inkscape: create a woodgrain effect

The following tutorial is the engish version of the tutorial written by chrisdesign published by him (coco) on inkscape-forum.de. There is also a Portuguese translation of the tutorial on the inkscapebrasil forum.

This is a very quick and easy tutorial.

First, choose the calligraphy tool (draw_calligraphic.png)

The most important setting to get correct here is the ”thinning” set it to about 0.30

wood4.png

Now, draw your ”woodgrain” pattern. (make sure you only draw 1 line with the calligraphy tool to create this pattern.)

wood1.png

Now, draw a rectangle of your background colour, and duplicate the rectangle (rightclick>duplicate)
Select one of the rectangles and the woodgrain pattern, and choose path>intersection.
You should end up with one path of woodgrain and one of background colour.

wood2.png

All that is left is to play with colours and various after-effects:

wood3.png

chrisdesign has used this technique in creating his drawings of “Gibson” guitars.
(yes, these images are for real, fully drawn by chris using inkscape…)

flametop-foto.jpg

flametop-foto.jpg
Chris has also done another tutorial in this series, where he uses this same tecnique to create a brushed steel effect, so keep your eyes peeled for that one…

Links and Resources:
http://twiki.softwarelivre.org/bin/view/InkscapeBrasil/TutorialTexturaDeMadeira 

http://www.grafikdesign-chris.de/

http://www.inkscape-forum.de/ 

12 Responses to “inkscape: create a woodgrain effect”

  1. Great Cornholio Says:

    way cool, i’m always on the lookout for vector tutorials and yours are neat.

    dared to add you to my blogroll ;-)

  2. ry Says:

    thanks for liking them, and thanks for the blogroll link! its greatly appreciated!

  3. Will Says:

    When I “…Select one of the rectangles and the woodgrain pattern, and choose path>intersection” both disappear. This seems so simple yet it isn’t working for me? Ideas?

  4. ry Says:

    hi will,

    i have so idea from here, if you post a SVG file of before your intersection action and another of your result, ill have a squiz to see whats going on…

  5. Will Says:

    ry,
    Here are links to the before.svg and after.svg. All I do is select the woodgrain then the background then Path->Intersection??

    http://willsimpson.org/temp/before.svg
    http://willsimpson.org/temp/after.svg

  6. ry Says:

    yeah will, you have to make sure that the calligraphy line is over the top of the rectangle… (layered on top of each other… ;)

    have a read of the inkscape tutorial - “advanced tutorial” and go to the section about the boolean operations…

    hope this helps

    :P

  7. Will Says:

    ry, thanks. This tutorial works for me now. I just didn’t see the part where I was supposed to overlay the wood grain over the background.

    Thanks for the tip about the advanced tutorial, I’ll have a look.

  8. create a woodgrain effect « the inkscape tutorials blog Says:

    [...]  view this tutorial [...]

  9. Coco Says:

    Hello there!
    If you want an real brushed steel effect watch this:
    http://wiki.inkscape-forum.de/tutorials:holzstrukturen_erzeugen
    Its very easy too. :-P . Have fun !

  10. MikaelKA » Blog Archive » Petit tour des tutoriaux inkscape Says:

    [...] Et.. un quatrième Blog dans la langue de Shakespear : http://ryanler.wordpress.com [...]

  11. Skippy Says:

    trop cool….

  12. Skippy Says:

    you have a similare tutorial for textile effect ?

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