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Basic Inkscape Vector Drawing
By Stephen Bucaro
Unlike a paint program, a vector drawing program allows you to create and
edit drawings by using your mouse to select and drag points on geometric objects
in the image. Another advantage of vector graphics is that you can resize the
image over a wide range without the loss of quality experienced when you try to
resize a bitmaped image.
Inkscape is a free Open Source vector graphics illustration application. It
supports features like shapes, paths, text, text-on-path, flowed text, transforms,
layers, gradients, gaussian blur, alpha blending, bitmap tracing, and much more.
Inkscape saves the file in the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file
format, and can import and export several other formats (EPS, PNG).
Inkscape comes in versions for Microsoft Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and other
operating systems. It can be downloaded for free from the Inkscape website. In
this article you'll learn how to use Inkscape's vector drawing tools. We'll
focus on the bezier curve tool and use it to create a simple drawing of a cartoon cat.
Drawing Tools
Inkscape provides tools for drawing standard shapes like rectangles and
squares, circles ellipses and arcs, and stars and polygons. In this article,
we'll focus on the tools for drawing paths. A path is basically a straight or
curved line, or line containing a combination of straight and curved parts. The
path drawing tools are the Freehand tool, the Calligraphic tool,
and the Bezier tool.
The Freehand tool is selected by clicking on the toolbar's "pencil"
icon. To start a freehand path, press the mouse button in the drawing area to
start your path, while holding down the mouse button drag the mouse to create
the desired shape, double click to end the path. While the path is still
selected, select the toolbar's Node tool.
Clicking on the Node tool will cause the path's nodes to become visible.
Click on one of the nodes and that node's control handles will become visible.
Use the mouse to drag a node, or to move a control handle to reshape the path.
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