Well, folks! Hope you are all ready to get moving on our project! For those of you who are just joining us, you may want to read Part 1 and Part 2 in this fabric development series first.
Today is the day that we transfer our “sketch” to our vector art program, Inkscape. First you will want to take a picture of your sketch with your digital camera and upload it to your computer. Don’t worry if it isn’t perfect, it will only be a guide for you anyway. This time I’m going to use this inspiration lion sketch from my niece Lilly Hannah. I just love this lion.
Open your program and the first thing you will want to do is to maximize your space and on the top bar there is a button that says “zoom to fit page in window.” Do that. Now you have your fresh canvas before you.
Here is a view of your bar you will see. Your artwork will be a bit to the right of that. You are now going to import your image. (If you choose to simply sketch right into the art program, you can ignore all of these steps.)
Click on FILE then IMPORT and find your digital print on your computer. It will probably be very large and you’ll need to shrink it down to fit your page. There is another awesome button on the top bar that says “zoom to fit selection in window” when you mouse over it. Click on that and your art will fill your page.
Click directly on your art and you will see arrows on the four corners. You want to shrink your art so it will fit on your page. Do not simply grab the corner arrow and make it smaller—it will get smaller but you will mess up the aspect ratio. Hold down the CTRL (control) button while you shrink your image from the corner. This keeps everything in place. Get your image situated on the page.
There are a lot of ways that people use art programs to make their shapes and I’m in no way saying that mine is best. In this post I am focusing on the raw tools on the left hand side of the bar for a beginner to begin.
NOTE: There is a cool feature that traces bitmaps and cleans them up in this program, but it’s a bit more complicated so I’m just going to start with the basics.
With this sketch I want to get a raw feeling then clean it up a bit, so with that in mind I am going to use the pencil. Think of the sketch like your template and remember that everything can get cleaned up. Click on the pencil on the left side. Trace your first shape with your pencil. It is important to start and finish your shape in one stroke. Otherwise, you will have a bunch of separate “line shapes” that will come apart on you. When you finish the shape, the little starting box will turn red. Don’t worry if you mess up. You can always click on it and delete it.
- This program is about SHAPES not lines
- Once you get the hang of that, you’ll be fine.
Looks kind of funny, doesn’t it? I filled in my tracing with a color so that you could see it better. I’ll show you how to fill shapes in later.
Now, each shape that you draw can be moved around at this point of time. Before I clean anything up, I’m going to make all my shapes then put them together. Click on the one you just drew and move it out of the way. Finish all of your shapes by drawing them just like the first one. To switch from drawing with your pencil to moving your shape you will need to click on the top arrow on the left-hand side bar.
Look pretty bad? I know! It does. To help with this demonstration I have colored in all my shapes. This is very easy to do and you can do this as well. Simply click on the shape that you would like to fill with your arrow (top arrow button) then click on the color you want. Done.
You should fiddle with the shapes on the left-hand tool bar—especially if your design has a more structured shape. The circle and the square buttons are fun. I’m going to use the circle to make the nose and the eye shape. (Don’t forget to use the CONTROL button if you want your circle to stay a circle. Otherwise it will turn into an oval!)
Here I am working on the eye and I wanted the center to become an oval. The problem is that I want to twist it around a bit so it’s more side-ways. To move your objects around click on it and the arrows will change to this:
Now you can turn it by the corner “turning arrow.”
I’m going to duplicate this eye and make the duplicate smaller to fit inside my first eye. To do this, right click and scroll down to “duplicate.” You’ll need to grab your “moving arrow” once more and move the newly duplicated eye off of the first one. Here we have two ovals--a blue one on the bottom and a rotated black one on top.
I know, I know. Freaky looking. Please bear with me, we will get somewhere good, I promise!!!
Cleaning Up Your Shapes
Finally! Time to clean up and see if we came up with anything decent. Let’s put all your shapes together on top of your sketch.
If your shapes aren’t falling in the layer you would like them to, get to know your “layer buttons.”
Think of each of your shapes as a separate layer. It can be moved up and down according to your design needs. For me, it wouldn’t make sense to have the yellow lion layer on top because it would cover my beautiful lion mane!
When you click on any of your shapes you may notice this second row of options pop up underneath our top layer. The arrows are pretty self-explanatory, but click on one of your layers (or shapes) and it will move up or down according to the picture on the button. Play around with them and see what I mean.
I know that the very important detail work to this lion is currently missing, but I’m going to clean up my existing shapes first. I’m going to click on my sketch and move it to the side.
Wow. Now that’s raw talent right here. Hee hee. I have some work ahead of me!
First I’m going to bring my main yellow shape to the top and work on that. To smooth out this shape click in the toolbox on the arrow pointing at the nodes right under the main arrow you’ve been using up to this point. 
This is what your shape will look like:
Believe it or not, each of these nodes can be moved and shaped. The reason my image looks so jerky is because IT IS! I want to get rid of all except the necessary nodes to make my shape. To do this, go to PATH then SIMPLIFY. As this removes nodes, your shape will get smoother and smoother. You can continue to do this until you get to a point you are happy with. An easier way to do the same thing is: [CTRL+L].
Now it’s time to play. Move your nodes, change your shapes so they look like how you would like them to be. Delete more nodes and if you get to the point where you feel like you messed up and shouldn’t have deleted that last one, just click on [EDIT then UNDO] or CTRL+Z. They do the same thing. Right now I’m happy with this shape. The cool thing is, I can always change it later if I change my mind.
Do each of your shapes and bring them together. Let’s see how they look:
It’s slowly coming together! Are you having fun yet? I’m going to mess around and add some details to this ferocious lion.
Well, like anything, you could tweak it forever. These aren’t necessarily the colors I would pick either, but you get the idea. One more thing I’d like to let you know is how to outline your shapes. Click on your shape and go to: [OBJECT] then [FILL AND STROKE]. This is what you will see:
Mess around with this tool, it’s really cool. If you want a solid line make sure that the “FILL” is solid and the “STROKE STYLE” is set to a solid line. You can make your line as thin or thick as you like. Mess around with all sorts of features here. It’s pretty fun.
PUTTING YOUR PIECES TOGETHER!
Last but not least, you can put your pieces together. They don’t need to be floating out there separate all the time. In fact you can do this at any time with just a couple pieces or a whole group. It makes things easier to move around and duplicate. Take your main arrow and click down and drag a box around all the pieces you would like to join. I’m going to join all of my pieces so it looks like this:
Once your image is selected go to OBJECT then GROUP and your image is one solid piece. If you ever want to take it apart, you select your image then go to OBJECT / UNGROUP.
We have now officially taken a sketch and made it into a .svg image using our basic tools on Inkscape. I want you to know that we’ve barely touched the surface of this amazing program, but I wanted to give you a starting point from which to work. I would encourage you to watch some tutorials and just PLAY PLAY PLAY! That’s the fun part and soon you’ll be putting things together and making things that are difficult to put onto paper.
What Comes Next?
The next part in this series will continue along the lines of design development. Now that we have some basic tools with which to work, we will continue with our design and explore color options. I’m going to return to my “Lilly Bird” design that I started working on in Part 1.
And now, I’ll leave you with “The ferocious lion teaser!”
Love, Rachel