Inkscape: Faceted Shapes
10 days and no posting. I spent most of last week in Ireland and I couldn’t bring myself to look at a computer. It’s nice to have a break sometimes.
Anyway, I’m back with my semi-regular 3 posts a week.
Today I’m going to show you a technique for making faceted shapes in Inkscape using simple geometry.
Start by making a six-sided polygon with equal width and height. Set the transparency to 33%. Copy and Paste another 3 polygons and colour them red, green, blue and white. Arrange the red green and blue hexagons so that they each have a side touching another colour and place the white hexagon on top spanning the red, green and blue shapes.
It should look similar to this (left).
Group (select them and press Ctrl + G or go to Object>Group) the 4 hexagons together and make 1 copy. Rotate one of the groups by 180° (Object>Transform…) and arrange them so that the white hexagons align. It’s starting to look kind of faceted but it lacks detail (right). Let’s make another set of hexagons to add dimension.
Repeat the steps above but this time use only the red, green and blue hexagons. Make 2 groups of 3 hexagons and rotate one of them by 180° as before. You’ll have something like this on the right.
Each group forms a larger hexagon. Rotate one of these by 30° so that the two shapes will intersect each other rather than line up one on top of the other. Combine the two hexagon groups so that the set with the white hexagon will be on top. The end result is a faceted diamond shape… well sort of.
Tomorrow I’ll show you a couple of ways you can tidy this shape up, make it look more like a diamond and trim off the rough edges.
