Open up the Layers and Fill and Stroke tooboxes (ctrl+shift+L and ctrl+shift+F, respectively). This will make it easier for when you make plates with other images for publication.Ĥ. First, you probably want to resize the image to the area of the 8x11 provided. The drawing will be imported directly into the open Inkscape window.ģ. Open inkscape, go to File > Import, and select your image from file. Before you even open inkscape, you need your drawing or other image scanned and saved as some sort of image file. Once you know these basics, the rest of this post will make sense.ġ. Before you use this, I'd suggest doing some of the tutorials on this page, or at least completing the kokeshi doll tutorial. In the rest of this post I'll be presenting my basic methods for line drawing illustration in Inkscape. In addition, continuous updates mean the tools are constantly improving.
The software is a free, open source vector image program which can operate on Windows, Mac OS, and Linux platforms, and it can do almost everything that Illustrator can do with a few exceptions. I recently found Inkscape to be an excellent, inexpensive alternative to Illustrator. Ralph Holzenthal has an excellent guide to the program for entomologists. For those of you who can afford the CS software suite, Dr. At the moment I don't have that kind of money, which I expect is true for most taxahackers and pro-am entomologists. I say expensive because Illustrator will run you about $450 USD roughly the same amount as a new Asus Eee PC netbook. The expensive alternative is making a basic line drawing (no inking, no clean up), scanning and importing the image into Adobe Illustrator, and tracing a vector image from the hand drawing. What was that again, a harpago or a seta? My illustrations tend to be pixellated and messy after rescaling. I spend hours with a microscope, freehand drawing with a gridded eye piece, trace and ink on vellum, scan to computer, clean up in GIMP, and hope that the finished product is passable.
If my readers are anything like me, we are all often disappointed with the way our line drawings turn out.
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