Kendra Schaefer

If you’re at all familiar with the Adobe Illustrator blend tool, you’ll know you can create neat vector flowers and swirls using Illustrator’s blend tool. Inkscape has a similar tool called “interpolate”, which produces lovely lines by “blending” two separate lines into one flowing shapes. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to use the Inkscape interpolate tool to make a vector Buddhist lotus flower.

You should already know how to use Inkscape’s pen tool, gradients and color functions before beginning this tutorial. If you don’t, click here to read about color and gradients in Inkscape.

Step 1: Draw your background

Since many of our lines here are white, they won’t show up against the white Inkscape page. So the first step is to draw a dark background so we can see what we’re doing as we do it. So draw a square, and fill it with a dark blue – medium blue radial gradient, with the medium blue in the center. Below, I have my gradient stops and background.

Step 2: Draw the outline of your petals

The flower itself consists of six parts – five petals, and one yellow glow in the center that looks a bit like a beam of light, and serves as the “pollen” of the flower. Below is what each part of my flower looks like on its own. You’ll notice that both sets of left and right petals are the same, just mirrored, so you only actually have to draw three petals, one center, one middle, and one outer petal, and then copy the middle and outer petals. I’ll walk you through that later in this tutorial.

Lets do the central petal first.

Before we begin drawing, make sure that your document has snapping enabled. Go to File > Document Properties > Snap and make sure your settings look like mine below. Then let’s start drawing. Using your pen tool, draw a single curved line. In my stroke color panel, I’ve set the stroke color to white, and in my stroke style panel, I’ve set the stroke width to 2.0. The fill is turned off.

Now, select the line you just drew, copy it, and paste that copy onto your page. With the copy selected, change the stroke color to pink.

With the copy still selected, go to Object > Flip Horizontal (or you can just press “H” on your keyboard). Line up the top points so that they’re touching each other. Since you’ve turned snapping on in your document properties, this should be pretty easy. You now need to select both of these lines. To select two or more objects at once, hold down Shift while selecting each object in turn.

Step 3: Interpolate the lines

Here’s the fun part. With both objects selected, go to Effects > Generate from Path > Interpolate, and set your settings as I have below. Click “Apply”. Inkscape has now blended your left object and your right object together in a series of steps that smoothly fades one into the other. The result looks something like this:

This is the basic method you’ll use to create each one of your petals. You make two lines, stick them together so the ends touch, select them both and interpolate. You’ll create one outer petal, then copy the interpolated result, paste it into your page, select it, and go to Object > Flip Horizontal.

And you’ll also create one middle petal. Again, copy the interpolated result and flip the copy horizontally.
You now have five petals. Time to lay them on top of each other to create our flower. Arrange each piece.

Step 4: Add the central glow

Nice. There’s our basic flower. Now it’s time to add the center. Using your pen tool, draw a shape that looks like the one below. In your color selection panel, turn the stroke off, and fill the shape with a yellow-transparent red radial gradient , bringing the center of the gradient down to the bottom of the shape. Now position the gradient so the transparency is closest to the top, as below.

All we need to do now is position this shape in the center of the flower. This is what it should look like:

And we’re done! Perhaps a couple more touches for an Asian atmosphere?