I’ve been AWOL again. Here’s why; I’ve recently acquired a car. The problem is I can’t drive, so it’s taken quite a bit of my free time to learn and for the past couple of weeks I’ve been working on a big new project for my business. It’s taking a lot of coding and I’m a little bit rusty so it’s all taking a long time. But I haven’t forgotten about the blog.
I had planned this week to show you a new extension for Inkscape I heard about through Planet Inkscape but I’m still trying to figure out how to get it working on OS X. It seems that it’s not as simple as installing a new Python Library so it might be a while before you see anything on that.
I hope to be back with a new tutorial on Friday. In the mean time if you’d like to request a tutorial (I’m in an Inkscape mood this week) just let me know.
Following on from yesterday’s faceted diamond shape, I’m going to show you a few ways to tidy up the edges without the need for time consuming node editing.
Here’s our shape from yesterday. In order to make it look more diamond-like we’ll need to get rid of those sharp edges and form it into a more uniform shape. 
If you look at the shape, you could fit the areas where two or more colours overlap into a 12 sided shape so make a polygon and fit it into the shape. I’ve outlined it here to show you but what you need is a white dodecahedron (I’ve been waiting to write that!) filled white at around 30% with no outline. It should fill most of the diamond shape.
The 12-sided polygon will be used to shape the diamond.
There are two ways of doing this; clips and masks.
Clip
Move your 12-sided shape on top of the diamond. For clipping it doesn’t matter what colour your top shape is as this won’t show when the clip is applied. Select the diamond shape and your 12-sided shape and go to Object>Clip>Set. Everything under your 12-sided shape will be showing and anything outside of it is hidden. You can undo it by going to Object>Clip>Release. The image below shows the diamond shape with the polygon positioned on top, then after clipping is applied.
Mask
Mask works in a similar way to clipping except that it retains some of the properties of the mask object. This time the white semi-opaque colour of the 12-sided shape will be applied as well as the clipping. This will give the coloured object the transparency of the mask above. Here’s how it looks now:
That’s possibly too transparent but you get the idea. Release the mask and adjust the transparency on the mask object and reapply the mask if you’re unhappy with it.
Note: If you want to apply a gradient as a mask use a black>white gradient.
If you copy and paste in place the mask object on top of a clipped object you can give the diamond a more glassy look:
Play around with it until you end up with something you like. All the files for this are available from yesterday’s tutorial including the various clipped and masked objects with explanations.
10 days and no posting. I spent most of last week in Ireland and I couldn’t bring myself to look at a computer. It’s nice to have a break sometimes.
Anyway, I’m back with my semi-regular 3 posts a week.
Today I’m going to show you a technique for making faceted shapes in Inkscape using simple geometry.
Start by making a six-sided polygon with equal width and height. Set the transparency to 33%. Copy and Paste another 3 polygons and colour them red, green, blue and white. Arrange the red green and blue hexagons so that they each have a side touching another colour and place the white hexagon on top spanning the red, green and blue shapes.
It should look similar to this (left).
Group (select them and press Ctrl + G or go to Object>Group) the 4 hexagons together and make 1 copy. Rotate one of the groups by 180° (Object>Transform…) and arrange them so that the white hexagons align. It’s starting to look kind of faceted but it lacks detail (right). Let’s make another set of hexagons to add dimension.
Repeat the steps above but this time use only the red, green and blue hexagons. Make 2 groups of 3 hexagons and rotate one of them by 180° as before. You’ll have something like this on the right.
Each group forms a larger hexagon. Rotate one of these by 30° so that the two shapes will intersect each other rather than line up one on top of the other. Combine the two hexagon groups so that the set with the white hexagon will be on top. The end result is a faceted diamond shape… well sort of.
Tomorrow I’ll show you a couple of ways you can tidy this shape up, make it look more like a diamond and trim off the rough edges.
Download the SVG but read the license first please.
