In my absence I’ve been working on a design for something I’m going to have laser cut. Who wouldn’t love to have their very own laser cutting machine? I know I would but until then I’ll be sending my work off to a specialist company, so I’ll keep you posted on how that goes.

As part of the design I was working on I came up with this leaf design. I started out just sketching line drawings in Inkscape and quickly came up with something I liked. The only problem is that when laser cutting you need to provide outlines for the laser to follow - not solid blocks of colours or thick lines. I was able to get around this problem and come up with a new technique using the bucket fill tool. Here’s how…

I started with this leaf shape. It was a 5 sided polygon that I reshaped to look like a maple leaf. I’ve also drawn a jagged outline with the pencil tool. It’s coloured pink to show you how it’s constructed but the final image will be black and white.

The next stage was to draw on the veins. To to this use the pencil tool and click once at the starting point and once at the end point. This creates a straight line rather than trying to drag a straight line. Use the node editor to click on each line to bend it into the desired shape.

Draw in the smaller veins until you’ve filled in your leaf shape.

In this image I’ve coloured all the strokes white and I’ve changed the page colour so that the white outlines are visible.

If it wasn’t going for laser cutting I would stop at this point but since the laser needs a line to follow, if I supplied this as the outline I would end up with just a cutout leaf shape and none of the vein detail.

For that I’ll need to outline the lines!

The Bucket Fill Tool  is really handy for this. Set the fill to be “none” and the stroke to black. The stroke for this stage needs to be thinner than your white stroke areas so that you can have detail in the corners.

You can either apply the bucket fill to each of the void areas in turn or just click on your white outline area for an almost identical finish.

Finally set your page colour back to white to get the full effect.