Beading Market
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Welcome to the Inkscape beading diagram tutorial! If you have any difficulty following this tutorial, please post a comment at the bottom of the page on which you are stuck, and I'll do my best to help!
A) In the Page tab, deselect "Show page border" and "Show border shadow" under "Border" at the bottom of the window. Notice that the default background is set to transparent (beside "Background" is a checkered box icon, which is the symbol meaning transparency). This means all your diagrams will have a transparent background. If you don't like that, you can click that box to choose a solid colour as your diagram's background colour. I personally like transparency because it makes the diagram look less bulky on the page. The Default Units are pixels (px), which is a unit of measure used on the internet. Leave it unchanged because it's the unit we will be using to set our grid size and our ellipse size.
B) In the Grids tab, click the "New" button. The grid options we already selected in the Inkscape Preferences menu should appear in the tab. To reiterate them, I am showing a screenshot of what your screen should look like after you click the New button. The grid should show up on your screen as well. The default page zoom is 35% right now, but we will change this later to 100%, so that you can see the grid properly. Note that you can remove the grid by clicking the Remove button. If you create a new grid without removing this one, they will both show at the same time. You can also simply make the grid invisible without removing it, by deselecting the "Visible" check box.
C) In the Snap tab, make sure "Enable snapping" is selected. Under "What snaps", select "Bounding box corners". Under "Snap to objects", deselect "Snap only when closer than", such that the Snap distance slider is grayed out. Under "Snap to grids", select the check box beside "Snap only when closer than". This will blacken the Snap distance slider. On the slider, slide to 15, which means that our ellipses will snap in increments of 15 pixels, which is the grid size that we set! This will ensure that our ellipses will fit perfectly on our grid with little effort. Under "Snap to guides", deselect "Snap only when closer than", which will gray out the Snap distance slider.
5) We are almost done personalizing Inkscape for drawing beading diagrams! The last step is to set the zoom to 100% instead of 35%. The zoom box is in the bottom right corner of the screen. Simply move the cursor over the box and delete 35 and type 100.
6) The very last step is to make sure that Inkscape will always remember all of our preferences so we don't have to enter them again!Select File >> Save As... and then under Places, double-click the word "templates". Type the word "default" (without quotations) beside "Name:" and then click the Save button. From now on, the program will remember all your preferences and properties, and make them the default.
We have now finished customizing Inkscape to meet our needs. You can test out whether Inkscape remembered your settings by closing and reopening the program. If you followed these instructions correctly, when you reopen the program, a grid should appear on your screen.
Now I will guide you through drawing a beading diagram using Inkscape!
Part II - Drawing a Beading Diagram
1) The first thing we need to do is draw an ellipse. We will conform the ellipse to a circular shape and colour it with our desired colour scheme.
Follow these steps to make the ellipse, shape it, and snap it to the grid:
A) Click the ellipse tool. It's along the left toolbar, about mid-way down vertically. In the screenshot I have taken, the red arrow pointing to it is labelled "1 click", signifying that this is step 1, and to click on the ellipse icon.
B) Move the cursor onto the grid and drag it to draw your ellipse. It can be any shape and size because we are going to perfect the shape and size in a couple of steps. Any ellipse on the screen is fine for now.
C) Click on the arrow icon, which is the selection tool. It's at the very top of the left toolbar. In the screenshot, the arrow pointing to it is labelled "3 click".
D) You should now see 8 black arrows surrounding your ellipse (as in the screenshot). If not, click once on the ellipse that you drew. You should see boxes at the top of the screen that show the width and height of your selected ellipse. The With box is labelled W by the program, and the Height box is labelled H by the program. We want the width and height of our ellipse to be 60.000 pixels (px). So whatever it says in those two boxes right now, change them both to say 60.000, as shown in my screenshot (arrows 4 and 5).
E) Now our ellipse is the right shape and size, but we need to snap it to the grid. If you'll notice, your ellipse is now a perfect fit for one of your grid cells. I cleverly planned it this way, because your grid is at intervals of 15 pixels, and there is a major divisionary line (the black lines) at every 4 divisions, ie, every 60 pixels. So now your 60 by 60 pixel ellipse is a perfect fit and should snap perfectly into the grid. Also, our snapping distance is 15 pixels, so when you drag the ellipse it will drag in the increments of our grid. So that's exactly what we will do now. Drag the ellipse until it snaps into place in the grid, in the middle of a black square, as shown in my screenshot.
If you screwed up any of the above steps to make the ellipse, simply delete your ellipse by selecting it (using the selection tool) and clicking the delete button (not backspace) on your keyboard.
Now we can change the color scheme of our ellipse (ie, our bead, LOL)! Follow these steps to set the ellipse color scheme: (Go to Page 3)
