In this tutorial, I will show how you can easily create clouds in Inkscape in less than a minute.
To have an idea of what we will create today, you can take a look at the flat landscape wallpaper below that I released as a freebie.
You will learn to make these fluffy, flat clouds using circle shape and path function in Inkscape. You can use the techniques learnt to create your own variations of clouds and use them in your landscape backgrounds, artworks or game backgrounds. Let’s begin creating our clouds. I have also included a quick video tutorial in the end to see below steps in action.
Step 1. Create background for clouds
Launch Inkscape and create a new document.
We will start with adding a sky as background for clouds.
For this grab the Rectangle Tool (F4) and quickly draw a rectangle. Fill it with a bright blue color like #55DDFF or any color of your choice.
Step 2. Draw a series of Circles & Ellipses
Select the Create Circle/Ellipses tool (F5).
Change the fill color to white and draw a circle on the background we created above as seen below. While drawing, press Ctrl to make a perfect circle.
After this, draw a smaller circle overlapping the first one as seen below.
Continue drawing circles and ellipses according to the shape you want for your cloud. Below you can see the cloud shape that I created using 4 circles and 1 ellipse.
Step 3. Unite into a single path
Select all the circles and ellipses with Ctrl+A.
Go to Path->Union (Ctrl++) menu option to unite all of them into a single path as shown below.
There you go! Your cottony fluffy cloud is ready, you can change the fill color if you want, I will go with white.
Final Image
You can create different variations of clouds by changing the basic circle and ellipse elements. I added another variation of cloud as well as duplicated the original cloud created above and scaled it down to create the following image with clouds against bright blue sky.
Video Tutorial: Create Clouds in Inkscape
You can see all the above steps in action in this video.
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