Fun with glass and shadows in Inkscape

This is a current trend to abuse transparency and glass-like surfaces, so here are a few pointers on how I do it with Inkscape.

To see the glassy effect, you will need to place the glass object above a textured surface, otherwise it may not be noticeable enough. A photo is just fine for the job:


Now draw your glass object, here I used a rounded rectangle as I think it look smooth, but it can be anything: circle, ellipse, freeform. Depending on what you want to get (the type of glass) fill it with a light or dark color, with high transparency. Here I used a gradient going from transparent light gray to transparent lighter gray. A stroke (also transparent) is optional:


This is the simplest glass:


Let's make it stand out better by adding a shadow.

Add a new object with the same shape as the glass but with a slightly larger size (if your glass object is very complex, duplicate it and use outset), color it in black and move under the glass, it will work as a shadow:


Add blur to the shadow and decrease its opacity (the transparent glass must have a transparent shadow):


And have the simplest shadow:


However, I do not like this shadow, it is too dark and it change the color and transparency of my glass object so will use a Mask to get a clever shadow.

Duplicate the glass object (I made the copy red only to have it more visible for the tutorial):


Add a new shape (in my case a rectangle) with a size large enough to cover all the shadow. Color it in white (the color is very important for the mask operation) and move it below the glass copy:


Select both the glass copy and the white object and perform a Difference operation:


And get a white mask:


Temporarily move the glass object out of the way (either Cut it or lower it under the shadow), we need easy access to the blurred shape:


Select the white shape and the shadow and apply the mask:


And get this advanced (masked) shadow:


Now put the glass back (paste in place or raise, depending on how it was put out of the way) and get a much better (in my opinion) glass effect:


But we can abuse it even more, I will try now a magnification effect, our glass is not plain glass, it has optical properties :D

Duplicate the background photo, put it under both the glass object and its shadow and resize it (keep Ctrl pressed to preserve the aspect-ratio) to make it larger (do not add transparency, I made it transparent only to have the resize visible in the tutorial):


Make another duplicate of the glass object, select it and the resized photo and clip the photo:

And here is the final result:

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Many thanks to my friends at OpenArt.ro, www.xdrive.ro and Inovatika for motivating me to write this.