Kendra Schaefer

In this lesson, you’ll learn how to use Inkscape to produce the same as Adobe Illustrator’s Extrude & Bevel + Break Apart functions to create professional 3d text and lettering. If you don’t have Inkscape, it’s free, and available on Windows, Linux and Mac. Click here to download Inkscape.

Let’s get started.

Step 1: Write your text

Using the Type tool, type one letter in a straight, preferably bold font. The less rounded corners and curves your font has, the easier this will be.

Bug note: The current Windows release of Inkscape, version 0.46, has a well-known bug that prevents some users from changing the text fonts using the font drop-down list. Hopefully this will be remedied in the next Inkscape release, but for the time being you can still change the font by going to Text > Text & Font and switching it from that menu.

I’ve also found that it’s easier in Inkscape to work with one letter at a time, as opposed to typing the whole word and working with that.

In this case I’m typing a capital “A” using Arial Black font.

Step 2: Break your text into pieces and color it

With your letter selected, go to the Path menu, and click on “Object to Path”.

At first glance, it appears nothing has happened, but if you switch over the Edit Path by Nodes tool , you’ll see that your letter is actually now a shape that can be edited, no longer a font.

Change your object’s color to something other than black, as leaving it black will make it difficult for you to see the edges and bevels after 3D effects have been applied. To change the color, select your letter and use the palette at the bottom of the Inkscape window to select a color. I’m using a medium blue.

Step 3: Convert to 3D

With your letter selected, go to Effects > Generate from Path > Extrude

Set your setting like this and click “Apply” (or, if you prefer to change the settings, make sure you check the “live preview” checkbox so that you can see what the effect will look like once you apply it):

Note for Illustrator users: Unlike Adobe Illustrator, when you Extrude from a path this way, you do not then need to Ungroup or break apart the text after the extrusion. Each side of the extruded path is already directly editable.

Zoom in so that the letter is right up in your face, and you can see the it very clearly – about 300% or 400%. You’ll now notice that you can double-click on each “piece” of the letter – each side has become its own shape. The trick now is to apply a different color to each side of the shape, adding color gradients as you go to create the illusion of 3D.

Step 4: Color the Shape

Double click a single piece of the shape so that it and only it is selected. In my case, I’m first going to color the left-bottom inside piece, but it doesn’t really matter which one you choose first.

Then click on the “fill” square at the very bottom of your screen. A coloring panel will pop up.

What we want to do in the color panel is to apply a gradient to that selected piece. To apply a gradient, simply click on the linear gradient button, and a gradient will be applied to the selected piece. After the gradient is applied you can edit the gradient easily by clicking the “edit” button – much more easily, in my opinion, than in Illustrator.

Step 5: Edit your gradient in the Inkscape Color Picker

This is actually a fairly simply process. The color panel offers multiple ways to edit your gradient colors and properties. You can edit by RGB (Red, Green, Blue) color scheme, HSL (Hue, Saturation, Lightness), CMYK (used for print, stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Key [black]), you can choose the color from a color wheel, or you can use CMS (color management system). I find I usually get the best results with HSL, so I’ll be using that.

The gradient editing works like this: each color in your gradient is a “stop”. You can have as many stops in your gradient as you like. A default gradient has two stops – the starting color, and the ending color.

Each stop is edited separately. To edit a stop, choose the stop from the drop-down box at the top of the color picker. Then arrange your color scheme below however you like.

For the first and second stops, arrange the H, S, L and A however you like. Hue is the overall color of the object. S is the saturation – how much of that color is present in the object. L is the lightness – how light or dark the color is. A is the opacity – how transparent the color is.

By default, Inkscape creates a two-stop gradient, with one stop a solid color (the original color of your shape), and the second stop is completely transparent. So the default gradient blends from blue to transparent in my case. I don’t want the second stop to be transparent right now, so I’m going to make them both solid colors. When I was done, this is what my gradient editors looked like for both stops:

Once you’re satisfied with your gradient, you can go ahead and close the gradient editor window.

Step 6: Set the direction of your gradient

Now you’ll want to use Inkscape’s gradient direction nodes to set the direction of your gradient. For a realistic light effect, you want to make sure that the darker colors are nearer to the corners, the lighter colors are further away from the corners.

To change the gradient direction, simply move the two gradient direction nodes around with your nodes tool.

Step 7: Repeat for each piece of the letter

Okay, now you’re set to repeat this for each piece of the letter. For each piece, start at Step 4, and go through Step 6. When I had colored each side of my letter A, this was the result:

Step 8: Add some effects

If you’ve been reading my 3D tutorials, you’ll know I’m a big fan of transparency effects, so I’m going go ahead and make this look like blue plastic. I’m going to do that by selecting the front piece of the “A”, and giving the lighter gradient stop a bit of transparency (below)

And there you go! That’s the basic method for creating 3D text in Inkscape.

With a few gloss effects, which are covered in other Inkscape tutorials, and a few more letters, you can end up with something rather similar to this: