Hello,

I am curious how the author has achieved this drawing of cabbage leaf.

My query is on two aspects:

1. Apparently the shape is drawn with pen tool and multiple copies made. Is it some kind of offset? Or is it clones?

2. Shades of green. Could he (she?) has selected from a palette / swatches or is it some filter in action?

Thanks,
nib

Out of curiousity, where did you find this? It probably would be polite to mention the artist's name, to give them credit. Because unless you got it on a public domain site, such as Open Clipart, it would not be right for anyone else to use it or edit it. (maybe not legal!) So it's just a good idea to take on the responsibility of making people aware of that, if you're going to share it somewhere.

Have you tried to investigate the file yourself? Did you realize that you can?

With the Selection tool, whatever you select is identified in the status bar. If it says Group, you can either ungroup and select the individual objects. Or you can use Ctrl + click to select a single object inside the group, without ungrouping.

If you select something, and it says Path, then you don't know exactly how it started out. Neither do we! We can only guess. But considering between offset and clone, would a clone be larger, smaller, or a different color, or any different at all, from its parent?

My best guess is that they duplicated, scaled and then moved each path horizontally. Or they might have moved first, then scaled - we have no clue about that.

The reason I think they simply scaled it, is because of how scaling behaves, compared to offsets. Notice in the screenshot that I made, how in those wrinkles, there's either no offset up or down, or only very little, while 95% of the "offset" is out to the right. If it had been a real offset it would be offset on all sides.

You can test that behavior yourself, if you like. Open the SVG I've attached. Duplicate that triangle, then hold Shift + Ctrl while you drag one of the scaling arrows. (Shift makes it scale from the center. Ctrl makes sure it stays in the same proportions.)

Notice how the diagonal line doesn't ever move? It just gets longer. Even if you don't use Shift and Ctrl, no matter which arrow you drag to scale it, one of the sides of the triangle never moves. These are other examples of the same thing that happened when the artist scaled the lettuce paths.

Next, make another duplicate, but this time do Path menu Outset or Inset or Dynamic Offset. Notice how all the side are offset equally?

For the color question, I would again direct you to the status bar. If there's a filter, the status bar will say so. Also, notice what's on the left side of the status bar. The Stroke, Fill and Opacity info, altogether, is called the Style Indicator. It's valuable for helping to identify a lot of things. There, if there's a gradient, you'll see it. Go ahead, try it yourself!

But in this case, each path has a solid fill. No gradient, no filter. The somewhat realistic effect is created because they carefully chose lighter and lighter (or darker and darker) shades of the same or very similar color. Perhaps they used the HSL tab in the Fill and Stroke dialog? They might have chosen a starting color (either the darkest or lightest shade) and then using the L bar (which I think is Luminosity) they might have changed the number value by say 10 or 20 for each different object. Or they might have just slid the slider until they hit on shades that they liked.

Try selecting the paths individually and give them random colors. Notice how it lost any resemblance to a lettuce leaf, with different colors?

Or maybe this:

Yep, could be

Thank you!