How to Design a Graphical Ink Splash / Splatter with Inkscape

Inkscape is a powerful software to design graphic arts. It is a vector graphic software and this is a tutorial about how you can use it to design 3D ink splashes or splatters.

Open up your Inkscape and select ‘Star and Polygoon’ from the toolbox. The control bar will display some options for Star and Polygoon tool (see below image). Click star mark and change other values as follows,

Corner: 16 | Spoke Raito: 0.860 | Rounded: 0.760 | Randomized: 0.030

Now create a star using your mouse on about center of the sheet. It’ll give basic shape of the ink splash we are going to create. Now click ‘Path’ from the menu and select ‘Object to Path’ or just hit ‘Shift+Ctrl+C’. Then select ‘Edit paths by nodes’ from the toolbox. F2 will also do it. Now nodes will be visible on the edges of the star (A on below image).

From the 16 corners of the star design, we’ll shape 8 edges to corners. So click on an edge and then click ‘Make selected nodes corner’ on the options bar. Now use Cusp node huddle to shape it to a corner. Drag both cusp node huddles inwards to create corners (B and C of below image). Do it for 8 edges and leave others as it is. Once you shape all 8 corners, it should look like ‘D’ on below image.

To give this splash a more realistic look, we need to add another segment to it. So create an ellipse (Image E) using circle tool. Hitting F5 will select circle tool. After drawing an ellipse, click ‘Path’ and then ‘Object to path’ and hit F2. Now adjust its shape to look like an ink mark using node handles (image F and G). Final look should be something like image H.

Now select ‘Transform objects’ (F1) tool from the toolbox and drag ellipse near to cornered edge of main ink mark (Image I and J). You’ll need 8 ink marks for all cornered edges. Simply duplicate it by going to ‘Edit’ from menu bar or hit ‘Ctrl+D’. Clicking on ink mark again will activate rotate tool. Use it to place ink marks at suitable places. Then add few more circles to represent little drops.

After all that, select all segments and go to ‘Object’ and select ‘Group’. It’ll group all segments in to one. Design is pretty mush completed at this point. But as last step, we’ll add 3D effect to ink splash. To do it, click ‘Filters’ from the menu bar and select ‘Bevels’ then ‘Button’. Now it will look like a 3D design. You can change color from the color bar at the bottom. Create more splashes by duplicating it.