From the course: Inkscape Essential Training

Creating spirals - Inkscape Tutorial

From the course: Inkscape Essential Training

Start my 1-month free trial

Creating spirals

“

- [Instructor] Let's continue our look at how to create basic shapes by seeing what you can do with Inkscape's spiral tool. To get the spiral tool, select it in the toolbox or press the keyboard shortcut, i, when you're not editing text. To start drawing a spiral, click and drag, and notice as I drag away from the point where I clicked, the spiral gets larger, or I can drag back towards where I clicked to make it smaller. If I drag around the point where I clicked, I can change the orientation of the spiral and where the outer point is or reverse it by dragging past the center. When I release, I've drawn my spiral, and there were two control handles on my spiral, ane at either end and I can drag them to modify the spiral. If I hold shift as I drag, I can rotate the entire spiral or resize it. If I hold alt as I drag, the radius of the spiral is locked so it won't change size. Dragging around the center just adds or removes turns making the spiral denser or looser. In the tool controls, I have four controls for working with spirals. Turns is how many times the spiral goes around. So one turn makes a very simple spiral. Two turns means the spiral goes around twice and I'll give this one five turns. Divergence controls whether the turns in the spiral are equally spaced or get denser in the middle or on the outside. A divergence value of one means the turns are equally spaced. A lower value, like .5, moves the outer turns closer together. A value higher than one, like three, makes the inner turns denser. The inner radius determines where the inner handle is. A value of zero puts the inner handle right at the center. Increasing the value moves the inner handle closer to the outer handle, the same as if you dragged it. I'll put it at .75 so you can see that. And lastly, there's a reset button to reset the spiral to default values. So in this movie, we looked at the spiral tool and how to control the size and appearance of your spirals by dragging the inner and outer handles as well as using the tool controls for turns, divergence and inner radius.

Contents