These images may be used for print, web design, social media, game characters, animation frames, and so forth. The skills acquired learning Inkscape will be useful even if you eventually transition to another vector graphics program such as Adobe Illustrator or Corel Draw. The core functionality of all these programs is quite similar. Inkscape works on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, and it's free. The course videos use version 0.92 of the software, but if you have a prior or more recent version, you should be fine. Inkscape is very slow to make significant changes. The basic interface has remained the same for many years. Updated 05/2020 to include information about the new version, Inkscape 1. There's also a lot of help and a thriving community online, if you get hooked and want to know more.Inkscape changes very slowly, and the interface remains nearly identical in version 1.Inkscape: Guide to a Vector Drawing Program, Fourth Edition, is the guide to the Inkscape program. Hopefully that's tempted you to download this application and play with it. If you've played Flash games on a website, you've seen vector graphics in action, and you might have already discovered that you can make downloaded Flash games bigger. You've probably seen vector graphics without even realizing it: Adobe Flash, the most common way to show animations in a web browser, uses them. Just math, telling the computer application how the bits all relate to each other. As you scale it up, the computer does the math and draws everything bigger, but not fuzzier, because there are no dots. The design can be any size, as big or as small as you like, and the quality stays the same regardless. Think of it not as a photo or a painting, but as a set of instructions. Everything needed to reproduce the design is there, but at no specific size. When you draw your vector art on the computer screen, what's stored is the math behind the drawing, not the drawing itself. In fact, it's not even an image, it's a text file, written in a code called XML, which describes the relationships of all the objects in the design to each other. Blow it up again after shrinking it down, and it looks like a Lego toy, because once you've lost detail, you can't get it back.Ī vector graphic, though, isn't graphical at all - it's mathematical, and it's not even in color. Shrink it down enough, and the fine details get lost. Blow it up, and the quality gets far worse, because the dots get bigger too. The size of this pattern is fixed, with a set number of dots, or pixels, occupying a set space and relationship to the rest. If you're curious about vector graphics, this is probably not the place for a long explanation but the short one goes like this: bitmap graphics such as JPG and BMP files are made up of numbers that represent a pattern of dots, or pixels. And it's not hard to convert vector graphics into bitmaps, though after that, they become just as inflexible as bitmap files too. Thanks, guys.īTW this is a format which is now read natively by all the major web browsers except (of course) Internet Explorer, but there's a plug-in for that now, too. It's a constant amazement to see what spare-time coders and designers give away for free, and a privilege to be able to use apps like this without having to install bloatware and be charged over the top for it. So don't be put off by the masses of menus and buttons, start drawing basic shapes and just mess around for a while until you're hooked enough on the vector graphic style to want to learn more. If you've done even the smallest amount of drawing with a vector art application, or even just toyed with the pen tool in Photoshop or similar bitmap art and photo apps, there's not much of a learning curve here and you can pretty much dive in and play with it straight away. Perfect for learning how to use vector graphics, and easily capable of producing professional work if you are, so don't overlook it just because you don't have to spend $400 on it.Īll the basics are here, including bezier curve drawing, manipulating shapes and colors, freehand line drawing and painting and all the basic vector graphic tools. An under-promoted open source alternative to Adobe Illustrator, lacking some of the power tools, but being open source, it's entirely free.
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