How to Create a Mandala in Inkscape - Part 3: Ring Creation and Coloring

Quick Access

    01 Introduction
    02 Relevant Inkscape Tools
        02-01 Drawing Tools
        02-02 Selecting Tools
        02-03 Aligning and Distributing Tools
        02-04 Transforming Tools
        02-05 Grouping Tools
        02-06 Coloring and Outlining Tools
    03 Guide Lines Setup
    04 Symmetric Object Creation
    05 Ring Creation
    06 Coloring

05 Ring Creation

A large proportion of modern mandalas are radially symmetric circles, or have some regular circular aspect to them. In this part of the tutorial I describe one technique you can use in Inkscape to place design elements in a ring so that they fit precisely and are evenly spaced.

Keep in mind that a circle is comprised of 360 degrees. This handy table shows the number of degrees wide a design element needs to be in order for a specified number of them to fit into a ring while just touching each other. If you want space between your design elements, add the degree width of one space to the degree width of one design element to get the total degrees for one unit. Of course, fractional degrees also work as long as you stick with numbers that divide into 360 evenly.

How to Create a Mandala in Inkscape - Part 2: Symmetric Object Creation

Quick Access

    01 Introduction
    02 Relevant Inkscape Tools
        02-01 Drawing Tools
        02-02 Selecting Tools
        02-03 Aligning and Distributing Tools
        02-04 Transforming Tools
        02-05 Grouping Tools
        02-06 Coloring and Outlining Tools
    03 Guide Lines Setup
    04 Symmetric Object Creation
    05 Ring Creation
    06 Coloring

04 Symmetric Object Creation

Most mandalas contain elements that are symmetric. The easiest way I have found to draw a symmetric object in Inkscape is to draw one side of it, then copy it, horizontally flip the copy, and join the two halves.

Here is a step by step illustrated description of creating a symmetric object.

Draw one side. I am right-handed, so I draw the right side first. You might wish to draw on top of the guidelines to control the width of the object, or you can draw the object in its entirety and then resize it to fit into a specific angular space. In this example, I want to draw an object that takes up 30 degrees of space, so I will draw the right side in 15 degrees using my guidelines. I am using the Bezier curves tool.

How to Create a Mandala in Inkscape - Part 1: Intro and Setup

Quick Access

    01 Introduction
    02 Relevant Inkscape Tools
        02-01 Drawing Tools
        02-02 Selecting Tools
        02-03 Aligning and Distributing Tools
        02-04 Transforming Tools
        02-05 Grouping Tools
        02-06 Coloring and Outlining Tools
    03 Guide Lines Setup
    04 Symmetric Object Creation
    05 Ring Creation
    06 Coloring

01 Introduction

Mandala art is very popular today. Most mandala artists describe the process of creating a mandala, usually drawn by hand with an ink pen, as a relaxing and meditative process. Modern mandalas are generally radially symmetric and often contain floral and/or geometric elements. Mandala designs range from very simple to very complex. Here is an example of a mandala taken from The Spruce Crafts.

I have found that creating mandalas in Inkscape is also relaxing and relatively easy since there are several tools that aid you in duplicating, rotating, and aligning elements, plus there is the added benefit of being able to color the same mandala multiple different ways without having to redraw it.

In this multi-part tutorial I will indicate the Inkscape tools that I use to create mandalas, describe and demonstrate how I create symmetric elements and place them in radial patterns, and talk about object cloning and how useful it is for coloring a design.

Creating a Tiling 3D Geometric Pattern Using Inkscape

Some time during the latter half of 2015 I sketched out the following design which I wanted to create as a pattern.

I finally got around to working on it at the end of January 2016. Creating the basic shapes in Inkscape was very easy. The fun came in when I started messing about with various filters to see what kinds of effects I could get. After a lot of experimentation I eventually ended up with this design.

In this tutorial I explain how to create this design using the simplest steps I can think of. My actual process was much more complicated and involved a lot of trial and error. (Please note: This tutorial is intended for instructional purposes only. I am not granting permission for anyone to use or publish this design in any form.)

Creating the Trojan Zebra with Inkscape

The intent of this article is to show my creative flow with Inkscape as opposed to giving a detailed step-by-step tutorial, which would be difficult with anything more than a simple design.

In June of 2015 I had the idea of drawing a zebra with a hair headdress instead of a mane – a kind that would look like the horsehair brush on an ancient Greek helmet. (My thought was, the zebra was bald and had to wear an artificial mane to keep up appearances.) I drew a quick sketch to save the idea and finally got around to working on it in August.

How to Import EPS Files into Inkscape

While browsing the shelves of a local discount book store, I stumbled upon an interesting pattern book called Drip.Dot.Swirl. by Von Glitschka, published by HOW Books in 2009. Being a bit of a pattern nut and seeing a lot of patterns in the book that I liked, I was about to buy the book when I noticed that the DVD that was supposed to be in the back of the book was missing. The DVD contains editable vector files, swatch libraries, and tutorials and is at least half the reason for buying the book. Being undaunted, after a quick search online I found a copy of the book and had it in my hands within a week.

Drip Dot Swirl: 94 Incredible Patterns for Design and Illustration

I happily popped the DVD into the drive and grabbed the first vector file, only to discover that all the files are in encapsulated PostScript (EPS) format and plain vanilla Inkscape is completely unable to load them. Fine. Back to the internet. After poking around for a while I finally found some useful instructions at InkscapeForum.com. Here's a quick step-by-step on how to set up Inkscape so that it can read EPS files. (Please note that these instructions are for Windows 7. For later versions of Windows, the way to get to your environment variables will probably be slightly different.)

Behind the Scene – Creation of a Seascape

Back in the autumn of 2012 I had seen a design on Zazzle that I liked quite a lot. It was a limited-palette, multicolored, layered, southwest United States-style design. I got the urge to create something using a similar concept, so after letting my subconscious mull it over for a bit I woke up one morning with the idea of a seascape and quickly made a sketch.

GIMP Tutorial: How to Make a Hexagonal Pattern

Introduction

I've always been fascinated by patterns. Over the past year I've been playing around with creating patterns from pieces of photographs. This is a fun exercise and can result in interesting, and sometimes beautiful, images.

In a previous tutorial I described how to make rectangular patterns. In this tutorial I'll explain how to make a hexagonal tile from a triangular cutout from a photograph and then show how to tile multiple hexagons to make a repeating pattern.

This tutorial is broken into the following sections:

• How to Create an Equilateral Triangle
• How to Create a Triangular Tile Piece
• How to Create a Hexagonal Tile
• How to Create a Hexagonal Tiled Pattern
• Examples of Hexagonal Tiled Patterns

GIMP 2.6.11 will be used for the main part of the work, but Inkscape 0.47 will be used at the beginning because it has a useful tool for quickly creating geometric objects.

See Also: If you are interested only in creating a hexagonal shape in GIMP, see How to Create Regular Polygons in GIMP.

How to Create a Vector Clown Fish with Inkscape

Capturing a Fish

I don't remember when or where the idea of a clown fish in clown makeup came to me, but the idea took hold of me and wouldn't let go until I created one. The first thing I did was fire up Inkscape and use the Bezier Curve tool to draw a vector object for each part of the fish that I wanted to color separately. All of the objects are closed paths. Here's the final set of objects that I came up with.

The Further Adventures of a Vector Graphics Newbie

Beyond Straight Edges — The Curvy Side of SVG

After creating my first vector design of a paper bag, which was mostly straight edges, I decided for my next Inkscape project to create a canvas bag, which would be a bit more complex due to curves on the handles and the wrinkled sides of the bag. I found a suitable canvas bag image to use as a model and got to work.

A Newbie Adventure into Scalable Vector Graphics

A Short Tutorial

Back in February 2011 I decided I wanted to learn how to create scalable vector graphics using Inkscape. For my first project I chose something very simple — a paper bag. I found an image of a paper bag to use as a model and loaded it into Inkscape. After a quick analysis it was pretty obvious where to draw the lines.