Kendra Schaefer

This tutorial is meant to give absolute beginners a detailed understanding of using and applying colors and gradients in Inkscape, and the different options available to you when working with object color. This tutorial goes very slowly, and covers basics, so if you’re above beginner-intermediate level, this will probably bore you to tears.

Parts of an Object

Every object you draw in Inkscape has two parts: a fill and a stroke. The stroke is the outer boundary of the object. The fill is the object’s inner, or main color. Below, you’ll see I’ve drawn a circle with a red stroke and a yellow fill. By simply manipulating the fill and stroke colors, you can produce almost any shading or lighting effect. Every object, be it text, 2D shape or 3D shape has a stroke and a fill. Stroke and fill can be colored independently of each other, and each have their own settings that are independent of each other. You can turn off the stroke or the fill for any object as well, and just show one or the other.

The Fill & Stroke Manager

To start working with color, you’ll first need to draw an object, then click on it to select it. You should see a bounding box appear around the outer edges of your object as in the picture above. Once the object is selected, you can either click Shift + Ctrl + F to open up the Fill and Stroke manager, or you can click on either of the Fill / Stroke color boxes at the bottom of your screen.

Below is the Inkscape Fill and Stroke Manager.

Notice the Fill, Stroke Paint, and Stroke Style tabs at the top of the manager. The “Fill” tab, which is currently selected in the picture above, allows you to manipulate the color, transparency, and blur of the fill. The “Stroke paint” tab gives you the same set of options for the stroke – you can manipulate its color, transparency, and blur. The Stroke Style tab is a little different – it lets you choose stroke width, stroke style (dotted, dashed, etc.), choose different ways to display corners and edges, and add arrowheads if desired.

This is what my Fill, Stroke Paint, and Stroke Style tabs look like for my yellow circle with a red stroke, shown above:

The Stroke Style tab is fairly self-explanatory. Remember to make sure that the object you want to edit is selected, and then play with the options in the Stroke Style panel. In this case, plain ol’ messing around with it is the best way to learn.

The options on the fill and stroke paint tabs are almost identical, so let’s take a quick look at the row of buttons in the top-left of the color manager. You can toggle between these buttons to fill or stroke your object with a multitude of patterns or colors.

These buttons give you a host of options for manipulating your color – but you cannot have two of these options selected at a time. You cannot, for example, have BOTH a solid color fill and a linear gradient fill on the same object. You can only choose one of these buttons per fill or stroke – this button panel lets you switch between the choices. The part of the shape (fill or stroke) that is effected depends on which top tab (Fill or Stroke Paint) you are currently in. For example, starting with my yellow fill, red stroke circle, if I click the “X” button in the “Fill” tab, the fill is turned off, and I get a red circular outline. Or, if I did the same thing inside of my stroke tab, and turned off the stroke, I get a solid yellow circle, no border.

To turn the stroke or fill back on as a solid color, simply click the solid color button under the appropriate tab.

The two gradient buttons, linear gradient and radial gradient create a color blending effect, fading two or more colors into each other.

I’ll talk more about how to use and manipulate color gradients later, but for now, here’s a quick demonstration of the effects. On the right, I’ve made the strokes thicker (using the Stroke Style panel) so the results are easier to see.

I’m going to skip the Pattern and Unset Paint tabs right now – if you’re just starting out with color in Inkscape, those are a little bit outside the scope of this lesson.

The Color Tabs

The color tabs offer you five different ways to manage, sort, and choose the colors for your project. Below, you can see the same yellow fill color I used in my circle as it’s displayed in some of the different color tabs.

The RGB tab – RGB stands for “Red Green Blue”. It’s called such because it creates colors by blending various gradations of – you guessed it – red, green and blue to achieve the desired color. The RGB palette is a bit limited, and is almost always used exclusively for web graphics. If you’re designing buttons for the web, you should probably be working with the RGB palette. The “A” Slider stands for “Alpha”, a.k.a. opacity. this determines how transparent or opaque your color is.

The “A” slider differs from the opacity slider at the very bottom of the panel. The opacity slider controls the overall opacity for the *whole shape* – stroke and fill. The “A” slider determines the opacity for this ONE color.

HSL Color – Personally, I find HSL the easiest to work with. HSL stands for “Hue, Saturation, Lightness”. You’ll also see the “Alpha” slider here, which, again, allows you to manipulate the transparency of the current color *only*.

CMYK Color – If you are designing for print, brochures or magazines, you should be working with the CMYK palette. CMYK stands for “Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Key [Black]“, and is the standard palette for many types of printing presses.

Wheel – If you find the sliders hard to use, or you are employing a color theory that is based on angles, you might prefer using the Wheel. It’s a bit more visually-oriented.

CMS – The CMS is your Color Management System. Again, if you’re just starting out with Inkscape colors, it’s unlikely you’ll be needing to use that. But just in case, here’s the manual on the Inkscape CMS: http://en.flossmanuals.net/Inkscape/ColorManagement

If you need to, you can also flip-flop between different color tabs to achieve exactly the color you want.

Summary of Color Application:

1. To add color to an object, draw the object
2. Select the object by clicking on it with your selection tool
3. Click Shift + Ctrl + F to enter your Fill and Stroke Manager
4. Use the top buttons in the Fill tab to add either a solid color, gradient or pattern to the fill, or to turn the fill off
5. Use the top buttons in the Stroke tab to add either a solid color, gradient, or pattern to the stroke, or to turn the stroke off

Remember, fill and stroke color have a similar interface, AND your shape must be selected for the changes you make in the Fill and Stroke manager to show up on your canvas, so if you’re making changes in the color manager and not seeing your colors appear, first check to make sure that your object is selected. Then check to make sure that you’re not editing the stroke when you meant to edit the fill, or vice versa. If the problem still isn’t resolved, check to make sure that your stroke or fill is not turned off.

To find out how to manipulate gradients, check out page 2.