Inkscape Basic Course for Beginners

TARGET AUDIENCE:

Beginners with little to no experience in vector graphics software.

OBJECTIVES:

To provide participants with a comprehensive understanding of Inkscape's core functionalities and enable them to create and edit vector graphics for various purposes.

DURATION AND METHODOLOGY:

10 hours - in person in Trieste or online. Individual student-centred lessons full of examples and practical exercises, flexibility and customisation.

CONTENTS:

Introduction to Inkscape and vector graphics

• Vector graphics vs. raster graphics
• Introduction to Inkscape: Interface overview (Canvas, Toolbars, Menus, Dockers)
• Setting up your document (Page size, orientation, units)
• Inkscape's global settings
• Basic navigation: Zooming, Panning, Scrolling

Working with objects

• Shapes and paths
• Nodes and paths

Creating basic shapes

• Rectangle Tool: Creating squares and rectangles, rounded corners.
• Ellipse Tool: Creating circles and ellipses.
• Star and Polygon Tool: Creating stars, polygons, and customizing their properties (corners, spoke ratio, roundedness).
• Spiral Tool: Creating spirals and customizing their properties (divergence, inner radius).

Selection and transformation

• Selection Tool: Selecting single and multiple objects.
• Transformations: Moving, Scaling, Rotating, Skewing objects.
• Grouping and Ungrouping objects.
• Align and Distribute Docker: Arranging objects precisely.

Colours and gradients - Colour Palettes, Fill & Stroke, Gradients

• Understanding Fill and Stroke basics: applying colours, gradients and patterns to objects.
• Basic understanding of color palettes and swatches.
• Stroke style: Width, dashes, markers, join types, cap types.
• Creating and using gradients.
• Using the Dropper Tool to pick colours.

Object Operations

• Duplicating, cloning objects.
• Boolean Operations (Pathfinder equivalents): Union, Difference, Intersection, Exclusion, Division.
• Clipping and masking.

Introduction to Paths & Node Tool

• What are Paths? Bézier curves explained.
• Pen Tool (Bézier Tool): Creating straight lines, curved lines, corner nodes, smooth nodes, symmetric nodes.
• Node Tool: Selecting and manipulating nodes, converting segment types (line to curve and vice versa), adding/deleting nodes, breaking paths, joining paths.
• Converting Shapes to Paths.
• Using the Calligraphy Tool for freehand drawing with variable width.

Text - Working with text

• Text Tool: Creating and editing artistic text and text frames.
• Font selection, size, style.
• Kerning, Spacing (Tracking), Line Spacing.
• Putting Text on a path.

Layers, Filters, and Extensions

• Layers Docker: Organizing your artwork with layers (creating, naming, locking, hiding, reordering).
• Introduction to Filters: Blurs, Shadows, Textures (use sparingly, can be resource-intensive).
• Brief overview of Extensions (e.g., generating grids, QR codes).

Preparing and exporting

• Short overview of file formats.
• Saving in SVG format.
• Exporting PNG and JPEG images: Exporting the page, selection, or custom area. Understanding resolution (DPI).