Looking Forward to Spring Flower Embellishment

This is an easy tutorial for a quick flower embellishment which you can tailor to your own taste for that early Spring project you have in mind!

This tutorial assumes that you have Inkscape installed in your computer. It also assumes that you understand at least the basics of the software (take a look at previous tutorials to get more familiar with Inskcape!)

Let's start!

Fire up Inkscape.
Choose the Create cirlces, ellipses and arcs tool (or hit F5)
While holding down the shift key, make a circle in whatever color you like best. At the bottom of the page, I
clicked on the palette arrow at the right hand side and chose Windows XP Icons palette and picked the nice warm orange
this palette has. At the left hand side below that palette, right click on Stroke. When the little menu appears, choose Edit Stroke.
Then just click on the X, to remove the stroke.

Duplicate your circle 3 more times. Click on each individually to place them around an imaginary circle, forming the petals of a flower.
Click on the star tool and choosing a very light color make a small star. Push it to the bottom of your round of circles by clicking on the 8th button at the top of the page. Make another star,
and give it yellow color, this one bring it to the top by clicking on the 11th button (counting from the left,) at the top of the page.
Make a circle. Color it green and leave the stroke black, but right click on the Stroke to choose the Edit stroke menu, and when the menu appears,
choose Stroke Style, pick the third style of the list. Now with the select tool, click on the circle to add the stroke style. Make another circle.
Fill it iwth yellow, right click on the stroke and then on Edit Stroke, then click on the X to delete the stroke.
Choose Gradient, and fill your circle with a linear gradient. Now, Inkscape will give you a gradient that is yellow and then transparent. We dont want that. We want a linear gradient that goes from yellow to orange.
To get that, we will right click on the fill then Edit Fill, now under the color wheel, you will see the Alpha channel, click on it to add a color that will substitute the transparent (in this case, it will be orange),
now your gradient is supposed to go from yellow to orange. Click on the circle and drag it into the center of your flower. Now for the last touch, make a small line with the Draw Freehand tool using black as your color.
Duplicate it. Drag the line to place it in the center of the first star corner. Now duplicate your duplicate and drag it into the next corner. Double click on it so that little arrow handles will appear for you to turn it into the
direction it is supposed to go according to the direction of the petal. Continue this way until you have made that small black stroke on each star corner.
Now stroke with the mouse to select all your work. Go to Object, Group. Now Go to File, Export Bitmap and save your flower as a PNG file.

If you have Gimp, you can open your flower in Gimp and using the bucket tool, add pretty textures to it as you see below. You can also do the same in Inkscape using SVG files. (There are lots of free textures online that you can use.)

Experiment, and have fun!

Real Hope. . .