Inkscape tutorials

Hey everyone feeling good today? With a smiley face in my list of Inkscape creations I felt that I was ready to attempt some of the tutorials I found on the internet. After googling I found this website http://inkscapetutorials.wordpress.com//. I was glad to have found this website because it is full of tutorials which should help me learn this program quickly and the less time I spend on learning the software the more time I can spend on using the software. The easiest tutorial I could fine was called 'Illustrating Chain Links' (which can be found here: http://kalaalog.com/2008/06/22/illustrating-chain-links/).

Once I actually looked at the tutorial I found out that it was in fact not an easy tutorial but rather an intermediate one (Highlighted above in the screenshot). So I thought might as well go straight into the deep end and hope that I won't drown. Reading the tutorial I came up against some things I had never heard of before in regards to Inkscape. The first example of this was the use of 'Guides'. After some looking around in the program I found that under the 'View' drop down menu there was a button called 'Grid'. I clicked it and as the name suggested there was now a grid over my work. Also right below the 'Grid' button there was a button called 'Guides'. I thought I had found what the tutorial was talking about and clicked it with haste. I was then disappointed to find that it did nothing. I clicked it several more times and still nothing happened. So I thought that I must be doing something wrong. I placed my mouse upon the button and a tool tip came up (at the bottom of the screen in a rectangle that normally states 'No object selected.') saying, "Show or hide guides (drag from ruler to create guide)." Luckily and thanks to the creators of Inkscape I know found out how to create guides. So now being able to make guides my document ended up looking like this.

Now with my guides in place I could now begin drawing the shapes I needed. The first shape I needed was a rectangle with curved corners. At first I thought this would have been really hard but it turns out it was not very difficult at all. The curved corners looked like this.

The blog entry about the chain link tutorial will be stopped for a little bit here in order to provide a photo tutorial on how I got the nice and even rounded corners.


Start off by drawing your desired length of straight line

Then where you want your curve to be, hold the left button until your red line is curved and a straight blue line appears

Then with your left mouse button still held place your cursor two blocks <- that way

This should be your end product. To make a square just do this four times but you need to do it with one line (so don't push enter after each curve)

This concludes the tutorial of how to draw a curved corner.

Before I did anything else I changed my curved square a bit by making the inner square a bit smaller.

At this point I was all excited and happy with what I had done and I thought that I would be able to finish it with ease. I was wrong. I got stuck when the tutorial asked me to use the 'Difference' button from under the 'Path' drop down menu. I clicked this and nothing happened. So I decided that I might attempt some easier tutorials before tackling this one again.