The Montoya Herald, a weblog about Blueprint, jQuery, design, music and life, publishing on the web since September 2005. Written by Christian Montoya: developer, designer and entrepreneur.

Tutorial: A starfish with Inkscape continued

Posted on January 14, 2007.

If you missed the first part of this tutorial, see A starfish with Inkscape. Last time I left off with a completed star and all that was left to do was add the eyes to our little starfish. The next step is to choose the circle tool:

The next step is simply to draw an oval by dragging from any point to top right. You should get a plain oval. If you only get an arc (that's a segment for those who don't know), then just click the "Make whole" button at the top to close the oval.

This oval will be one of the eyes for the starfish. The next step is to do just as we did with the star and select Object > Fill and Stroke. Here we want a 1.4 pixel black stroke and a gradient for the fill. The gradient is a bit more complicated than the usual solid fill so I'll explain it in detail. Here is where you select the gradient option:

The next step is to edit the gradient, which involves simply clicking "Edit…" Here you get a new dialog that allows you to edit the individual stop. It's possible to add stops and make a very complex gradient, but we're keeping things simple here so we are only going to work with the two stops provided. Chances are that one is solid and the other is transparent.

You can play around with all the color tools and transparency sliders to edit the two stops, but whenever you are done learning the dialog go ahead and set stop 1 to RGBA fafafaff and stop 2 to RGBA ddddddff. When you are done (there's no OK to click) just close that dialog and you should be done. Usually the gradient will go horizontal so you have to slide the gradient guide to make it 120 degrees (as if light were coming from top left). Like so:

Now we can put another circle on top to finish the eye. If you are having trouble positioning it, change to the arrow tool and just resize or move it to get it like I have it. Fill it with black and use no stroke.

Now we need to rotate this eye to make it look natural. The first thing to do is get the arrow tool and drag it over the full eye to select both ovals:

Once you have them you can group them with the group button (or ctrl+G on windows):

Then you can click on the grouped object with the arrow twice to bring up the rotate tabs:

Last step here, this one you will like. With this object still selected, go to Edit > Duplicate (ctrl + D on windows) and you will have an exact copy of this object sitting right on top of the original. Just move it with the arrow tool and you can position it right next to the first eye.

Just like that, you are done with your starfish! You've just mastered a ton of basics in Inkscape that you can use to make all sorts of invertebrate marine animals. If you would like a copy of the SVG file I arrive at in making this tutorial, you can get it here:

starfish-tutorial-christian-montoya [SVG, 7.9 Kb]

Note, however, that this file has a license in my name, so you may not use it in your own websites; I'm providing it solely for educational purposes. If you make your own unique starfish with the help of this tutorial then you can use that for whatever you like.

And if by some chance you would like to know how you can put this vector into your non-vector graphics work, just go to File > Export Bitmap… and use the following dialogs to set the size and filename of the result.

You will get a PNG that you can then use in your graphics editor. Note that since this is a vector, the quality will always be the same no matter what size you set. And that, my friend, is why we went through all the trouble of making this in a vector program!

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3 Comments

1. ericgrave on January 7, 2009

   Awesome tutorial just started using inkscape and i must say thanks to this dude am going to be using inkscape more often!

   Cant wait to see if you have done some more

2. !!!!! on March 5, 2009

   Yea i know same here i think this website is awesome! i made a star!!!! ******

3. Salim on January 19, 2011

   This really is a great tutorial. I searched so long for a suitable beginners guide, but most of them just explain Inkscape's functions without any practice, what's boring and hard to understand. This one is just great. Thank you (=

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