How To Illustrate 8 Ball Vector

• Software: Inkscape (or other vector graphics editor)
• Level: Beginner
• Subject: 8 Ball

It has been a while since a beginner level tutorial was published at KalaaLog.com and hence I thought I would show how to do something simple.

The 8 ball is pretty important ball in the game of snooker or pool as it is called. I remember the days when I would go with my friends during my bachelors and the glossy balls of vibrant colors, with stark hightlights and shadows from bright lights. Before I get all nostalgic, we will see how we can create a vector art of the 8 Ball.

Create Basic Shape

It is pretty easy to create the basic shape. Create two circiles - one black and one white. Use the text tool to create the digit ‘8′.

Unless you want to create a very symbolic looking vector art, you would want to get a 3d shape. And for that, group the white circle and the ‘8′ text; and then rotate and skew it a bit. Move it over the black circle and roughly to one corner.

The mid-tone shade

Assuming the light source to be on the left, we need to create a mid-tone shaded area.

Create another circle that overlaps the top left area (shown in red). Make a copy of the black circle and paste it exacly over the original. Select the overlapping black circle and the red one and perform intersection operation. (Use the [Ctrl]+[*] or choose intersections from the Path menu). Change the fill and outline color of the newly created shape to white. Make it transparent - opacity around 10% to 15%.

Highlight

As I mentioned earlier, the combination of glossy finish and the bright lights cause the hightlights to be pretty stark.

Start of by creating a hair like arc shape using the bezeir tool. (Shown in red below). It will be having only two nodes with two lines connected to each other.

Draw a seperator shape - shown in green. Now subtract the green shape from the red. This operation can be performed by selecting both the shapes and using the Diffrence option from Path menu. (Or you could select both shapes and press [Ctrl]+[-] ). Make the fill and stroke of this shape white. After that, to get a more natural look, apply ‘Simplify’ operation from the Path menu. (Or you could press [Ctrl]+[L] ). You will need to do it several times to get to the natural look.

Shadows

To complete the look, we will need to add shadows.

Start with a elongated ellipse shape placed below the 8 ball. Make it black colored and opacity around 40% to 50%.

Make a couple of copies after you adjust the opacity and then scale them successively as shown above.

You can use the newly added feature in Inkscape 0.45 - Gaussian Blur. Apply blur to the shadows - around 2 to 3 units.

You may need to reposition the different shapes a bit.

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