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How to Create Illustrations

Even if you do not consider yourself an artist, there are techniques which you can use to produce passable illustrations for your courses.

Simple Shapes and Lines

One of the easiest techniques is one you probably know from grammar school. Think how children create illustrations with scissors, glue, and construction paper. They may then add lines with crayons. They may also cut elements out of discarded magazines and add them to their compositions.

You can use many of the same techniques with Inkscape. Start by drawing circles, squares and rectangles. Move them around, resize and stretch them, rotate them as if they were pieces of construction paper which you were gluing down to make a picture.

Just like children may cut illustrations and graphical elements out of old magazines with scissors, you can find online photos, illustrations, and graphical elements to import into your drawings. See our on our stock illustration sites page.

Some of the stock materials are themselves vector illustrations which you can learn to modify in Inkscape. Depending on how well the vector drawing is designed, you may be able to change colors, add or remove elements, and move elements around.

Inkscape Tutorials on Other Sites