Kendra Schaefer

Everything’s going eco these days, and chances are you’ll have the occasion to make some environmental or organic icons, graphics and logos. I hope to help give you a nice basis for the creation of nature-themed graphics. This tutorial is a bit long, and is for intermediate – advanced Inkscape users. You should be familiar with Inkscape’s color and gradient tools, as well as have some basic knowledge of path / pathfinder tools. You won’t be able to do this without a solid knowledge of Inkscape gradients, so if you need a quick lesson on colors and gradients, try this tutorial first.

In three parts, we’ll discuss how to make the body of the globe body of the icon / logo, the surrounding leaf and leaf stem, the water droplets, lighting effects, shadows and extras.

You’ll need to click here to download the vector for the world map silhouette that I’m using – it’s free, and only takes a sec.

Overview

Here’s a close-up of what we’ll be making:

Though this might look rather complicated, there are really only three basic parts to this icon: the glossy button itself, the globe insert, and the surrounding leaf and stem. Here are the three basic parts of this icon / logo split into pieces (the globe is shown on a black background so it can be seen easily):

We’ll be walking through the steps of re-producing each of these pieces in this tutorial. You’ll learn tricks like gloss, drop-shadows, pathfinding and transparency, so bear with me, this might take a while.

Step 1: Create the Glossy Button Background

Let’s first create our aqua glass button so the rest of our artwork has a background on and around which to appear. The button consists of a basic circle with two inner glows, plus one shiny gloss effect gradient. Here’s the button split into its component pieces:

Draw a basic circle, and fill it in with a radial gradient. The stroke should be turned off. The center of the circle should be a light aqua color, with the outer edges a slightly darker blue-green. Here’s my circle, with my gradient stops:

Bottom Glow

Now to make each effects piece. First, let’s create the bottom glow (labeled Piece 2 in the graphic above). Draw an oval in the center of your circle. Mine is shown below in red. The color doesn’t matter right this second. Fill that oval with an aqua to transparent linear gradient. Here is my red circle, aqua gradient, gradient positioning and result:

To finish off our bottom glow, let’s give it a bit of blur. With your oval still selected, use the blur slider to give it a blur of 7.8. Here are my results:

Crescent Side Glow

Now we’re going to make a crescent-shaped side glow (Piece 3). To get a nice crescent in Inkscape, we need to use our path tools. Make a copy of your circle background button (with circle selected, Ctrl + D). Make it the copy a tad smaller than the original. Now copy the smaller circle (with smaller circle selected, Ctrl + D). You should now have the left-most picture below. (I’ve made the copies a different color so they can be easily differentiated). Then, place copy one on top of copy two, like the right-hand picture.

Select both circles (You can select two items by holding the Shift key and using your selection tool to click both). A bounding box should appear around them. Now go to Path > Difference. This is the result:

Color your crescent with a solid light green, and give it a blur of 8.7. Below are my color and blur settings. My crescent is shown on a black background here so you can see it. After that, position the crescent on top of your circle, near the left edge.

Glossy shine

And now for the finishing touch, a glossy shine. Draw an oval near the top of your circle. I’m showing mine in red here so it can be seen, but color doesn’t matter at the moment. Then fill that oval with a white to transparent linear gradient. This is my red oval, white gradient positioning, my gradient stops, and the result:

Okay! That’s our background. You should now have the glossy orb shown on the left.

Before we go on to Part 2, select all of your objects – both of your glows, the background circle, and the gloss gradient – and go to Object > Group to join all the parts of this button together. Remember, to select multiple object, hold down Shift while clicking on each object in turn.

In Part 2, we’ll talk about how to create a leaf, background, and the surrounding green stem.