Inkscape for Metal Clay and Etching

For the metal artist, Inkscape is the perfect tool for gorgeous surface design, layout of different elements, and resizing with clarity and ease. Inkscape makes it possible to produce surface decoration exactly adapted to the sizes and shapes you want, rather than the other way around.

This book provides a comprehensive look at the many features of this powerful free vector drawing program, especially useful for those seeking high contrast black and white images for acid etching, photopolymer plates, stencils, templates, or direct machine etching in metal clay.

Accompanied by hundreds of illustrations, the instructions lead the artist through setting up the program and getting started with simple shape tools, varieties of lines, standard and custom patterns, tiling, cropping, numerous text possibilities, tracing of hand drawn images, photos, and raster images, and many ways to further manipulate geometric and free-form drawings. A long chapter is devoted to the basics of making texture plates and stencils, as well as preparing for etching on metal or metal clay.

Concentration on the black and white possibilities of Inkscape 1.1, rather than color and shading, allows for more extensive coverage of pattern-making features, path effects, and special extensions than will be found in some Inkscape books. A comprehensive index makes it easier to skip to features of immediate interest or to review what has been forgotten.

Written with metal clay and metal etching in mind, this coverage of Inkscape could just as well apply to other arts that require original designs in black and white, such as glass etching, woodburning, or metal embossing.