Inkscape For Beginners - Drawing Flower

This is a beginner's Inkscape tutorial showing you how  easy it is to make the flower shown here.  There is no prior experience necessary, the goal of this tutorial is to get you familiar with some of the tools of Inkscape and how they can be used in the creation of graphics.

So let's get started!


 1. .Let's start with the star tool in the side toolbar, set it to have 8 points. Click anywhere in the white area and drag the mouse while holding down the left mouse button:

2. If you end up with a border, remove  it by going down to the color palette and right click on the "Stroke" color bar on the bottom left of  Inkscape, choose Remove stroke from the pop up menu:

3. If you want to change the star's color click on a color in the color palette:

4. With the Node tool click on the star. Go to the Path menu and select Object to Path:

 5. You now see nodes on all the inner corners and on the points of the star, click a node on a point, when the node turns blue it means that it is selected. While holding down the Shift key click all the nodes on the pointy ends of the star so that they become selected:

 6. Click the "make nodes smooth" button near the top of Inkscape to make the points rounded:

7. Ah now it's starting to look more like a flower. Click the Selection tool from the side toolbar. You should see the flower enclosed in a box with arrows, if it isn't click on the flower with the selection tool:

 

8.  While the flower is selected, make a duplicate by pressing Ctrl and D on your keyboard. The duplicate will be on top of the original. While the duplicate is selected, click on it, the corner arrows become curved. Click and hold down left mouse button on one of the rounded arrows while at the same time holding down the Ctrl key, rotate the flower slightly:

9.  Click outside on the white space to deselect. Now select both the original and duplicate by clicking on the white space and drag the mouse until the flower is surrounded by a rectangle, then release mouse button. Go up to the Path menu and choose Union:

 10. The duplicate and the original are now one image. With the image selected press Ctrl + D on your keyboard to make a duplicate. Go down to the color palette and pick a color. While the duplicate is still selected hold down the left mouse button on a corner arrow and move inward to make the duplicate smaller. If you press down on Ctrl + Shift while you're doing this, it will preserve the proportions of the duplicate  and keep it centered with the image underneath:

11. Select the Ellipse tool from the toolbar and make a small circle on the smaller image while pressing the Ctrl key to form a perfect circle:

12.  To position the circle exactly in the middle, select the circle by clicking on it with the Selection tool, and while pressing down the Shift key select the image directly below the circle as well:

 With both objects selected, access the Align and Distribute dialog box either from  the Object menu. In the dialog box click the "Center on vertical axis" button  as shown in the illustration:

And we are done! Now that was easy, wasn't it.