Drawing a smiley face, part 3

This is part 3 of a tutorial, making a simple drawing in Inkscape and formatting it for the Eggbot.

<<< Part 2 || Smiley Face Tutorial, Part 3

22. About filled regions

In Inkscape, it's easy to color in any path region (say, a circle) with the paint-bucket tool (or solid Fill in the Fill and Stroke pane). However, all that the Egg-Bot sees is the path around the outside, and it will be very happy to just draw the outline for you.

Egg-Bot is a vector printer, not a raster printer. If you ask it to draw a circle, the pen tip actually moves in a circular path on the surface of the object that you're drawing on. This is like an old pen plotter, and very different from an inkjet or laser printer, where the entire surface is scanned back and forth.

This means that if you want to fill in a region, you need to actually construct a path that the pen will trace through the entire filled region. Plots where you fill solid regions can potentially take a long time, so it's a good idea to use alternate methods when possible. However, making solid fills is sometimes the only way to get the effect that you want.

In the procedure that follow, we'll show how you can create a pen path that fills a region, what you might call a "toolpath" in machining terms. This can be a slightly tedious process. The effect is very good though, and it will seem much more straightforward after you've done it a couple of times.

In our plot, we'll fill the yellow background with a solid path, and also fill the three black shapes with solid black.

23. Starting on the yellow background

Again, it's easy to hide layers that we don't want to have visible at any given moment. Hide the black layer by clicking the "eye" icon by layer "2-black." What remains is the yellow circle. Select the circle by clicking on it.

24. Open the Path Effect Editor pane

From the Path menu, select "Path Effect Editor…", which pulls up (surprise!) the Path Effect Editor pane.

25. Select and add the hatch effect

From the popup menu in the Path Effect Editor pane, select "Hatches (rough)" and click the "+Add" button to add it.

25. The hatch effect

The hatch effect, as it appears in the example above, is a squigly but continuous path that fills the circle region with something that looks like a hand-drawn pencil line. Now, we need to edit the hatch effect to look right. Mainly, we need to *turn off* the different sorts of randomness that makes it look hand drawn. There are two separate ways to enter the parameters: (A): Manually or (B): The easy way, using our extension.

(A) Manually entering the hatch settings. Change the settings for hatches as follows:

• Frequency randomness: 0
• Bend hatches: Uncheck
• Magnitude and parallelism jitter: 0 (all four)
• Half-turns smoothness: 2 (all four)
• Generate thick/thin path: uncheck

(Unfortunately, these settings are not saved by Inkscape and need to be entered every time you add the hatch effect.)

The Path Effect Editor pane should look roughly like this when you finish:

(B) The easy (and recommended) way: enter the settings by using our extension.

A much faster route to the same end result is to use our special purpose Inkscape extension. From the Extensions menu, select EggBot > "Preset hatch for fills..." This extension applies the same settings as under (A) to all objects in the document that already have the hatch effect applied.

26. Working with the smooth hatch

Now that you've applied the right settings to the hatch effect, whether by method (A) or (B), the squiggles should now appear to be smooth and uniform. However, we still want to change the frequency and maybe angle of the squiggles. You do this with the "Edit Paths By Node" tool, the one below the standard "arrow" tool. Click this tool to select it, and (if the object is not already selected) select the hatched area by clicking on it.

27. Editing the hatch

When you have the object selected, several "control handles" appear near the middle of the squiggle. One of the diamond-shaped ones -- usually the one further away from center -- allows you to change the angle and frequency of the lines. Drag it to a suitable position, such that the area looks like it will get appropriately colored in by the hatches.

You may find that some positions of the control handles lead to better looking fills than others. Pick one that looks good. One that fills the region without gaps or artifacts, but will not take too long to draw.

<<< Part 2 || Smiley Face Tutorial, Part 3