How To Design And Draw Gears In Inkscape

Be sure to check the “Live Preview” box to see the effect of your parameter changes in real time. From this same tab, you may render a “rack gear” if your design calls for it. If you are content with the rendered gear, feel free to start customizing and coloring it as is!

You may need to ungroup so the program continues to recognize your inner circle as a separate entity to be subtracted.

The hole for the axis is another circle aligned to the center and subtracted from the wheel. Other gears coupled with this first one must have similar teeth, so use the Gear plugin and change only the number of teeth, or duplicate your first gear and adjust each copy accordingly. You may want to increase the complexity further by adding some parallel gears, which may have their own parameters (as long as they are not coupled with the initial gears). [2] X Research source

A metallic gold should contain a succession of lighter and darker shades of yellow, and maybe also a bit of orange. A metallic bronze should be yellow with a shade of green (copper oxidation is green). A metallic steel should contains greys. A metallic chrome is also made up of more reflective shades of grey (more contrast, from almost black to almost white), while silver includes less reflective greys.

For a 3D look, add a drop shadow by duplicating a gear, making it black, moving it a few pixels down and right under the initial gear, and adding a bit of blur.

A drop shadow becomes especially crucial when trying to contrast your gears with the background.