Creating Swirls in Inkscape

  1. Open Inkscape and select the  Create Spirals button from the left menu bar.  
    At the top of the screen changed the Turns Divergence and Inner radius as follows


    :

    You can play arround with different setting to get the initial swirl that suites you best.
     
  2. Next draw the spiral and adjust the end nodes to your liking using the end node path
    tool from the left hand menu bar




     
  3. Next we choose the select button and click the spiral to show the pivot point
    and the rotation arrows.  Then click and drag the pivot point of the spiral to
    the inner end point of the spiral




  4. Next we need to change the spiral object to a path and duplicate it.  
    Click on the spiral once so you just have the scale arrows showing
    then go to the top menu bar and choose  Path then Object to Path.  
    Then move to the Edit menu option and choose Duplicate.  
    This will have duplicated the spiral and placed the duplication on top
    of the existing on.  
     
  5. We now need to revert back to the rotation arrows on the duplicated
    spiral and rotate it a small amount:




  6. Now click on the outer spiral once to show the scale arrows and scale
    the outer spiral to obtain the swirl that best suits your needs.  




  7. Finally we need to select both spirals ( hold the shift key down to 
    select the second ) and use the top menu selection of Path then
    Combine (or Ctrl + K) with both spirals selected.  Then select both
    outer end nodes using the shift key for the second one then click
    the  Join selected end nodes with new segment.  Reselect the
    original end nodes and click the  click Make selected segments
    lines to straignten the new segment.




     
  8. Now  you can stroke and fill the shape to suit:





                                     Pictures and Text Copyright © 2007 Web-Grafix