
Inkscape 0.48 Illustrator's Cookbook

In art, an intelligent use of repetition evokes a sense of elegant complexity in the viewer. By using the powerful tiled clones feature present in Inkscape, we can leverage this technique to produce beautiful backgrounds and textures.
In this recipe we will create a grid of equally spaced squares in different ranges of colors.
The following steps will show you how to draw a colorful grid of tiled clones:
1. Create a 10 x 10 px rectangle, unset its fill, and remove its stroke.
2. Go to Edit | Clone | Create Tiled Clones...
to open the dialog.
3. Set Rows, columns: boxes both to 20 to create 20 rows and 20 columns grid of 400 clones in total.
4. On the Symmetry tab, choose P1: simple translation.
5. On the Shift tab set Shift X: Per column: and Shift Y: Per row: to 10. This means that the gap between the clones will be (10 * 10) / 100 = 1 pixel wide.
6. On the Color tab set the Initial color: to ff8787ff
, H: Per row: to 1, and H: Per column...
Change the font size
Change margin width
Change background colour