Kendra Schaefer

It’s my personal opinion that silver is one of the hardest materials to faithfully render in any vector program. In this tutorial, I’ll show you a neat – and fairly easy – technique for creating a basic embossed silver jewelry-style effect.

You won’t need the pen tool for this tutorial, but you will need to know how to work with gradients in Inkscape. If you’re just starting out, go here to learn about Inkscape’s gradient and color applications.

Step 1: Draw your three background shapes

The first thing we’re going to do is draw three rounded rectangle shapes for our pendant design to sit on. Unlike Illustrator, which has a rounded rectangle tool that is separate from the normal rectangle tool, in Inkscape, both of these tools are combined. So go ahead and select your rectangle shape tool, and draw a rectangle. I’m making mine red so it can be seen clearly, but this color will be changed later.

Switch over to your Edit Path by Nodes tool. You’ll now notice that there are three points around your rectangle. Two of those points are squares, one of those points is a circle. The circle point is located in the upper-right hand corner of the rectangle. That is your rectangle rounding point. To round the edges of your rectangle, use the Edit Path by Nodes tool to drag that point downwards until the desired roundness is achieved.

Okay, that’s one rounded rectangle. Now we need two more, each slightly bigger than the last.

Select your rounded rectangle, and duplicate it (Ctrl + D). A new copy of your shape has just been pasted directly on top of the old shape, so it still appears that you’re only looking at one shape, but there are indeed two. Let’s change the color of the top shape so we can clearly see it. It doesn’t matter what color you make it.

To make it bigger, hold down your Shift and Ctrl keys, and drag one of the corner arrows out just a teeny bit. Now, with the shape still selected, go to Object > Lower to Bottom (or press Pg Dn on you keyboard) to move the top shape behind the original shape. You should now have the middle shape below.

Repeat this process one more time, creating another rounded rectangle (select shape then Ctrl + D to duplicate it, then enlarge it and move it to the bottom). The bottom shape should be the biggest. This is what mine looks like – a large green rectangle, a purple, then a red:

Note for Advanced Inkscapers: You’re probably thinking that you can use the Outset tool to achieve a similar effect, but I don’t like to do that. In the current build of Inkscape (0.46), the Outset tool tends to garble the edges of rounded rectangles a bit. The rectangle stays crispier and crunchier if you just expand it.

Step 2: Create your Pendant Overlay Shape

You can use any shape you want for this: stars, hearts, swirls, you name it. In this tutorial, I’m going to use a funky spiral design.

Using your circle tool, draw a circle. The color doesn’t matter right now.

Then, using your spiral tool, draw a spiral and move it on top of the circle. I have my spiral settings set to: Turns: 6.0, Divergence: 1.0, Inner Radius: 0.020. You can find your spiral settings at the top left-hand corner of your screen when you have the spiral tool selected.

Select both the circle and the spiral shapes, and go to Path > Difference. This is what you should get:

There you are, you now have two sets of shapes – one stack of rounded rectangles, and one modern-y spiral design. Now all that’s left is to add some color and effects.

Step 3: Making your silver gradient

The essence of making realistic or semi-realistic silver is the gradient color that you choose. Your silver gradient should have at least five stops, with stop colors varying from extremely light gray to darker gray and back again. The shinier you want your silver to appear, the more extreme the gray variations should be. If you want it very shiny, your light grays should be almost white, your dark grays fairly dark. If you want your silver to appear more matte, you should make the color variations more subtle.

Let’s start by going back to our stack of rounded rectangles and coloring in the top-most shape. Select the top rounded rectangle shape in your stack, then open your Fill and Stroke Manager (Shift + Ctrl + F).

Change it from solid fill to linear gradient by clicking the linear gradient icon in the top of your Fill and Stroke Manager.

Now, edit your gradient by clicking the “Edit…” button in the Linear gradient section of the Fill and Stroke Manager. I ended up with a six-stop gradient.

On the left below, you can see what happens when, with my top shape selected, I click the Linear Gradient button. Then, on the right, you can see my gradient after I’ve edited it. If you want a convincing silver tone, it’s important that your gradient fluctuates from light gray to dark gray and back several times. The bigger the contrast between your light and dark colors, the shinier your silver will look. Conversely, if your grays are just barely lighter and darker than each other, your silver will appear more dull. The contrast on the below gradient is pretty low, so the silver has a matte feel to it.

Step 4: Change the Gradient Direction, Apply Additional Gradients

We have a basic silver color now, but that gradient looks a little too… well, fake. To give this a little more of a realistic effect, let’s change the gradient direction. Switch to your Edit Path by Nodes tool, and move the gradient direction nodes like so:

Go ahead and repeat this process for each of the two rounded rectangles underneath (purple and green in my picture above) – select the rectangle, apply a gradient, and change the gradient direction to something random.

There are only two differences between the gradient you apply to the top, and the gradient you should apply to the lower two:

1) The lower gradients should be radial gradients, not linear.

2) You may or may not want to make the grays in the lower gradients darker.

This is what my three different rectangles look like when they are separated (not stacked on top of each other), so you can see here how each of my gradients behaves:

And this is what they look like when they are all stacked up:

It is, as they say, all an illusion.

Step 5: Add and Color your Design

Take the spiral (or other shape) that you created previously, and place it on top of your rectangles. With the spiral still selected, apply the same gradient to it that is applied to the top-most rectangle (the lighter, linear gradient).

If you’re satisfied with that, you can save and be done. Or, go ahead and make some gradient adjustments to the spiral’s gradient with your Edit Path by Nodes tool:

And there we go.