Inkscape Tutorial: A Tiled Clone Trick

I’m always looking for new things to make with Inkscape, and I found a video from Logos By Nick that I hadn’t seen before. It outlines a trick you can do with tiled clones, which makes a spiral design from a figure you choose. It’s fairly easy and can be edited as well.

Opening Inkscape, start a new project. Make the canvas big, maybe 1,800 × 1,200 px. Depending on your starting object, the finished product may be bigger than the page.

Draw the object you want to use. I did this 3 times, and used a triangle, a pentagon and a 5-pointed star. This time I’ll use a 6-pointed star. Change the size so it’s very small, because the tiled clones tool will increase the size as it makes the spiral. You can see how big it is on the page (left) and what I drew (right).

You can eventually use any color you want, but let's use black fill and no stroke. Select the star (or whatever you used) as shown at right above. Click it once again to show the rotation handles. Holding down the <CTRL> key, drag the center rotation handle down under the star.

Keeping your star selected, click Edit > Clone > Create Tiled Clones… If you have used this tool at all, the first thing you should do is click on Reset to reset the settings back to the defaults. Then, use the settings below (under the indicated tab).

Symmetry

Shift

Scale

Rotation

Click on Create. Depending on how far down you dragged the rotation handle, you might get something you like, or something you don’t. Earlier, I got these:

On the first example, the triangles were a bit too close together, so I pulled the center rotation handle down more, and on the second example, it looked better to me. The change is easily made by clicking <CTRL> + Z to undo the version you don’t want, making the change to the handle, and then clicking Create again.

Another thing you can do is make changes to the spiral by manipulating the original star/triangle/whatever you used. When you clone the original, the first clone goes on top of the original, but if you send the first clone to the bottom, and manipulate the original, all the clones will change automatically. On mine, after I made the first spiral, I grabbed the original star and sized it down a bit more, and watched the spiral change.

Experiment with the settings to see what can be done. Decreasing the rotation percent sets your clones closer together, I believe. You may not like the way that looks, but it's your creation (always), and only you know what you want.