3 ways to draw gears with Inkscape

Drawing uniform and symmetrical gears can be difficult whether you do it by hand or with a computer. However, it will be much easier if you have Inkscape installed on your PC!

Steps

Step 1. Start with the gear effects included in Inkscape

You can find them, in current version 0.48.4, under "Extensions> Render> Gear".

Adjust the parameters (with "Live Preview" enabled in order to view the effects applied in real time) and you will get a cogwheel

Step 2. Add a circle inside the cogwheel

Step 3. Use the Align and Distribute dialog

This allows you to align the center with that of your cogwheel. The example uses Relative to: Largest object.

Step 4. Subtract from circle to wheel

You may have to pop this one out once, as the gears effect created the cog as a group.

Step 5. Create spokes for your wheel

Step 6. Add a rectangle whose center you will align with that of your wheel

Step 7. Duplicate this rectangle and rotate it 90 °

Step 8. Select the two rectangles together and rotate them freely

Step 9. Select everything and apply a union

Step 10. Make a small circle

For the central part of the cogwheel, create a small circle whose center you will align with that of the wheel, then apply another union to the assembly.

The hole in the axle will be made with another smaller circle, the center of which you will align with that of the wheel and which you will subtract from it.
Our first cogwheel is now complete!
The other gears that will be coupled to it will have to have similar teeth, so use the same graft again and only change the number of teeth.
You can build a complex gear mechanism.

Step 11. Increase the complexity

You can further increase the complexity by adding other gears in parallel, which can have their own parameters (as long as they are not mated with our first gears).

Method 1 of 3: Brown the gears

Step 1. Bring realism

We are now going to give a touch of “realism” to our gears by emulating a metallic surface, like gold (or bronze if you want it, the procedure is almost identical).

Step 2. Define the color

The metallic effect is not a color per se, but an effect caused by the reflection of light, so we will be using a multi-step gradient for the purposes of this article.

To emulate gold, the color gradient must contain a succession of shades of yellow from the lightest to a slightly darker color tending towards orange.
For bronze, yellow with a tinge of green (copper oxide is green).
For steel, the gradient must contain shades of gray.
Chrome is also made up of shades of gray, much more reflective than steel (more contrast, almost from black to white), silver is also made of shades of gray, but is much less reflective and so on. following.

Step 3. Now apply the gradient to one of the gear wheels

Step 4. Add a drop shadow to give a 3D appearance

Duplicate your wheel, blacken the resulting clone, place a few pixels to the right and left and finally place it in the background of the cogwheel, then blur it a little and reduce its opacity.

The gear should not remain in a vacuum, so you need to add a background to it. If you are using this example, use the same gold color gradient. To simplify, you can darken it a bit

Step 5. Add more gears (all gold)

Note that the drop shadow is useful, because without it it would be difficult to make the gear stand out against its background. They are now two separate objects

Method 2 of 3: Color the gears (steel type)

Step 1. To make the image more vivid, add steel gears to it

Step 2. Start by defining the gradient

You will get it with multiple grayscale and a slight bluish tone.

Step 3. Apply this gradient to some of the gear wheels

Here is a little trick to enrich the cogwheels a little so that they appear more realistic: make them two concentric circular grooves filled with the same gradient. The one that fills the larger groove will be applied in the opposite direction to the one filling the wheel, the one that fills the small groove will be applied in the opposite direction

Step 4. Place the steel-colored wheels on a mounting plate

Just be careful not to couple the steel colored gears with the gold colored ones. Steels must be coupled together and gilded together.

We are now going to make axles: they are small circles made of gold, steel, ruby and sapphire. Don't forget to drop them a drop shadow and apply a white highlight to them

Step 5. Position the axles with their centers aligned with those of the gear wheels, which will be sufficient

Step 6. Add some screws to support the assembly plate

It's easy to do: create a steel-colored circle, subtract a rectangle from it to make the screw slot, add a darkened steel-colored rectangle to it to represent the bottom of the groove, and rotate the heads of the screws with it. random angles, but different for each of them. Arrange the gradient and add a drop shadow. It may be advisable to add a perforation effect to the screws by means of a colored circle having the same gradient as the background, but with a different orientation (the image has been enlarged for better illustration clarity).

Step 7. Distribute the screws evenly (or at random if you want)

There it's done !

Method 3 of 3: Color the gears on paper

Step 1. Make your gears look like an old sketch

Now is the time to try a completely different approach, making your gear design look like an old-fashioned (Leonardo da Vinci-style) sketch. We will mainly work on the lines of the gears.

Step 2. Go back to the original drawing in black on a white background

Step 3. Turn on the path color and turn off the fill color

This will give you something like that, with some contour overlaps which we'll get rid of later.

Step 4. Select the gear (or gears if there are more than one)

Pick the one (s) affected by these unwanted overlaps and convert their paths to vector paths.

Step 5. Now go to another gear that covers it

Make a clone that you will select with the previous plot and do a difference operation.

Step 6. Repeat with all the gears that cover each other until you get a result similar to this

Step 7. Convert all residual paths to vector paths

Step 8. Make your design look rough

Since there are a large number of nodes to edit, working them all manually one by one to make them look the way you want them would take a lot of time, so here is a simplified and automatic way to operate (the image has been enlarged for detail). better clarity of illustration).

Step 9. Repeat on all gears

Step 10. Now define a multi-step gradient for the paper

Light brown to yellowish for old paper or darker blues to mimic a negative overlay (I haven't decided how to do this yet).

A multi-step gradient is also needed for the ink color (not shown here) and it should be made up of colors that are very contiguous, but having good contrast with the paper (such as shades of brown for old paper or blues. pastel for the negative plans). Apply the gradients

Step 11. Then add texture to the paper

Draw a random shape using the hands-free tool with a fill color close to the desired background color (but it should be slightly lighter or slightly darker), turn off the path, simplify if necessary, and blur heavily.