Just when you think Inkscape has a tool for everything, you come across a tool that literally builds a tree from scratch. Let’s take a look at this awesome extension.
Step 1
You’ll find this feature in Extensions > Render > Random Tree. Go ahead and select that and you’ll see a dialog box like the one below. The only two settings are Initial size and Minimum size. I set those to 100 and 4 respectively.
Since these are completely random, I kept checking and unchecking Live preview until I got a tree I was happy with.
Step 2
Here’s the totally random tree I ended up using. Looks cool already, doesn’t it?
Step 3
Now we’re going to add a big Stroke of about 40px to give it a leaf-like look. Make sure the Join is set to Miter to keep it nice and jagged. And of course, I gave it a nice green Stroke color as well.
Step 4
Since there’s so much detail here, it’s probably running pretty slow. Make sure you select your tree and head up to Path > Stroke to Path. This will convert this into a much more simple shape.
Step 5
Now we need to chop some wood! Just grab the Pen tool and draw a shape that we’ll use to roughly separate the leaves from the trunk.
Step 6
Select both the tree and the shape you just drew and use Path > Division. You should end up with something that looks like the tree below. Go ahead and give that trunk a brown color.
Step 7
Unfortunately, that leaves our leaves looking particularly bad on the bottom. To fix this, let’s just copy and paste the leaf bunch and flip it vertically.
Step 8
Then you’ll need to tinker with positioning a bit to get it to look just right. After all, your tree will look entirely different from mine.
Optionally, you can select both leaf objects and do a Path > Union to merge them.
Step 9
Then, I copied the entire tree top and flipped it horizontally, shrunk it, rotated a bit, and gave it a slightly darker green color. You’ll see below that it adds some depth.
Step 10
For even more depth, I wanted to add a shadow to the tree trunk. To do this, I copied the tree top and tree trunk and gave the tree top a black fill with a 50% opacity. Leave the tree trunk in position as we’ll be clipping it for a proper shadow.
Now, make sure the tree trunk it on top of the shadow, select them both, and head up to Object > Clip > Set.
Step 11
You’ll end up with a small, perfectly cut shadow to place over your trunk. I used Align and Distribute to center it vertically, and to align to the top of the original tree trunk.
Step 12
Just to add some finishing touches, I added some ground and sky. Looks pretty darn good, doesn’t it?
And We’re Done!
This is such a unique feature in Inkscape, I couldn’t resist sharing this. I’ve been using Inkscape for years and I just found this fun little gem - it truly does draw a great tree! Go ahead and give this a try, because the possibilities of a randomly generated tree are endless. Thanks for reading!
