on the right side of the page and release. Now let's turn off snapping with % key, grab the rectangle's top-left scale handle, hold Ctrl and drag it up to above the base of the trees. Okay, for the color, Let's give it a linear gradient, switch to the gradient tool with the G key, and move the first stop to the top. We want the stop to not go past the border of the object, or else it won't blend in with the trees correctly. Okay, now let's grab the other stop, hold Ctrl and bring it to the bottom. We can use the color picker in the fill and stroke dialog to make this the color of the front-most layer of mountains. That should be good. Okay, now we're going to create a brighter, squiggly path in here, where we'll draw the camp site. For this, let's switch to the pen tool, make sure we're on Bezier mode, change shape back to none, and let's create a squiggly path on the ground. It doesn't really matter what it looks like. This is just to help make the camp site stand out more from the rest of the ground. Let's turn off the stroke, give it a flat fill color, and use the color picker to make it the color of the front- most mountains. Now we can select the main ground object, duplicate it, Shift-click the path we just created, and do an Intersection with Ctrl *. Next, we'll work on the camp site. Let's first go back to the layers and objects dialog, and let's lock the ground layer. Now let's select the foreground layer and create a new sub layer inside it. Let's call this one Campsite. And let's make sure we have it selected in the list. Alright, let's begin by creating the tent. For this, let's go to the pen tool and create a triangular path on bright part of the ground. Let's turn off the stroke and give it a bright orange fill. Now we can go to the node tool and adjust the nodes and curves a bit. I'll drag in both of the side segments some. Next, let's go to the select tool and duplicate this path, and let's bring it back here. Let's make this one a bit darker. Now we want to close this part between the paths. To do this, we can turn on snapping with the % key, go to the pen tool, snap to this cusp node, then to this one, click inside here, and snap to this cusp node, then this one, click in here and click the first point again. We can turn snapping back off, switch to the select tool, select these two paths and do a Union with Ctrl +. Let's press the pgdn key to move it below the front of the tent. I'm also going to switch to the node tool and adjust some things a bit. Let's also add an opening with a flap on the front of the tent. For the opening, let's turn on snapping, switch to the pen tool, snap to the cusp node at the top point here, and snap to the path down here, then over here, and we can snap to the line midpoint here if we want, then back to the first point. Let's turn off the stroke, and let's give this a really dark orange fill. We also want to cut a duplicate of this path out of the path behind it, so that it doesn't show through here at the bottom. To do this, we can switch to the select tool and duplicate this path, Shift- click the bottom path, and go to Path -> Difference. For the flap, we can switch back to the pen tool, snap to the top point again, then click in here, snap to this point, and back to the start. Let's turn off the stroke, and give it a bright orange fill. Let's turn off snapping, switch to the node tool, and drag this bottom segment up to give it a curve. We can also add a shadow here. For this, we can turn snapping back on, switch to the pen tool and create a triangular path connecting these two nodes, turn off the stroke, give it a flat fill, use the color picker to make it the darker orange of this side of the tent, then press the pgdn key to put it below the flap. Now we can turn off snapping again, switch to the select tool and select all of the tent parts, and let's group them together with Ctrl G. Okay, we're finished with the tent. So let's work on the fire now. If we go back to the pen tool, the second mode option we have up here is the spiral mode. With this mode, we can create super smooth curves by simply clicking points in the canvas. If we want to create a sharp point here, we can hold Shift before we click. Okay, let's undo this path and see how we can use this to draw fire. To begin, I'll click in here, then here, and I'll create a corner here by holding Shift and clicking, then click down here, then hold shift and click here, click up here, hold Shift and click here, and I'll basically continue doing this, normal clicking once, then shift clicking. When I get down here, I'll bring it back around to the first point and close it off. And the great thing about this is that we can go to the node tool and adjust the nodes and it will maintain the smooth curves. Okay, now let's go to the fill and stroke dialog and turn off the stroke. Then let's give it a flat fill for the moment and adjust the colors some. Let's give it a linear gradient, switch to the gradient tool with the G key, move the first stop to the top and the last stop to the bottom. Let's raise the alpha of this one all the way up and change the color slightly. Alright, now we can go back to the pen tool and create another layer for the fire. Let's start outside and below this one. We'll cut off the excess later. Let's turn off the stroke and give it a linear gradient, switch to the gradient tool, bring the first stop up here and make a yellowish, bring the other stop down here, raise the Alpha all the way up, and make it an orange. Let's go back to the pen tool and create one more layer. For this one, let's turn off the stroke, and let's just give it a white fill and lower the opacity a bit. Okay, to cut off the excess parts of these, we can switch to the select tool and duplicate the main path here, Shift-click one of the others and do an Intersection with Ctrl *. Then we can do the same for the other path. Alright, let's also turn the main fire path into a normal path by selecting it and going to Path -> Object to Path. This will prevent the curves from getting messed up if we move it around later. Now let's select them all and group them with Ctrl G. And we can resize and reposition it some. Let's now add some smoke coming out from the top of the fire. For this, let's go to the pen tool and switch back to Bezier mode. For shape, let's choose Ellipse. If we create a path with the Ellipse option, it will make the path elliptical. However, we might have to lower the scale setting up here in order for it to look right. Like with the triangle in and triangle out options, we can use the node tool for more accurate control over the width. Let's go back to the pen tool and create a few more of these. Let's now select all of these, turn them into normal paths with Shift Ctrl C, group them with Ctrl G, make them white, and lower the opacity some. I'll also readjust the size and positioning a bit. Now let's select the smoke group and the fire group and group the two together. Okay, next we'll add a couple of glow effects to the fire. For the first one, let's go to the circles and ellipses tool, hold Ctrl and create a circle covering the fire and the smoke. Let's give this a radial gradient, and add a blur to it with this blur slider down here. As you can see, this makes the fire look like it's glowing. Adding a blur to an object also increases the size of it, as we can see by the bounding box. Let's go to the select tool and click this button up here to move this object to the bottom. Then readjust it if necessary. Next, we'll add another glow effect to the ground under the fire. For this, we can create an ellipse at the bottom here. Let's give it a radial fill as well. Let's select the center stop and make it a yellow. Then let's select one of the other stops and make it an orange. We can go to the select tool and adjust the size if we want. Let's press pgdn to put it below the fire, but not below the large glow object. All right, to finish up the fire, let's add some wood down here. For this, I'll switch to the pen tool, put Shape back on None, and create some simple rectangular shapes. I'll turn off the stroke and give this a fill that's the same color as the ground down here. Then I'll create another one of these, turn off the stroke and make it the color of the front layer of mountains. Now I'll create a few more. Alright, let's select all of the pieces of wood and group them with Ctrl G, and press pgdn to put it below the fire. I'm going to readjust some things here a bit. Now let's select all of the fire objects, being sure to also get the large blurred object, and let's group them with Ctrl G. Okay, we're almost finished now. The last thing we have to do is add some text. First we want to create a new sub layer for the text. So let's go to the layers and objects dialog, select the foreground layer and click the Add button. Let's name this one Text, and with as sublayer of current chosen for the position, let's click Add. We can also go ahead and lock the campsite layer. The first text we will add is a curved title or slogan at the top of the poster. We learned in the previous lesson that we can curve text around a path using the put on path feature in the Text menu. Well, we can actually do this with shapes too. Let's go to the circles and ellipses tool, hold Ctrl and create a large circle up here. We can go ahead and raise the opacity all the way up. We're actually going to be stretching this out into an ellipse after we put the text on it, but we want to keep it a circle for now, or else it will make it difficult to center the text on it later. Now let's switch to the text tool, click in the canvas, and I'll type something cheesy like, let's go camping. For the font-family, we want to use something with thicker letters. And actually, another way to change certain features of a text object is with the text and font dialog, which we can open with this button up here. Here we can set the font family, font style, and font size. However, it doesn't actually change the text object straightaway. Instead, it shows a preview down here so we can decide if we want to use the chosen settings or not. For my text, I'll go with chunk five as the font family, but feel free to use whatever you want. And after checking the preview, I can click apply to apply the changes. And by the way, we can also change other features of the text object in here, as well as the text itself. And in order to center the text on the circle, we also need to change the alignment of the text up here to centered. Alright, now let's go to the select tool, hold Ctrl and scale up the text objects. Let's make it white. Next let's hold Shift and select the circle and go to Text -> Put on Path. Then we can select just the circle, click it again to get the rotation handles, hold Ctrl and rotate it until the text is at the top. Now we can click the circle again to get back to the scale handles, hold Shift and stretch it out. We can also move the ellipse and it'll move the text as well. And we can double-click the text object to switch to the text tool and change any of these settings if we want. I'm going to make the size bigger. The problem now is that the cloud under the text here blends in too much with the text. So I can go to the layers and objects dialog and unlock the background layer for the moment, then go to the select tool and select the cloud and lower its opacity some. I'll lower the opacity of this one a bit as well. That should work. We can select the ellipse and turn off its fill color temporarily in order to see everything better. Okay, I'll give the ellipse a fill color again and also lock the background layer again. Alright, when we have the text the way we want it, we can select it and turn it into a path by going to Path -> Object to Path. Now we're free to delete the ellipse. Now let's select the text again, and in the align distribute dialog, choose Page as the anchor, and let's align the text vertically with the page. All right, finally we'll add some information text at the bottom of the poster. For this, we'll use the flow into frame feature in the Text menu. With this feature, we can create a shape, then a text object with a lot of text, select both the text object and the shape and go to Text -> Flow into Frame, and it will use the shape as a frame for the text. If we resize the shape, the text will flow accordingly. Alright, so we can delete these, and let's create a rectangle at the bottom of the poster. I'll raise the opacity all the way up, and let's go ahead and align it vertically with the page. I'll also change the anchor back to last selected, for later lessons. Okay, for the text, we can type some real information if we want. But as this is just for demonstration purposes, all we need is some random placeholder text. And a great way to create placeholder text is with the Lorem Ipsum extension, which we can find by going to Extensions -> Text -> Lorem ipsum. Let's go ahead and check live preview here. What this does is it creates placeholder text with the number of paragraphs and sentences per paragraph chosen in here. And it uses a selected shape as the frame for the text. We're going to be making the text bigger later. So for the number of paragraphs, let's just go with one. And we can try adding a few more sentences. That should be good. Now we can click apply in here and close this out. Next, we can select the text and make it white, then go to the text tool and increase the size a bit. We can also set the alignment to justified to make the text flush with the sides of the rectangle. We can turn it into a path by going to Path -> Object to Path, and delete the rectangle. And that should do it for our camping poster. Thank you very much for joining me in this very long lesson, and I'll see you in the next one. 14. Travel Icon Overview: In this lesson, we'll create an icon that we can use for something like a travel app. In the process, we'll learn how to use the Trace Bitmap dialog to vectorize imported images; we'll learn how to use the pencil tool to do free-hand drawing; we'll learn how to apply dashed patterns to strokes, as well as how to create our own dash patterns; and we'll learn how to use clipping to hide parts of objects. Okay, let's go ahead and start up a new Inkscape document, and I'll see you in the lesson. 15. Travel Icon: To begin creating the travel icon, we're going to vectorize an image of the Earth. And to do so, we'll use a feature called the Trace Bitmap dialog. So first let's go to File -> Import. The image we'll be using is this globe image here, which I provided as a downloadable resource. Okay, let's go ahead and import it. Then let's hold Ctrl and make it a bit bigger. Alright, to open the Trace Bitmap dialog, we can either right-click the image and choose Trace Bitmap or go to Path -> Trace Bitmap. In the Trace Bitmap dialogue we have three tabs: single scan, which will create a single path; multicolor, which will create a group of paths; and pixel art, which lets us vectorize pixel art. Let's first check out the single scan tab. At the top here we have some different detection modes we can choose from. The default mode, brightness cut-off, will vectorize all parts of the selected image that are darker than this threshold setting. We can see in the preview down here that the only part of this image that is darker than the threshold is the semicircle going around the outside of the globe. If we increase the threshold, we'll start to get more of the globe in the result. And if we like what we see, we can click Apply down here. Now we have this single path created from a tracing of the image. We're not actually going to use this path for our icon though, so we can go ahead and delete it. Then select the image again. The next detection mode, edge detection, attempts to create line art from the image. Color quantization separates the image into the number of colors we choose here. The next mode, auto trace, doesn't give us a preview, so we have to click Apply. This will add some color to the path. Centerline tracing also doesn't give us a preview, and it's another method for creating line art from an image. Let's put the mode back on brightness cutoff. We can also invert the image, which will give us the background with the globe cut out. And we have some details settings that we can change here. But the results of changing these are very subtle, so I don't use them much myself. With User-assisted trace, we can use the pen tool to draw a path around the part of the image we want, give the path a fill color, select the path and the image, check User assisted trace, and now we can see that it traces just the part of the image under the path we drew. We can increase the threshold setting a bit more if we want. Then click Apply and delete the path we drew. Now we have our Earth path. We're going to be using this path for our icon, so let's move it out of the way for the moment and select the image again. Let's take a quick look at the multicolor tab. Like with single scan, we have some detection modes to choose from. All of these modes will create a tracing consisting of a group of multiple paths, allowing us to get a more detailed result. And the number of paths it creates is whatever the scans setting is here. The minimum is eight, so it will create at least eight paths. If we click apply and give it a few seconds, here's the result we get with the brightness steps mode. As we can see in the status bar, this is a group of eight paths, and we can double-click it to enter the group and access the individual paths. The colors mode lets us get the colors in the tracing. And grays is the grayscale version of colors. Auto trace seems to often cause Inkscape to freeze up, so I'm not going to try it here. We also get some extra settings here with the multicolor modes. Smooth will apply a Gaussian blur to the tracing, giving us a smoother result. But it's a very subtle difference. Stack is good for more detailed images as it will fill in some of the gaps in the tracing and make it less transparent. And remove background here actually removes the path that is closest to white in the tracing group. This is useful for images that have a white background as it will remove the background for us. The final tab we have in the dialog is pixel art. If you have a pixel art image that you would like to vectorize, this is the tab you would use. Be careful with this one though, because it can create up to one path per pixel in the image. So unless you only use it on very small pixel art images, it can be extremely slow. Okay, we can go ahead and close out the Trace Bitmap dialog now, as well as delete the image. Now let's work on our Earth path here. First, for the color, this is of course supposed to be the water, so let's open the fill and stroke dialog and give it a blue fill. Next, we want to be able to add some color to the land parts. To do this, let's first switch to the circle and ellipses tool with the E key, hold Ctrl and Shift and create a circle starting at the center of the path. Let's give it a green fill. Now we can switch to the select tool with the S key and reposition and resize the circle. We actually don't want to make it quite as large as the Earth path as we're going to cut off some of the jagged outer part of the path. Okay, now we can click this button to put the circle below the earth path. Then let's duplicate it with Ctrl D, zoom in a bit more, hold Shift and select the earth path, then go to Path -> Intersection. There we go. Now the Earth path looks better. Now we can select these two Earth objects and group them with Ctrl G. Let's next create an airplane for the icon. First, let's switch to the squares and rectangles tool with the R key and create a long thin rectangle over here. And let's round the corners. For the color, I'll just make it white. Now let's turn it into a path by going to Path -> Object to Path. Then we can switch to the node tool, select the three bottom nodes and combine them into a single node by clicking this button up here. Then let's turn it into a symmetric node, hold Ctrl and drag out one of the handles a bit while keeping them horizontal. I'll hold Ctrl and move the node down a bit more. We can also turn the top node into a symmetric node, hold Ctrl and drag out the handles some. Then select the two nodes under it, hold Ctrl and move them down a bit. For a wing, I'll switch to the pen tool with the B key, click inside here, click over here, hold Ctrl and click down here, hold Ctrl and click over here and close it off. I'll turn off the stroke and give this a red fill. I'll create an engine here by switching back to the squares and rectangles tool and creating a white rectangle on the wing. I'm going to make the corners a bit less rounded. Now I'll switch to the select tool, click this button to put the engine below the wing, select them both and group them with Ctrl G. Then I'll duplicate it with Ctrl D, flip it horizontally with the H key, hold Ctrl and move it over here. Now I'll select both wing groups and group them with Ctrl G, hold Shift and select the plane body, open the align and distribute dialog with this button and align them vertically. I'll select just the wing group and press pgdn to put it below the body. I'll also use the pen tool to create a tail fin. I'll turn off the stroke, use the color picker tool to make it the same color as the wing, then I'll switch to the select tool, duplicate the fin with Ctrl D, press H to flip it horizontally, hold Ctrl and move it over here. Then I'll select both fins and group them with Ctrl G, hold Shift and select the plane body and align them vertically. Now I'll move the tail group below the body by pressing pgdn. Now we can select all of the plane parts and group them, then move them on to the Earth group and resize and position it the way we want it. Let's also add a shadow of the plane on the earth. To do this, we can duplicate the plane, make it black, give it a low opacity like 15%, move it down and to the right some, scale it down a bit, and put it below the plane. Next, we can add a location marker to the icon. For this, let's switch to the circles and ellipses tool, hold Ctrl and create a circle in here. I'll raise the opacity all the way up and make it the same color as the plane's wings. Now I'll switch to the select tool and duplicate the circle, make it another color, scale it down while holding Shift and Ctrl, then select them both and go to Path -> Difference. Now let's switch to the node tool, hold Ctrl and drag this bottom node down And we can turn it into a symmetric node, hold Ctrl and drag in the handles a bit. Let's make the right half of the marker a bit darker. To do this, we can turn on snapping, switch to the squares and rectangles tool, snap to this top center node and create a rectangle covering the whole right side. Let's sharpen the corners with this button and make it black with a low opacity like 15%. Now switch to the select tool and duplicate the red path, then hold Shift and select the rectangle and do an Intersection with Ctrl *. Let's go ahead and turn snapping back off. To add a shadow of the marker onto the earth, we can select the main marker path and duplicate it, turn it black with 15% opacity, like the airplane shadow, rotate it, move it down here, and shrink it down some. Next we can create a dashed line going from the marker to the airplane to indicate a flight path. I want to make my flight path kind of zigzagging and give it some loops. A good way to do this is with the pencil tool here. The pencil tool has the shortcut P, and it lets us do free-hand drawing. If we look up here at the controls bar, we have this smoothing setting. The lower this is, the more accurate the paths we create will be. However, this will also create a bunch of nodes. The higher the smoothing setting is, on the other hand, the less accurate the paths will be, but it will allow us to get smoother curves. This will also result in fewer nodes. The smoothing setting actually only applies to the paths we create after changing this setting. It won't affect the smoothing of existing paths. If we want to change the smoothing of an existing path, we can go to Path -> Simplify. We can use the shortcut Ctrl L to do it quickly. I'll go ahead and delete these paths now. Let's switch back to the pencil tool, put smoothing on something pretty high, and create a flight path. Let's make the stroke color white. Then go to the stroke style tab and increase the width a bit. To give this stroke a dashed pattern, we can use the dashes setting here. If we drop down this box, we have various dash patterns to choose from. We can actually also create our own dash patterns using this pattern setting. Each pair of numbers in this box, separated by space, is the length of a dash followed by the length of a gap. We can change these, and we can add more. I actually like the 3 3 pattern, so I'll reset mine, but feel free to use any pattern you want. We can also still switch to the node tool and play around the nodes and curves if we want. Let's also give the flight path a shadow. To do this, we can simply switch to the select tool and duplicate the path, make the stroke color black, change the opacity to 15%, move it down and to the right a bit, then press pgdn to put it below the flight path. All right, let's next add a sky to the icon. First, let's switch to the circles and ellipses tool, hold Ctrl and you create a large circle over these objects. We'll be using clipping later to hide the parts of the earth group that are outside of this circle. Okay, let's go to the stroke style tab and turn off the dashed pattern. And let's go to the stroke paint tab and click the X to turn off the stroke. Let's raise the opacity all the way up, then go to the fill Tab and give this a light blue fill. Let's give it a linear gradient, move the first step to the top right and the other stop near the bottom left. Then let's raise the alpha channel of this stop all the way up and make it a lighter blue. Let's go to the select tool and click this button to put it below all the other objects. Okay, as I mentioned earlier, we're going to use clipping to hide the parts of the earth group that are outside of the sky circle. To see how clipping works, we can create a shape over here, then create another shape on top of it. Let's go to the select tool, select both objects and either right-click and choose Set Cip or go to Objects -> Clip -> Set Clip. So what clipping does is it uses the top object to hide or clip out any parts of the bottom object that are outside of it. We can change the color of this and we can transform it like a normal object. If we go to the node tool, we still have the handles for modifying the original bottom object. And if we toggle on this button in the controls bar, we get the handles for modifying the original top object. I'll turn this back off for now. And if we want to release the clip, we can either right-click it and choose Release Clip or go to Object -> Clip -> Release Clip. Now we have our original objects back. Okay, we can go ahead and delete these now. Alright, so to use the sky circle to clip the Earth group, we can duplicate the sky circle, select it and the earth group and set the clip. Perfect. Let's finish up the icon by adding some clouds. For this, let's switch to the circles and ellipses tool and create an ellipse in here, make it white, and create some more ellipses until we have a cloud shape. Now we can select all of the ellipses and Union them together with Ctrl +. To create a shadow, we can duplicate the cloud, make it black with 15% opacity, move it down and to the right some, and shrink it down a bit if we want, and press pgdn to move it below the cloud. We're also going to clip out the parts of this shadow that are outside of the Earth group. But first, let's create some more clouds. I'll just duplicate this cloud and its shadow, move them somewhere else and resize them a bit. Okay, so to clip out the parts of the cloud shadows that are outside of the Earth group, we can duplicate the Earth group, hold Shift and select all of the cloud shadows we want to clip, right-click and Set Clip. Alright, finally, we can select all of the icon objects and group them with Ctrl G. And that should do it for our travel icon. Thank you very much for watching, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 16. Coffee Shop Logo Overview: In this lesson, we'll create a logo that we can use for a coffee shop. In the process, we'll learn how to use path effects, including Interpolate Subpaths, Pattern Along Path, Power Stroke, and Corners (Fillet/Chamfer). We'll also learn how to use inverse clipping, how to use the eraser tool to erase parts of our drawings, and we'll learn how to use the Transform dialog for very precise transformations of objects. The topics we cover in this lesson will really take your Inkscape skills to the next level. See you there. 17. Coffee Shop Logo: Let's begin by switching to the circles and ellipses tool with the E key, holding Ctrl and creating a circle. Let's give it a black stroke for now and turn off the fill color. Now let's switch to the select tool with the S key, duplicate the circle with Ctrl D, hold Shift and Ctrl and scale it down some. Next we want to create a circle that goes right through the center of the area between these two circles. To do this, we can use a path effect. Path effects are special effects that can be applied to paths and sometimes shape objects, and to use them, we have to open the Path Effects Dialog, which we can do by going to Path -> Path Effects. At the top of the path effects dialog, we have a list that shows any path effects that are currently applied to our selected objects. We haven't added any to the circle yet, so the list is empty. To add a path effect to a selected object, we click this + button at the bottom. This will open the live path effects selector dialog, which shows us all of the available path effects we can choose from. If we click the arrow at the bottom of a path effect, we can hover over this information icon to learn what it does. The path effect we want to use to create a circle between our current two circles is Interpolate Subpaths here. However, this effect only works on paths. So we need to turn the circles into paths first. Let's close this out for now, then select both circles and go to Path -> Object to Path. Another thing we need to do is make these subpaths of a single object, instead of separate objects like they are now. To do this, we can go to Path -> Combine. We can now see by the single bounding box around the paths that they are subpaths of a single object. If we click the + button in the path effects dialog again, we can see that Interpolate Subpaths is now enabled. And to apply it to the object, we can simply click the icon. So what Interpolate Subpaths does is it creates transition paths between two subpaths of a selected object. And the number of transition paths it creates is determined by this Steps parameter that we now see in the path effects dialog. And this actually includes the two original subpaths. So with the default value of five, we have our two original subpaths plus three transition paths between them. We can change this to add or remove transition paths. But the minimum is two, for the two original paths. For our purposes, we want three steps. We can actually also change things like the spacing between the paths. Just to give an example, I'll switch to the pencil tool and create a path, then hold Shift and create another path, which will make them subpaths. Now I'll add Interpolate Subpaths to it. If we now click this button here that says Edit on-canvas, we get this green line on the object. We can move the nodes of this line around. And we can drag the line to curve it. We can also double-click the line to add a new node. If we turn off this equidistant spacing parameter, the distance between pairs of transition paths will be determined by the nodes on the green line, allowing us to adjust the spacing between them. Okay, We can go ahead and delete this object now and go back to our circles. All right, so one thing to know about path effects is that when we apply one to a path, the path is no longer a normal path. If we switch to the node tool, we can see that we still have access to the nodes of our original subpaths, but not the transition path. To make this object a normal path object and get access to all of the nodes, we have to finalize the path effect, which we can do by going to Path -> Object to Path. We can now see that the object no longer has Interpolate Subpaths applied to it, and we now have access to all the nodes. Another thing we want to do is split these subpaths into separate paths. We can do this by going to Path -> Break Apart. Let's next switch to the text tool and create a text object for the name of our coffee shop. I'll just go with "COFFEE PLACE" in all caps. We can change the font family if we want, but I'll leave mine on Calibri and make this style Bold. Now let's switch to the select tool, hold Ctrl and scale it up. Okay, now we want to wrap this text object around the center circle. But we want to be able to center the text at the top of the circle, as well as make it so the text is centered between the two outer circles. In order to make it so we can center the text at the top, we first need to switch to the text tool with the T key and change the alignment to centered To make it so we can center the text between the outer circles, we're going to need to subtract the height of the text object from the width and height of the center circle. This will make sense in a bit. For now, let's go back to the select tool, double-click the text object's height here to select the value, and press Ctrl C to copy it. Now let's select the text object and the center circle and go to Text -> Put on Path. Then we can select just the circle, click it again to get the rotation handles, hold Ctrl and rotate it until the text is centered at the top. To center the text between the two outer circles, we're going to take the text object's original height value that we copied and subtract it from the center circle's width and height. To do this, we're going to need to use the transform dialog. We can open the transform dialog by going to Object -> Transform. With this dialog, we can move, scale, rotate, and skew objects by precise percentages or amounts. We can also apply transformation matrices to objects. The tab we want to use is the scale tab. In here we want to change the units to millimeters to coincide with the units of the rulers. And we also want to check scale proportionally so that the width and height will change together. Now to subtract the text object's height from the circle, we can click at the end of either the width or the height box, type a - sign, press Ctrl V to paste the height value we copied, and press Enter. Okay, the center circle has been scaled down and the text is now centered between the outer circles. Now if we want, we can double-click the text object to get to the text tool and change some of the spacing of the text. I'll add some spacing between the letters, as well as between the words. Okay, now we actually want to use this center circle again for another text object that we'll put at the bottom. So we need to reset the size of it. But if we reset it right now, it will of course affect this text object. So we need to turn the text object into a path first by going to Path -> Object to Path. Now we can go to the select tool and select the center circle, then, back in the transform dialog, we can click at the end of one of the size boxes, and this time type a + sign, then Ctrl V, then Enter. Now let's switch to the text tool and create another text object. I'll type "THE BEST IN TOWN." I'll leave the font family and style on the defaults and change the alignment to centered, switch to the select tool, hold Ctrl, and scale it up a bit. Okay, now we want to copy the height value of this text object, then hold Shift and select the center circle and go to Text -> Put on Path. This time we want to center the text at the bottom. However, if we select just the circle and start rotating it, we can see that the text is upside down. So let's undo that. To put the text on the bottom while keeping it right-side up, we need to flip the circle vertically by pressing the V key. There we go. However, this also puts the text around the inside of the circle instead of the outside. So instead of subtracting the height value we copied from the circle, we need to add it to the circle. Okay, now we can add some spacing to this text as well. We actually want to reset the center circle's size once again, because we're going to leave parts of its stroke showing in-between the text and the sides of the logo later. So first let's turn the text object into a path by going to Path -> Object to Path, then select the circle and subtract the copied height value from the circle's size. All right, now we can close out the transform dialog. Now let's select the largest circle, open the fill and stroke dialog, and give it a brown fill. Then let's select the smallest circle and give it a darker brown fill. Now let's select all three circles, change the stroke color to white, and let's switch to the stroke style tab and increase the stroke width a bit. Let's give all the text a white fill. Next, we're going to get rid of all but the parts of the center circle on the sides here and leave some space between it and the text. To do this, we want to turn on snapping, go to advanced mode, enable snapping to object rotation centers, then switch to the pen tool, snap to the rotation center of the circles, and click over here outside of the circles, leaving a small gap between the line and the text, and right-click to finish the path. Now let's click this anchor point here and create another line down here, leaving a small gap between it and the bottom text, and close off the path. Let's now switch to the select tool and click the path to get the rotation handles, move its rotation center to the center point here, duplicate the path with Ctrl D, then press the H key to flip it horizontally. Now we can select both paths and go to Path -> Combine, then hold Shift and select the center circle, and go to Path -> Cut Path. This will cut the stroke of the circle into pieces using the paths we created. Now we can hold Shift and click the two side paths to de-select them, then press Delete to delete the top and bottom paths. Perfect. Next we're going to add a pattern around the outside of the logo. To do this, we can use the Pattern Along Path path effects To see how Pattern Along Path works, we can create a path, then create another path or a shape, give it a different fill color and turn off the stroke, and copy it into the clipboard with Ctrl C. Now let's switch to the select tool and select the first path, go to the path effects dialog, click the + button at the bottom, and choose Pattern Along Path. Next, under pattern source here, we can either click this paste path button or this link to path in clipboard button. If we click this one, we'll be able to edit the copied object and have the changes also be applied to the pattern. So let's go ahead and click this button. Alright, so by default, it takes the copied object and stretches it along the path using the fill and stroke characteristics of the path. We can give it a fill if we want and turn off the stroke. To change how the copied object is placed on the path, we have this pattern copies parameter here. The default is single stretched. We also have single, repeated, and repeated stretched, which is like repeated, but it stretches out the copies in order to make them take up the entire path. We can also change things like the width, which we can also do with the node tool by dragging around this diamond handle at the first node. And we can change the spacing of the copies, as well as the offsets. We can also still adjust the nodes of the path. And because we used the link button here, you can modify the pattern source object, and it'll modify the pattern on the path as well. Okay, we can go ahead and delete these objects. Now let's create a pattern for our logo. First, let's switch to the circles and ellipses tool, snap to the center of the circles, hold Ctrl and Shift and create a circle that is larger than all the others. The color doesn't matter at the moment. Let's press the End key to send the circle below everything. For the pattern object, let's create a small ellipse here. We want to cut off the bottom half of this ellipse. So let's switch to the pen tool with the B key, snap to this quadrant point on the ellipse, hold Ctrl and click over here outside the ellipse, and bring it around the bottom and close it off. Now let's select the path and the ellipse and do a Difference with Ctrl -. Let's copy the path into the clipboard with Ctrl C. And let's turn off snapping for now. To use the copied path as a pattern on this circle, we first want to select the circle and turn it into a path by going to Path -> Object to Path, then we want to switch to the node tool, select all of the nodes, and turn them into symmetric nodes with this button. The reason we need to do this is that Pattern Along Path for some reason will slightly warp the shape of circles if the nodes aren't symmetric. Now let's add Pattern Along Path to this path, click the link button and change pattern copies to repeated, stretched. Alright, now we can use the color picker tool to make this the dark brown. Then we can switch to the select tool, hold Shift and Ctrl, and scale it down some. To fill in this empty space in the center of the pattern, we can duplicate the pattern with the Ctrl D, remove Pattern Along Path from it by clicking this - button in the path effects dialog, hold Shift and select the pattern path here, and Union them together with Ctrl +. And we can adjust the size of it some more if we want. We can also go ahead and delete this half ellipse here. Okay, let's next add a couple of coffee beans centered at the sides of the logo. To do this, we can first create a small white ellipse over here, turn on snapping, switch to the select tool and move the ellipse over here, until its rotation center snaps to the smooth node at the center of this path. Let's also go ahead and remove the part of the stroke that's under the ellipse. First, let's switch to the pen tool, snap to the center of the logo, click over here outside the logo, leaving a small gap between the line and the ellipse and right-click to finish the path. Now we want to switch to the select tool, click the line to get the rotation handles move its rotation center to the center of the logo, duplicate it with Ctrl D, and press the V key to flip it vertically. Now we can select both of these, do the Combine operation with the shortcut Ctrl K, hold Shift and click the stroke, and go to Path -> Cut Path. Then we can hold Shift and deselect the two outer parts of the stroke and delete the center part. To make this ellipse look like a coffee bean, we can cut a wavy line down the center. One way to do this is with the eraser tool, here. The eraser tool has the shortcut Shift E, and to see how it works, let's create a few objects. I'll just stamp this one a few times with the spacebar. If we have any objects selected, the eraser tool will only work on those objects. But if we have nothing selected, it will work on all objects on the canvas. So first let's de-select everything, then switch to the eraser tool. With the eraser tool, we have three modes to choose from. The default mode is delete mode. With this mode, when we click and drag on the canvas, we get this red line, and any objects that the line is touching when we release the mouse get deleted. The next mode is cutout mode. With this, only the parts of objects that the red line touches get erased. This mode only works on paths or objects that can be turned into paths, like shape objects, and it will turn the shape objects into paths. With this mode, we also have some settings we can change, For example, we can change the width of the red line. With thinning, a value greater than zero will make it so drawing slowly gives us a thick line, and drawing fast gives us a thinner line. Negative values give us the opposite effects. Caps lets us change the appearance at the ends of the red line. With tremor, we can make the red line jagged. For mass, the higher the value, the more the red line lags behind our cursor, allowing us to get a smoother result. Finally, we have this toggle button that says break apart cut items. If we have this turned off and we completely cut through an object, then switch to the node tool and select the object, we can see it's still one object, with subpaths. But if we go back to the eraser tool and turn this button on first, then cut through an object, the subpaths have been split into separate paths. The final mode is clip mode. This one is similar to cutout mode, except instead of actually cutting out parts of objects, it just clips out the parts that the red line touches. So if we select this object, we can right-click it and choose Release Clip to get our original object back and its clipping path. This mode also allows us to erase parts of objects that can't be turned into paths, such as imported images. Okay, We can go ahead and delete this image and these objects over here. For the coffee bean, we want to first select it so that the eraser tool will only work on it and not the objects around it. Now let's switch to the eraser tool. We want to set the mode to cut out mode, have thinning, caps, and tremor set to zero, set mass to something high so we can get a smoother line, and make sure the break apart button is turned off. We'll probably also need to lower the width a bit. That should be good. Now let's create a wavy cut down the center of the ellipse. And by the way, if we undo with Ctrl Z, it will deselect everything. So to cut the ellipse again without affecting the other objects, we need to re-select it. We can do this easily by pressing the spacebar to switch to the select tool, select the ellipse, press the spacebar again to switch back to the eraser tool, and cut the ellipse. We can now go ahead and reset all these settings back to the defaults. Alright, to make it look the same on the right side of the logo, we can switch to the select tool and delete the center stroke on the right side, then select the coffee bean and the two stroke pieces here, click them again to get the rotation handles, snap the rotation center to the center of the logo, duplicate with Ctrl D, and press H to flip them horizontally. The last thing we need to create for our logo is a cup of coffee in the center. Let's start by switching to the circles and ellipses tool and creating an ellipse over here. Next we want to cut off the top half of the ellipse. To do this, let's switch to the pen tool, snap to this quadrant point, hold Ctrl and click over here outside the ellipse, bring it down not quite to the bottom of the ellipse, hold Ctrl and bring it over to this side and close it off. Now let's select the path and the ellipse and do an Intersection with Ctrl *. We can turn snapping back off now and resize the paths some if we want. Next, we can round the corners of this path a bit. To do this, we can use the Corners (Fillet/ Chamfer) path effect. To demonstrate how it works, let's create a rectangle over here. Let's turn it into a path with Shift Ctrl C, then, in the path effects dialog, click the + button, click Corners (Fillet/Chamfer) here. Okay, so by default, if we start changing the radius parameter in here, it will round all of the corners of the path. We can also switch to the node tool and round a single corner by dragging the handles near it. Or we can select multiple nodes and drag one of the handles to round all of the selected nodes. We also have some different mode options here at the bottom of the path effects dialog. The default is fillet, which lets us round the corners. We also have inverse fillet, which inverts the rounding. With chamfer mode, it will bevel the corners. We can change the number of steps that it uses with this chamfer steps parameter. Finally, inverse chamfer will give us an inverted result. Alright, we can delete this path now. And let's add the Corners path effect to the coffee cup. Let's switch to the node tool, select the top two nodes and round them using the handles. We can also select the bottom two nodes and round them a bit as well. Let's finalize the path effect by going to Path -> Object to Path. Next, let's cut out a part of this path on the left side so that the dark brown will show through some when we put the cup on the logo. For this, we can switch to the select tool and duplicate the path, make it any color, shrink it down a bit while holding Shift and Ctrl, duplicate again, make it another color, move it up and to the right a bit, select both of the smaller paths, and do a Difference with Ctrl -. Then we can hold Shift and select the big path and do a Difference again. Let's next add a plate at the bottom of the cup. Let's first switch to the squares and rectangles tool and create a long thin rectangle down here. Let's turn it into a path, switch to the node tool, select the two bottom nodes, toggle on the transformation handles with this button, hold Shift and drag in one of the scale handles. Now we can turn the transformation handles back off. We can also round the corners of the plate. Let's add the Corners path effect to it, select the two top nodes and use the handles to round them. Then do the same for the two bottom nodes. Let's finalize the path effect by going to Path -> Object to Path. Now let's switch to the select tool and move the plate up until it slightly overlaps the bottom of the cup. Then let's hold Shift and select the cup, open the align and distribute dialog and align them vertically. Next we can give the cup a handle. For this, we can switch to the circles and ellipses tool and create an ellipse here. Then switch to the select tool and rotate and resize the ellipse a bit. Now let's duplicate it with Ctrl D, make it a different color, scale it down while holding Shift and Ctrl, then select both ellipses and do a Difference with Ctrl -. Now let's select all of the cup parts and Union them with Ctrl +. The last thing we'll add is some steam coming up from the top of the cup to make it look like some hot coffee is inside it. For this, we'll use the Power Stroke path effect. To see how the Power Stroke path effect works, let's use the pen tool to create a path with some curves. Then let's add Power Stroke to it by switching to the path effects dialog, clicking the + button, and choosing Power Stroke. The easiest way to use Power Stroke is to switch the node tool. And now we see these purple diamond handles on the path. We can drag these in and out to change the width of the path at that point. And we can move them around. At the moment, we can move the handles past each other on the path, allowing us to create strokes like this. But if we uncheck the sort points parameter, now the handles won't pass each other on the path, giving us a different result. We can also change the interpolate type here, giving us different stroke appearances. If we choose either CubicBezierJohan, or CubicBezierSmooth, we can change the smoothness of it with this parameter. Another thing we can change is the appearance at the start of the path and at the end of the path. If we change one of these inner nodes to a cusp node, we can change the appearance where the two segments join at that node. Okay, we can delete this path now, and let's use Power Stroke to add some steam to our cup. For the steam, we can simply use the pen tool to create a wavy path here, add Power Stroke to it, switch to the node tool, and adjust the width and nodes a bit. Now we can switch to the select tool and put the path where we want it, duplicate it with Ctrl D, move it to the left and shrink it down a bit. Let's put one of these on the right side as well. Now we can select all three paths and Union them with Ctrl +, hold Shift and select the cup path, use the align and distribute dialog to align them vertically, then Union them with Ctrl +. Next, let's change the fill color to white, move it on to the logo, and resize and position it the way we want it. And we can hold Shift and select one of the circles and align them vertically. Now, let's select all of the logo objects and group them together with Ctrl G. One more thing we can do is give the logo a bit of a scratchy texture. For this, we'll use an imported texture image, along with the Trace Bitmap dialog and inverse clipping. First, let's go to File -> Import. For my texture, I'll use this paper image here. I've provided this image as a downloadable resource, but please feel free to use your own texture image if you'd like. Okay, let's go ahead and import the image. To open the Trace Bitmap dialog, Let's right-click the image and choose Trace Bitmap. I can't really see much of the texture in the preview at the moment, so I'm going to increase the threshold a bit. That should be good. I want it to be noticeable but not too crazy. Now I'll click Apply, move the tracing onto the logo, resize it a bit, then delete the image and close out the Trace Bitmap dialog. To do inverse clipping, we can select both the texture and the logo, then go to Object -> Clip -> Set Inverse Clip. As we learned in the previous lesson, clipping lets us use an object to hide parts of another object that are outside of it. Inverse clipping basically does the opposite, hiding the parts of the bottom object that are inside the clipping object. And inverse clipping is actually a path effect, as we can see if we switch to the path effects dialog. The object now has the Power Clip path effect attached to it. We can change it to normal clipping by unchecking inverse clip here. Okay, and that should pretty much do it for our coffee shop logo. Thank you for joining me in this lesson, and I'll see you the next one. 18. Watermelon with Reflection Overview: In this lesson, we'll draw a watermelon and give it a reflection. In the process, we'll learn how to use mesh gradients to create smooth transitions of colors across different points of an object and give it a more realistic look; we'll learn how to use masking and inverse masking; we'll learn how to use the spray tool to make quick copies of objects, as well as add variations to the copies; and we'll learn how to use the Jitter Nodes extension to give a rough, jagged look to paths. Alright, let's start up a new Inkscape document, and I'll see you in lesson. 19. Watermelon with Reflection: To begin, let's switch to the circles and ellipses tool with the E key and create a large ellipse. Now let's turn it into a path by going to Path -> Object to Path. Then we can switch to the node tool and add some more nodes if we want, to give it a more organic shape. For the color, Let's open the fill and stroke dialog and give it a dark green fill. Next we're going to give this object a mesh gradient. In the fill and stroke dialog under both the fill tab and the stroke paint tab, We have this button here that we can use to give an object a mesh gradient. To see how mesh gradients work, Let's create a shape over here. And let's give it a mesh gradient. Now by default, the top-left corner and bottom-right corner are both white, the bottom-left and top-right corners are the original fill color, and there's a gradient between the corners. To edit a mesh gradient, we use the mesh tool, located here. With the mesh tool active, we now see these four diamond shaped nodes at the corners. We can move these around. And we can change the color at each node. We can also select multiple nodes and move and change them together. We can adjust the curves of the segments between the nodes by dragging these circular handles, which change to arrows when we select them. In the controls bar, we have options for creating a new normal mesh gradient or a new conical mesh gradient, which we'll look at in a bit. And we can choose whether to apply the mesh to the fill or the stroke. Another thing we can do is change the number of rows and columns of the mesh. We currently have a one-by-one mesh, and to add rows, we can either change the value in the controls bar or simply double-click a vertical segment using the mesh tool. We now have more nodes to work with. To add columns, we can double-click horizontal segments. If we select a segment, we can click this button up here to turn it into a straight line segment, which will hide the handles. If we click the button again, the handles will reappear, allowing us to curve the segment. For conical mesh gradients, we can create another object, switch back to the mesh tool, select the conical mesh option here on the left, then double-click the object. Conical mesh gradients start at the center and move out. We also have multiple nodes at the center. Like what normal mesh gradients, we can add rows and columns by double-clicking segments. Okay, let's delete these objects, switch back to the mesh tool, choose the normal mesh option, and double-click our object here to give it a mesh gradient. First, we actually want to make all the nodes the same dark green for the moment. To do this, we can select one of the green nodes, double-click its RGBA value in the fill and stroke dialog, press Ctrl C to copy it, then select all the nodes, double-click the RGBA value again and press Ctrl V to paste. Next we want to adjust the node and curves of the mesh so that it follows along the path of the object a bit better. Let's go ahead and add a few more rows and columns. Next we can change the colors of some of the nodes, making some darker and some brighter. First I'm going to select the four bottom rows of nodes and make them a bit darker. And I'll make the second and third rows from the bottom even darker. I'm going to make the bottom row a bit brighter, so it looks like some light is bouncing onto it off the surface. Like with the node of paths, we can hold Shift and click node or drag a selection box over them to add them to the selection. I'll make the top a bit brighter as well. And the sides a bit darker. Now I'm just going to select some random nodes and make them either darker or brighter. We can adjust the node and curves some as well, so the colors don't look too uniform. Next, let's add some stripes along the watermelon. For this, we can switch to the squares and rectangles tool with the R key, and let's start with a center stripe by creating a long thin rectangle across the center of the watermelon. We want both sides of the rectangle to extend beyond the watermelon, as we'll be cutting the excess off later. For the color, let's make it brighter and more yellowish. And let's create a few more stripes. The next thing we want to do is give these stripes some jagged edges. To do this, we can use the Jitter Nodes extension. But in order for Jitter Nodes to work correctly, we need to add some more nodes to the rectangles. So first, let's select the top rectangle, turn it into a path by going to Path -> Object to Path, switch to the node tool, select all the nodes, and click the insert new nodes button a few times. Now let's switch to the select tool and go to Extensions -> Modify Path -> Jitter Nodes. Let's go ahead and check live preview. So what Jitter Nodes does is it randomly displaces the nodes of a path, giving it a rough, jagged look. We mainly want to have both shift nodes and shift node handles here checked. And we can play around with the displacement values here to increase or decrease the displacement at each axis. We can also check out some different distribution types here. I'll leave mine on uniform. Okay, when we like what we see, we can click Apply and close out the dialog. Next, we want to give a bend to this path so that it follows along the curvature of the watermelon. To do this, we can use the Bend path effect. To demonstrate the Bend path effect, let's create an object over here, then let's open the path effects dialog by going to Path -> Path Effects, click the + button at the bottom, and choose Bend here. To bend the object, we first have to click this edit on-canvas button in here. This gives us a green line across the center of the object. If we click and drag the line, we can bend the object. We can also move the nodes of the line around. And we can change the width of the object, either in the path effects dialog, or by dragging this diamond handle at the bottom left of the object. Another thing we can do is double-click the line to add a node. Okay, let's delete this object, select the stripe path and add the Bend path effect to it. Now we can click the edit on-canvas button and bend the path. Let's also move the nodes a bit closer to the center of the watermelon's sides. Now let's repeat all these steps for the remaining stripes. First we can select the next stripe, turn it into a path with the shortcut Shift Ctrl C, select all of the nodes with Ctrl A, and we can press the Insert key to add new nodes. Next, if we just want to use the same Jitter Nodes settings that we used for the first stripe, we can simply go to Extensions -> Previous Extension. Let's add the Bend path effect to it, click the edit on-canvas button and adjust the curvature and nodes. Let's repeat for the remaining stripes. Okay, now let's switch to the select tool with the S key, select all of the stripes, and Union them together with Ctrl +. To cut off the excess, we can select the watermelon and duplicate it with Ctrl D, hold Shift and select the stripe path and do an Intersection with Ctrl *. Next, we want to give a mesh gradient to the stripe path. But first we want to switch to the fill and stroke dialog and copy the RGBA value of the fill color. Now let's give it a mesh gradient, switch to the mesh tool, select all of the nodes and paste the copied RGBA value into the RGBA box. Okay, now let's make the mesh fit the path more closely. Next, let's add a few more rows and columns and adjust the colors. First, I'll make the bottom darker. I'll make the sides a bit darker as well. We're going to make it so it looks like a light is shining in from the top right. So let's select some of the nodes in this area and make them a bit brighter. Now I'll just select a few random nodes and make them either darker or brighter. Next, we can use the eraser tool to cut out some parts of the stripes. First, let's make sure we have the stripe path selected so that the eraser tool will only work on it, then switch to the eraser tool. For the settings, we want to put it on cutout mode, make the caps a bit rounded, and also make it a bit rough by adding some tremor. Now let's cut out some parts. Okay, now I'll reset all these settings back to the defaults. To finish up this part of the watermelon, let's add a highlight to the top right. For this, we can switch to the circles and ellipses tool and create an ellipse here. Let's make it white, then give it a radial gradient. Now we can switch to the select tool and adjust the size and rotation a bit. Let's lower the opacity a bit and also give it some blur. Now, when we blur it, it increases the size of it, making it extend beyond the watermelon. To hide the excess part, we can use clipping. So first let's select the watermelon and duplicate it with Ctrl D. And to easily select the highlight object that's under this, we can hold Alt and Shift and click in here to add it to the selection. Then let's right-click and choose Set Clip. Okay, let's next add a slice of watermelon here on the right. First, let's switch to the pen tool with the B key and create triangular path here. Let's turn off the stroke, and give it a red fill. Now let's switch to the node tool and curve the bottom segments a bit. I'll also move these top nodes up some more. Next, we're going to give this a mesh gradient. So first let's copy the RGBA value, give it a mesh gradient, switch to the mesh tool, select all the nodes and paste the copied RGBA value. Now let's adjust the nodes. Let's add some more rows and columns. We actually want a straight line going from this point down to this one. We also want to make it so these rows down here follow along the angle of this part of the path here. We next want to make the bottom of this green. To do this, we can first select the main watermelon path with the mesh tool, select one of the mesh nodes, copy its RGBA value, go back to the slice, select all of the bottom nodes, and paste the RGBA value. For the next row up, let's make it a pale yellowish color. Let's make the next row closer to white. We also want to make this left side here a bit closer to white. For this column going up through here, we want to make it kind of sharp and bright. To do this, we first need to add a couple of columns close to it on both sides. For the bottom center nodes, we want to select them individually and make them closer to white. Now we can select all of the red nodes and brighten them. We can brighten up some of the nodes down here to even out the colors a bit. We can also add a few darker spots to it. Next we can add a highlight to the top right, like we did with the whole watermelon. First let's switch to the circles and ellipses tool and create a white ellipse here. Let's give it a radial gradient, then we can adjust the opacity some, give it a blur, and adjust the gradient handles. Now let's switch to the select tool, duplicate the slice path, hold Shift and select the highlight, right-click and Set Clip. To finish up the watermelon slice, we can add some seeds to it. For this, we can use the spray tool, which is located here and has the shortcut A. With the spray tool, if we create one or more objects and have them selected, then switch to the spray tool, we can click and drag to create copies very quickly. In the controls bar, we can change things like the width of the tool. With a high amount setting, the tool will create many copies. And with a low amount setting, it'll create fewer copies. With rotation, which goes from 0% to 100%, we can add a random rotation to the copies. Scale, which also goes from 0 to 100%, lets us add a random scale factor to the copies. With a higher scatter and a larger width, the copies will be scattered around the area of the tool. With a smaller scatter, the copies will either stay near the center of the tool when focus here is low, or when focus is high, they will stay near the outer part of the tool. Let's set these back to the defaults. Next we have some toggle buttons. The open eye button here lets us spray on non-transparent areas. If we turn it off, we can't spray here. The closed eye button lets us spray on transparent areas, including the canvas. And turning it off will stop us from spraying on the canvas. The next button will prevent the copies from overlapping each other. With the next button, we can put an offset between the copies. Setting this to a number lower than 100 will allow the copies to overlap a bit. Finally, we have this eyedropper button, which gives us some options for affecting the colors of the copies. If we turn on this first new button and spray over some objects with colors, the fill color of the copies will either become the color at the center of the tool, when this button is toggled on, or, if we toggle this off, the copy colors will become an average of the colors inside the tool. This next button here will make the tool change the stroke color. But first we have to give the objects a stroke. The final button here will invert the chosen color. Okay, I'll go ahead and turn these back off now. Back over on the left of the controls bar, we have some different modes to choose from. The default is the duplicate mode, which creates duplicates of the selected objects. The next mode is the clone mode. This one will create clones of the objects. The difference between clones and duplicates is that clones are connected to the original objects. So if we re-size or change the colors of one of the original objects, its clones will also be affected. Another way to create clones of a selected object is by clicking this button in the commands bar. If we want to unlink a clone from the original object, we can select it and click this button. Now the object won't be affected by changes to the original object. Let's select these two objects again and go back to the spray tool. The next mode here will simply perform the Union path operation on all of the copies, making them a single path. And finally, delete mode here lets us delete copies. Alright, let's put this back on duplicate mode, then delete these objects. For the seed object we'll use on the watermelon, let's switch to the circles and ellipses tool and create a small ellipse. Let's turn off the stroke, make sure the opacity is at 100% and blur is at 0%, and let's make it a very dark red. Now let's switch to the spray tool. For the settings, we don't want to make too many copies in one area, so let's set amount to something low, like 20. Let's set rotation to 100% to randomly rotate the copies, and let's add a small scale factor, like 10%. We also don't want the copies to overlap, so we can toggle on this button to add an offset between them. Now let's zoom in on the slice them. And by the way, the width of the tool is independent of zoom. So zooming in and out is another way to change the width. Okay, let's go ahead and spray some seeds in here. I'm actually going to undo that and make the seed a bit smaller. Now I'm going to put these settings back on the defaults, switch to the select tool and adjust the positioning of some of these seeds a bit. We can also delete the original seed object now. Next we can give these objects a shadow. First, let's select everything and group it with Ctrl G, then let's switch to the circles and ellipses tool and create a long ellipse here at the bottom. Let's make it black and give it a radial gradient. Now we can adjust some things a bit. Let's switch to the select tool, de-select the ellipse and select it again, and let's lower the opacity some, and give it a blur. Then let's press pgdn to put it below the watermelon group. Next, let's give the watermelon group a reflection. For this, we can use masking. Masking is similar to clipping, but with the added feature of transparency. The closer to black the bottom object, or mask, is, the closer to transparent the clipped object will become, and the closer to white the mask is, the closer to opaque the clipped object will become. To see how it works, we can create an object over here, and let's go ahead and raise the opacity all the way up and make it a different color. Then create another object on top of it. Let's make this one a dark gray. To set the mask, we can switch to the select tool, select both objects and either right-click and choose Set Mask or go to Object -> Mask -> Set Mask. Now the bottom object has been clipped by the top object, but because the top object was close to black, the clipped object is also somewhat transparent. Like with clipping, we can go to the node tool and modify the original bottom object. And if we toggle on this button in the controls bar, we can modify the original top object. I'll go ahead and turn this back off. To release the mask, we can either right-click and choose Release Mask or go to Object -> Mask -> Release Mask. Now we have the original objects back. Also like with clipping, we can do inverse masking. To do this, we can go to Object -> Mask -> Set Inverse Mask. Like with inverse clipping, inverse masking is a path effect, as we can see if we switch to the path effects dialog. We can enable or disable the inverse masking with this checkbox. Okay, let's delete this. And let's use masking to add a reflection to the watermelon. First, let's select the watermelon group and duplicate it with Ctrl D, then let's press the V key to flip it vertically, hold Ctrl and bring it down here. Let's press the End key to send it to the bottom. For the reflection, we want to make it start out opaque at the top here, and get more and more transparent towards the bottom. To do this, we can use masking with a white to black gradient. First, let's switch to the squares and rectangles tool and create a rectangle covering the entire bottom watermelon group. Let's make it white, give it a linear gradient, move the first stop to the top, hold Ctrl and move the other stop to the bottom, raise the alpha channel all the way up and make it black. Now we can switch to the select tool, hold Alt and Shift and click in here to add the bottom watermelon group to the selection, then right-click and Set Mask. Finally, we can select everything and group it with Ctrl G. And our watermelon with a reflection is finished. Thank you very much for watching, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 20. Export Drawings: In this video, we'll learn how we can export our drawings and start using them outside of Inkscape. Let's start by creating some objects. To export our drawings, we use the export dialog, which we can open either by clicking this button in the commands bar or by going to File -> Export. The first tab we have in here is single image. With this, any parts of our drawing we export will be placed in a single image file. And our options are to export every object in our document, all the parts of our drawings that are inside the page, all the objects we have selected, or we can define a custom export area here. At the bottom here, we get a preview of what the exported image will look like. We get this for each of the export modes. As we can see in the page mode, the size of the exported image will be proportional to the size of the page, and any objects that aren't fully inside the page will have parts cut off. We also have this export selected only option here. When this is off, it will export all parts of the drawing that are within the export area, regardless of whether or not they are selected. If we check this, unselected objects won't be exported. Another thing with this is that if we switch to selection mode here, when this option is unchecked, it will export this part of the unselected object that is inside the selection box. If we check this, however, it won't export that part. In the image size section, which is available for every mode, we can see and set the exact pixel size of the exported image. This is helpful in case we make our objects too big or too small on the canvas and we want to make the exported image a different size without having to re-size the objects themselves. So if we want smaller images, for example, we can decrease the size of the width or height here. And notice that this also changed the other value by the same proportion. An easier way to do this is by changing the DPI value here. The default is 96. And if we want the image to be half the size as the area we're exporting, we can simply change the DPI to half of 96, which is 48. And because we're working with vector graphics, we don't have to worry about quality loss when changing the sizes. In the batch export tab, we can export multiple images at once. With selection mode, we can export each of the selected objects to separate images. With layers, we can export all objects inside each layer. And with pages, we can export all objects inside each page of our document. Creating multiple pages is a new feature of Inkscape version 1.2, and we can do so with the page tool here. At the bottom of the export dialog, we choose what format we want to export to. PNG is the default, but we have a few other options as well. We can also set a location and file name for the image here, then we can export. Okay, that's how we can export our documents. I'll go ahead and close out this dialog now, and I'll you see in the next video.