Ryan Lerch

Recently, Lensman posted a comment on my simple orb bubble tutorial. He was asking a question about how the clipping works in inkscape. I understand his pain, because when i started with inkscape, i was not sure how it worked either, until bulia posted his ropes and tubes tutorial.

So i decided to post this little mini-tutorial thingo to help anyone out there who wants to know.

Basically, what clipping in inkscape does, is takes the top path in a selection and clips all the paths below it (in the selection) to the shape of the top path. Confused? Let me walk you through a simple example:

1. Draw some simple shapes.
2. Now draw your clipping path. (mine is a pink star). And make sure this path is on top of all the other objects/paths (don’t worry about colour, after the clip this path will not be visible)
3. Select all the paths now, and go to Object > Clip > Set. You can see the result below.

So how does this tie in to the orb tutorial i did before? I have done a simple example of the workflow again. (this time only the clipping part of the tutorial…)

and thats about it. Please tell me if this has helped you, and i try to answer any comments & questions as soon as possible.