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 (
)
The most important setting to get correct here is the ”thinning” set it to about 0.30
Now, draw your ”woodgrain” pattern. (make sure you only draw 1 line with the calligraphy tool to create this pattern.)
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.
All that is left is to play with colours and various after-effects:
chrisdesign has used this technique in creating his drawings of “Gibson” guitars.
(yes, these images are for real, fully drawn by chris using inkscape…)


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




May 31, 2007 at 7:12 pm
way cool, i’m always on the lookout for vector tutorials and yours are neat.
dared to add you to my blogroll
June 1, 2007 at 9:10 pm
thanks for liking them, and thanks for the blogroll link! its greatly appreciated!
June 2, 2007 at 3:57 am
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?
June 2, 2007 at 8:37 am
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…
June 2, 2007 at 11:38 pm
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
June 3, 2007 at 4:17 pm
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
June 4, 2007 at 10:23 pm
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.
June 19, 2007 at 8:53 am
[...] view this tutorial [...]
September 20, 2007 at 12:27 am
Hello there!
. Have fun !
If you want an real brushed steel effect watch this:
http://wiki.inkscape-forum.de/tutorials:holzstrukturen_erzeugen
Its very easy too.
December 27, 2007 at 6:30 am
[...] Et.. un quatrième Blog dans la langue de Shakespear : http://ryanler.wordpress.com [...]
April 18, 2008 at 5:25 pm
trop cool….
April 18, 2008 at 5:37 pm
you have a similare tutorial for textile effect ?