Creating Radial Arrays in Inkscape

By Forrest Smith - Drempd.com

Radial Array in Inkscape:

1. Create a Shape
2. Click on the shape, and then click on it again to bring up the ‘rotational handles’
3. Drag the + sign, currently in the middle of the shape to the center point of the circle that you would like to rotate the shape around.
4. Go to Edit > Clone > Create Tiled Clones
5. On the first page, make sure P1: Simple Translation is selected. On the same page, set the rows equal to how many times you want to rotate the object. In this case, I want 6 copies. Set the ‘columns’ field to 1.
6. Move to the ‘Shift’ tab. Make sure everything is zero (As a default, the ‘Exponent’ seems to be set to 1). Keeping everything at zero won’t shift the center point for each copy.
7. On the ‘Rotation’ tab adjust the angle — this is 360 divided by however copies you are making. In this case, 360/6 = 60, so we’ll set the angle of 60 degrees per row, leave everything else as 0. Click create — you should have an object that has been radially arrayed. Coloring Each of the Cloned Tiles Separately: Click on the source object, then open the fill pallette. Click on the “?” — this will unset the ‘master fill’ from the cloned tiles.