Illustrating pile of coins in Inkscape.

This one is about illustrating pile of coins using Inkscape.
Steps to follow as below...


1) Draw a perfect circle (this will be our cir1 object).
Fill it with linear gradient
Duplicate it, increase its size holding shift and ctrl keys.
Fill it with darker color (this will be our cir2 object). Place cir2 below cir1 (object-->lower)
you will get something like this.



2)Select both the circles, duplicate them and move them out
and apply path--> difference
Give it a circular gradient for the fill and fill a dark color for stroke.
This will be our cir3, the coin border.


3)Slightly decrease the size of the smaller circle(cir1) holding CTRL
Now place cir3 over cir1 and cir2
Move cir1 slightly to get the slight shadow like effect of the border of the coin.



4)Type your text (preferrably in times new roman font)
Draw a beizer curve (make it as much circular as your coin)
Select both and text -->put on path.
(adjust the text size to get something like this)
Now select only the text and duplicate it to get our text in a curved path.



5)Similarly create other contents like year.
Now we will place our text within a circle
Small tweaks like rotating & resizing is required
to set them into the circle.


6)here you are, a plain simple coin.
lets make a pile of coins..



7)Select all the coin objects, rotate it and
shear it vertically to get something like this.


8)Now duplicate the coin border
Give it a grey color fill and
Send it to bottom(object-->bottom or END key)
Now move this with a slight shift downwards.


9)Now duplicate coin border once more and move it out.
We need to create a pattern to fill this.
- Type two | 's followed by two spaces.
- From object menu select pattern--> object to pattern.
Now fill the border with the pattern.


10)Now place this object over the previous coin border as above.
Select all these objects & press ctrl+g to group them.
You have your coin.



11)Duplicate these coins and place them with little shifts
Rotate one of the coin and shear it
so that it appears like leaning on the pile of coins.



12)Now if you want a shadow effect,
Move out the slant coin
Draw an ellipse and place it below the coin,
give it a grey color with about 70% opacity and 4-5% of blur.
This will be the shadow falling on the pile of coins.
Group both the shadow and coin into one object.



13)Place this(slant coin with shadow) group over the pile of coins
You can also draw another ellipse, dark grey color 100% opacity & no blur.
Place this ellipse object at the bottom to give the sharp shadow.





lots more can be done to this like
-- having a logo in the coin content
-- giving the coin content a shadow, etc.

The tutorial in PNG image format is here and in SVG format is here.

I am not that good at explaining things, especially when its in writing. Hope that you find this tutorial useful. Leave comments if you feel like...
Happy Inkscaping...