Cup of Coffee Using Inkscape

Coffee Cup

This was my first project in Inkscape to test the software. For the last few years I’ve had Adobe Illustrator on my windows machine, however I never got the chance to use it. Now that I have a MacBook Pro I can’t be bothered spending several hundred Euros for the OSX version, so now I am Inkscape girl. For this experiment I wanted an image that I could easily trace and use as the bones of my drawing.

My inspirational muse was a photograph of a coffee cup that I imported as a new layer. This acted as my template for the drawing. Using the bezier tool I traced around the different sections of the cup and assigned them to different layers. Assigning each section of the cup to a new layer makes it easier to fill in later.

Tracing the cup was the easy part, after all a cup is just a cup, but colouring it in…

This is where I have my biggest challenge with Inkscape. For my first project I wanted to play with gradients, because I had been struggling with the gradient stop system.

My coffee cup has the advantage of only having a few solid blocks to be filled, meaning I could focus my energies on learning to use the gradients properly. I hope you all like it.