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I’ve made a selection of brochure templates in Inkscape that you can download here for free! They’re based on an A4 page so are ideal for home printing.

How to use:

• Download the zip file for the brochure template you want to use. Each contains two parts – one svg file for the front and one for the back of your page.
• Open it up in Inkscape.
• Open the Layers menu (Shift + Ctrl + L), select the layer “Artwork” and start working there. A second layer above called “Guidelines” will show you the boarders/folding lines and orientation (some will require your artwork to be flipped upside down) as well as outlines of each page of your brochure. It will sit on top of your drawing until you hide it. The panels are numbered in order of how they appear on the finished brochure.
• Hide the layer “Guidelines” before printing.

Tips:

• Some printers can’t print edge-to-edge so check your printer manual and make your artwork with the necessary borders.
• When printing from Inkscape choose “Print to File” and open up your image as a PDF in your favourite PDF viewer.
• Make sure the “Scale to Fit” option is not selected in the print dialogue.
• I have included Inkscape guidelines (the blue or red lines crisscrossing the page). These are useful for snapping objects to and will help you align things but don’t show up in printed or exported artwork. If you don’t like them it’s easy to turn them off. Go to File>Document Properties>Guides and un-tick “Show Guides”.

About the 8 Page Stapled Brochure Template…
I made this template because I wanted to produce a short hair dyeing guide for my customers at my day job but didn’t want to have the expense of going to a print shop for such a short run. With this one you have 8 pages which are made up of 4 quarters of a A4 page front and back. Basically you fold the page in half and then half again before stapling and cutting.

Because of the way it’s folded you’re going to have 4 pages which need to be printed upside-down – pages 1 2, 7 & 8. The easiest thing to do is to make these parts as normal, select object which will appear on the page and then group them (Ctrl + G), then flip vertically (when selected press V or go to Object>Flip Vertically). Don’t rotate by 180° instead of flipping vertically as this will cause you problems if you try doing 2 panels at the same time.

You’ll also notice on the “Guidelines” layer that as well as the 2 fold lines, running top to bottom and left to right, that there are also dotted lines and two bonus rectangles in part 1. If you’ve already finished your brochure and printed it out you’ll probably have guessed the dotted line is where your guillotine will come in handy. You’ll need to cut off the edge of the fold to free up the pages. The extra rectangles in the top portion are guidelines on where to staple. I recommend stapling before cutting.

Downloads:

8 Page Booklet Template

Accordion Brochure Template for Inkscape

Gate-fold Brochure Template

Trifold Brochure Template

Not particularly happy with how this turned out. Usually I draw everything from scratch in Inkscape but today I decided to see how tracing a hand drawn image would turn out. I can’t say I like the results much. I’ll have to keep playing with it.

Here’s the original line drawing:

Hand drawn and scanned image

And here’s how it looks scanned and bucket filled:

After tracing the lines to paths

I don’t think it’s just the bucket fill causing it to loose definition. Needs a bit more work to look less mushroomy.

Today’s offering is a new pattern I’ve designed to get printed on fabric. It started as a one of those annoying ideas that flashes in your head when you’re just falling asleep and makes you get out of bed to make notes.

Pattern repeated

It was drawn as a vector graphic but I gave up on finding a clever way to chop up the longer stem to spread across top and bottom. I tried cutting the path but it messed with the dotted stroke on the objects. In the end I made it into a raster for chopping up and then applied the texture (a vector) over the top before exporting. Not sure if that is the most efficient way of doing things but it worked.

I’m a bit late to the party in that I’ve just discovered SpoonFlower. It’s a site where you can upload your designs and print them onto cotton or crepe de Chine. There’s also an option to allow other people to order fabric in your designs and receive a cut of the profits. Nice!

The only downside for me is that it’s based in the USA so there are additional postage costs and waiting times as well as potential customs charges but it still works out significantly cheaper than it’s closest UK equivalent The Fabric Press – $20/£12.50 per yard vs £37 per metre.

This discovery just happened to coincide with a new fascination in pattern making and I found myself designing one. Could I do something simple and easy to tile? No. Instead I decided I wanted to make a seamless geometric pattern.

Using Inkscape and my best geometry I came up with this design which I pretty much pinched from this carved dude I met in Japan.

Wooden guardian at Todai-ji whose armour I copied the pattern from

Close up of the carved statue showing the star pattern

Figuring out how the pattern would repeat nearly melted my brain but in the end I came up with this:

This is the basic pattern before repeating

The pattern repeats like so:

The basic pattern seamlessly repeated

This took me a couple of hours to perfect. It was really difficult to get it seamless in Inkscape, firstly because the paths I used were not snapping to my guidelines exactly (turns out I needed to make the nodes corner nodes), and secondly because Inkscape’s anti-aliasing makes it more or less impossible. I tried the XML editor trick as outlined here (thanks Rich) but the tolerances on this drawing made it impossible to get just right.  I needed a little help from another program to make it seamless unfortunately.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, I made you some tutorials on using Inkscape.

Anyway, to get back to my original topic…
The idea is to get this design printed up to make a Tenugui for when Tony gets his Kendo armour… but what to do with the leftover material? I’ll report back when I order the stuff.

Reviving this blog for the second time now I’ve decided to start posting again.

The plan is to try and make something a day and post it up here. I already know I won’t keep up with it because I’ll be away next week but it’s something to work towards anyway.

The chore that is re-skinning a wordpress theme is high on my priority list. I hate it so much but who wants an ugly blog? I’m also going to try to draw more stuff and continue with the vector graphics tutorials. Posting the occasional photo might count towards my make-something-a-day idea if I’m feeling lazy.

Today I made a blog post.

I had a go at making a panorama. Shame I forgot to take the polarising filter off. Will know for again.

Dundrum Bay

So this is definitely not a new year’s resolution to start posting again. New year’s resolutions are stupid. This post was inspired by an email from my domain registrar telling me the domain was about to go extinct. I thought I should try posting again because I feel like I actually do stuff when I look back on the posts.

Further to the domain registrar’s email, I’ve decided to let one of my other domains die and have therefore imported all the posts from that blog to this. Suddenly there is a lot of stuff about Inkscape and GIMP.

I’ll save the boring catch up on the last 13 months, other than I got married and went to Japan which was the coolest holiday ever. I might post some photos some time.

Last weekend I ordered a few bits from the internet to start on my wedding invitations and thought I’d post up how I’ve made them.
For this you’ll need:

• White pre-scored greeting card – I’m using 135mm square white card for this
• Washi Paper, available from good paper suppliers and origami shops
• Coloured card to match washi paper
• Mizuhiki in 2 colours- Japanese paper cord available from some origami shops and Japanese goods shops
• Paper Inserts – the lengths should be slightly shorter than your card (in this case mine is 26.8mm x 135mm)
• Pritt Stick or other lightweight paper glue
• Glue Line or similar
• Guillotine/Rotary cutter & Cutting Mat
• Ruler
• Scissors

Cut your coloured card to the same length as your card front (135mm here) and about 60mm wide, then cut the washi paper to 40mm x 135mm. Glue the back of the washi with Pritt stick and position in the centre of the card.

Next apply a line of Glue Line around the perimeter of the back of the coloured card and position in the centre of the card front.

Meanwhile form the Mizuhiki into a knot of your choice. For this I used 2 cords but you can build it up with a few cords following the same lines for a thicker knot. Mizuhiki can be a bit tricky to work with so if you find you knots are coming apart use a small piece of Glue Line to hold it in place while you work. For this card, the purple cord should measure 210mm and the silver 380mm.

Use a small amount of Glue Line along the length of your Mizuhiki to attach it to the front of the card, leaving enough cord to wrap around the card.

Next make a small hole in the back face of the card near the crease to thread the Mizuhiki cord through. Attach it to the inside of the card with more glue line and bend the other side of the cord around the front of the card and attach to the inside in the same way.

Finally, to complete the card either print or write your message on the insert and using yet more Glue Line apply a small line to the back inside face of the card (avoiding where the cord pierces through) and attach your insert.

You should now have something along these lines:

Each card takes around 5-10 minutes and costs around £0.30 to produce.

I spent a couple of hours working on a graphic of a dandelion the other weekend and I thought I would share how it was done.

The design is simple. Using Inkscape, I began by drawing the dandelion stalk using the Freehand Tool (using spiro for that nice curve) and coloured it with a slight gradient from pale green to dark green.

For the head I simply drew a circle and filled large number of very small star-shaped hand-drawn polygons. Drawing these by hand meant I was able to ensure a good placement. Initially I had drawn a series of star shapes and tried using tile clones to place them radially. This created a very geometric look so I decided to hand-draw for a more organic feel.

After filling the circle with stars a few were dragged across the canvas to create the “just blown” look. I then made the guide circle completely transparent. Leaving it there meant I could still check the placement of the stars by viewing the image in Outline Mode (View>Display Mode>Outline).

The star shapes were selected (Edit>Select All and while holding Shift, click on the stalk to deselect) and in the Fill & Stroke Dialogue I set the blur to around 3. The stars were copied and pasted in place and while the duplicate stars were still selected I set the blur back down to zero. This makes a sharp star shape with a blurred halo, creating a soft appearance without losing detail.

And that’s pretty much all there is to it. Opinions welcomed.

Now you have your development version of Inkscape running, let’s have a look at the Spiro option. Select the Freehand (Pencil) Tool. You’ll notice an addition to the toolbar:
Make sure the “Create Spiro Path” mode is selected as shown. This will correct your freehand lines to smooth curves which you can adjust using the Smoothing Slider. Currently this can only be set before drawing your line so some experimentation will probably be required to get the amount of smoothing right.
This image shows you how it works. The blue path shows the line I drew. The purple line shows the path with Spiro applied.

As with any path, you can edit each node and the Spiro path will adjust accordingly.

Shape

Spiro paths can be shaped. This shows each type of path; None, Triangle In, Triangle Out, Ellipse, From Clipboard.

None: This draws a simple line with no shaping which you can thicken or thin using the Stroke Style dialogue. There you can choose the cap or even add markers to your line. Change the colour using the Stroke Colour dialogue.

Triangle In & Triangle out: The line is thickened at one end. By default you can change its colour using the Fill Dialogue but you can also apply a stroke colour. If you do so the stroke is an outline of the triangle shape so thickening it will eventually cover over the fill colour rather than increase the size of the whole object.

From Clipboard: Use an existing path to shape your spiro path. In the example above I used a star shape and applied it to a curved line to create the deformed star shape. You must use a path for this trick to work. If you draw a shape you’ll need to convert it to a path first Path>Object to Path. The colour of your original shape will not be preserved.

How can you thicken a shaped Spiro path?
Try resizing a shaped Spiro path and you’ll soon see that proportionately remains the same, but what if you want a much thicker object than the one you drew? If you thicken the stroke you’ll find the lines are blunted and the fill colour becomes occluded by the stroke. The secret is to draw small and scale up. Here’s an example.

The two paths on the left show how scaling a medium sized path up slightly thickens the overall object.  The two paths on the right show how drawing a very small path allows much more noticeable thickening when the image is scaled up.

Notice how the stroke has scaled with the image? If you don’t like this effect you can decrease the stroke thickness through the Stroke Style Dialogue.

This is quite a dirty workaround to the problem and hopefully a better  solution will be incorporated into the final release.