Create a Snail
For this tutorial, you are going to create a snail from scratch. You will learn how to use gradients and how to draw Bezier curves and straight lines.
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Create a new document in Inkscape. In this tutorial I left the dimensions as the default which is exactly 744.09 x 1052.36 pixels.
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Select the spiral tool (shortcut: F9) and click on the central area of your document. Drag out a decent-sized spiral similar to the one below:
You may need to modify the properties a bit in order to replicate my spiral.
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Now it’s time to create the round shell. Select the circle tool (shortcut: F5) and click-and-drag out a circle which just covers the spiral.
To make things easier, change the colour of the circle to something more distinct. The colour doesn’t matter too much since we’ll be adding gradients at a later stage.
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Play around with the size of the objects and the spiral’s divergence and turns. Soon enough, you should be able to get the spiral to fit almost in line with the circle’s edge.
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Press Ctrl + A to select both objects to squash the shell. Click-and-drag just the bottom, middle handle to squash the objects inward.
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Click the object once again and use the new handles to rotate the shell. I rotated the shell just a little bit in an anti-clockwise direction.
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Here comes both the fun, yet tricky part. Select the Bezier curve tool (shortcut: Shift + F6)
Draw out a quick path of your snail.
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Select the edit path nodes tool (shortcut: F2).
Click-and-drag the nodes to better shape the snail. This section varies in length as it depends on how much editing you need to do.
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Fill in the shape with a brown or greyish colour.
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Since the body need to below the shell, go to Object à Lower (shortcut: PgDn). I also moved the object a bit to the top-right.
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Now it is time to create the eyes. Select the circle tool (shortcut: F5).
Click-and-drag out a decent-sized oval and position it at the tip of the tentacle.
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Since the eye doesn’t have a border around it, so let’s create one now. Right-click on the eye and select ‘Fill and Stroke’ from the menu.
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Click on the ‘Stroke paint’ tab and make the colour solid black (000000ff). Click the ‘Stroke style’ tab also and change the width to a value of ‘0.300’ and a Miter limit of ‘0.00’.
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Duplicate the current eye (shortcut: Ctrl + D)
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Now we are going to create the snail’s pupils. Select the circle tool again (shortcut: F5) and draw out a very small circle. Make sure the fill colour is black.
Duplicate the pupil and move it onto the other eye. You may position the pupils anywhere on the eye as you like.
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As you can see, our snail is missing its mouth. Select the Bezier curve tool (shortcut: Shift + F6) and draw out a long, rounded cone shape. Make sure that you do not connect it, by pressing [Enter] once the shape is ready.
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Select the mouth and click on the colour picker tool (shortcut: F7). Now select the snail’s body to make the mouth the exact same colour as its body.
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Move the mouth into position and duplicate the object (shortcut: Ctrl + D).
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Since I wanted to create a bit of variety, I edited the path nodes (shortcut: F2) for the second object. If you are already happy with your snail’s mouth, you can skip this step.
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Once the mouth and eyes are complete, we are going to add more detail to the snail’s shell. Right-click on the shell and select ‘Fill and Stroke’. Click on ‘edit’ to modify the gradient settings.
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For the 1st stop, I used an RGBA value of ‘68513cff’ and for the 2nd, ‘968369ff’.
The 3rd stop uses a value or ‘6a5132ff’ and the 4th uses ‘94846eff’.
The 5th stop uses a value or ‘725328ff’ and the 6th uses ‘8e795dff’.
The 7th stop uses a value of ‘7b5d32ff’ and, lastly, the 8th uses ‘9a826fff’.
To finish off the effect, click on ‘Radial gradient’
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Almost done! Now it is time to adjust the stroke and gradient on the shell. Click on the gradient tool (shortcut: Ctrl + F1). Click-and-drag the gradient so that its mid-point is directly in the centre of the spiral.
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Now let’s edit the stroke. Select the spiral and right-click to bring up the menu. Select ‘Fill and Stroke’ and click on the ‘Stroke paint’ tab. I used a ‘Flat color’ with an RGBA value of ‘c6a183ff’. Then click on ‘Stroke style’ and adjust the width to ‘2.218’.
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As you can see, I have adjusted the spiral through resizing and rotating it.
Use the spiral tool (shortcut: F9) or node editor (shortcut: F2) to adjust the end-points, like I have done below:
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Once you are happy with the results, your snail is complete!
Final Result
