Inkscape tutorial: Trip

Of the many reasons why I'm trying out Inktober this month the two main are that I unexpectedly have free time right now, and that I want to progress in designing with Inkscape. Today, I wanted to try out a more conventional design, following again some ideas of flat design.

A map laid on a table, with navigational tools around

Inspiration

Once I settled on drawing a map, I wanted to recreate the way Kurzgesagt draws continents and clouds, as very simple solid shapes.

I also watched some tutorials, including the excellent Intermediate/Advanced tutorials by Logos By Nick. And I applied some of the techniques he presents there.

Techniques

Layering and clipping

For the first time, I relied heavily on Layers to organize my drawing. I have a layer for the table, a layer for the parchment, five for the map and one for the tools.

Additionally to providing a nice way to organize and lock already drawn shapes, layers are a good way to use clipping. For example, The continents, the grid and the clouds are all overflowing from the map. But I defined a layer that contains a rectangle the same size as the map above these elements. And selecting this top layer along with all layers I wanted to clip, I just had to select Object -> Clip -> Set and voilà!

Shadows, map ripping, wood texture: one trick to rule them all

Logos By Nick's tutorial series is filled with ideas to cut and assemble path in bigger, more defined objects. He heavily uses duplication (Ctrl+D) and various operations on path:

Union (Ctrl++) to assemble many path in one,
Difference (Ctrl+-) to remove one path from another
Intersection (Ctrl+*) to only keep the overlap of two path,
Path splitting (Shift+Ctrl+K) to isolate non touching path...

Definitely have a look for yourself!

As an example, here is how I drew the compass:

Start with a circle (call it C).
Duplicate it and reduce the size holding Shift+Ctrl (so that the two centres don't move), giving circle C'.
Duplicate C and C', and subtract the two path (Ctrl+-) so that you only have one ring R.
Make R black and semi-transparent, shift it a bit, duplicate C' and intersect (Ctrl+*) the two path. This gives two kind of moon shapes.
Split those shapes (Shift+Ctrl+K), remove the bottom one and you have the inner shadow of the compass!
Duplicate C, shift it a bit, make it black and transparent and put it at the bottom of the stack (PageDown) and you have the outer shadow!

The compass arrow is simply a Bezier curve. Easy right?

Link to the `svg`

The svg file is here