how to do mandalas in inkscape tutorials

With your outlines layer locked and the color layers selected, click on any of the colors along the bottom of the screen and try the paint bucket tool on part of your drawing. Right now it doesn’t matter what the color is set to, I just want something other than black so I can see the difference. For my drawing that is probably the skin or shirt color. Think of your colors as a stack of paper cutouts and decide which one would be on the bottom. The parts you should color first are those that would appear behind any other colors. That’s the one that looks like a tipped over can of paint. The easiest way to color a drawing is with the paint bucket tool. Now click on the lock icon for the outlines layer so we don’t make any more changes to it, and if you’d like to you can delete you pencil sketch layer since we don’t need that any more. Name it colors and this time set the position to below current. In the layers panel (Control + Shift + L to open) click the create new layer button with the outline layer selected.

Lets make another layer underneath our outlines layer for our colors to live on. Grouping is nice because you can un-group at any time, but union makes fine tuning our lines easier.īut enough about lines, we’re here to talk about color.

The downside is that union can’t be undone later. This is great because it gives us better control over parts of the drawing that used to have overlapping lines. Unlike grouping, the union command will meld all of your lines together so that your outline becomes one object. Then I said, “Inkscape please, do you have to say that every time I group something together?” Looks just like grouping, doesn’t it? When we grouped our lines, Inkscape said, “oh! These lines are buddies now, so they should stick together inside of this nice little box I made for them.” You could do this the way we did before by selecting all of the lines (Ctrl + A) and grouping them (Ctrl + G), but you already know that trick, so lets learn a new one! This time, select all of your lines and choose “Path” then “Union” from the menu at the top. If you don’t have an inked drawing to work with, you might want to read the tutorial on inking in Inkscape first.īefore we start coloring, I recommend grouping all of the lines together. Open up you graphic in Inkscape and lets get started. In this tutorial I’ll show you two methods that I like.

There are many ways to approach coloring in Inkscape.

How to do mandalas in inkscape tutorials