Inkscape Hands-on Class 02: Whale Logo

1. Introduction: Hi, I'm Brandon and welcome to the Inkscape hands-on series of lessons. In this series, we're using entirely hands-on project-based approach to learn how to create stunning digital art with Inkscape, a powerful, free and open-source vector graphics editor. In the second lesson of the series, or create a logo with a whale and some waves. And the process will learn about another type of object that we can create an escape code paths and how we can create them with the pen tool and modify them with the node tool and path operations will 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. Alright, if you're ready to begin, go ahead and load Inkscape and start up a new document. And I'll see you in lesson. 2. 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.