Creating a woven straw mat

In this recipe we will create and apply a special texture to an artistic composition of shapes, in order to produce the image of a woven straw mat. We will generate the texture from a primitive and then apply filter effects to it to change the overall look. Finally we will decorate our map with the artistic rendition of a woven flower.

This is a good example on how Inkscape can produce an elaborate drawing in a relatively small number of steps.

How to do it...

The following steps will show how to create a woven straw mat:

1. 1. Open the Document Properties (Shift + Ctrl + D) and set the document background color to very dark brown by entering 221e11ff into the RGBA: box on the Background: pop-up.

2. 2. Select the Rectangle tool (F4 or R) and create a 200 px square by holding Ctrl. Fill it with the color #dbc68c. Create a vertical linear gradient and set the end stop color to #aa8a58. Add more stops and move them to create nice shading transitions.

3. 3. Apply the Film grain...