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| Inkscape - continued | ||||
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Drawing a Car |
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| Anyone familiar with CorelDraw should feel right at home with the Inkscape interface. Although not quite as powerful as CorelDraw, the price was right. | ||||
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Here is my car so far. Inkscape does a pretty good job of closing up 'containers'. Some of my lines have crossed over each other, yet the paint bucket tool still recognizes the separate entities. You will see what I mean shortly. | |||
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Select the Fill Bounded Areas button. The cursor turns into a paint bucket icon  . The selected object will take on the currently selected color.
You can select a color from the swatches along the bottom of the screen or from the Fill and Stroke Window. |
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Make sure that you have the correct item selected for painting. Use the Select and Transform  tool to select the part you want to paint. |
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Go to Object on the menu bar and select Fill and Stroke... to bring up the Fill and Stroke Palette. | |||
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You can adjust the width and color of the Stroke outline of each section of the object.
You can choose various color conventions:
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I have painted all the main areas and adjusted the outline stroke color and width.
Now, to add a bit of realism. |
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Using the Create and Edit Gradients tool  click slightly below the car body and drag upward to slightly above the roofline as shown to the left. Click the cursor in the small box at bottom. In the Fill and Stroke Palette choose a shade of color darker that the desired color of your car. Next, click on the top box and select the desired color of your car. You can experiment with the blending and shading by clicking and dragging either end of the line to other locations.
Do the same for the windows and other components of the car. Temporarily lock this layer. Click on the eye icon to turn off the layer's visibility as well. |
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Add a new layer. If the Layers Palette is still open, just click on the + symbol, otherwise go to Layer on the menu bar and select Add Layer.
Use the Draw Bezier curves tool to draw a shape as shown. This will be used as a shadow to fill in the white spaces in the wheel wells. Color this object black or dark gray. Turn on the car layer's visibility. Use the green arrows to move the shadow layer to behind the car layer. |
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To add an interesting touch I prepared a gif image of a tire and wheel. I gave it a transparent background.
Create a new layer and name it "wheels". Go to File --> Import to import the image. To resize proportionally hold down the Ctrl key while dragging one of the corner re-sizing handles. Move the image into place and copy and paste for the second tire. You can use the arrow keys to more precisely place the images.
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Here is the car with the blueprint layer turned off.
For a finished effect, import a background image. Move the background image to the back layer. |
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Here I am cruising into the sunset. |
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