The Book of Inkscape

19.5 Design 2: Texture and Color

Something is starting to emerge here, but it’s far from being ready. The card looks too empty, too flat, too hostile to the irregular blotch of ink in its center. Can we do something about it? Let’s try adding some background gradients. As explained in 10.7 Gradient Tips and Examples, the default gradient from opacity 1 to opacity 0 of some color (for example, blue) looks crude and unnatural, its boundary clearly visible even if it uses a very pale color. To improve the look of a gradient over a white background, paint the transparent end of the gradient white, instead of the same color as the other end.

Here, I added four rectangles with irregularly slanted bluish green gradients at the edges of the card to achieve ...