Sketch Tutorials
Sketch Tools for Making Art
List of plugins to create beautiful things with Sketch.
Hi, did you know that in addition to user interfaces, Sketch can be used to create cool looking graphics? This is specially made possible thanks to a vast community of talented developers who cut-through window to creativity into masses, allowing anyone to do crazy things with just a couple of clicks.
Therefore, I would like to keep here a list of extensions to assist in creating illustrations, patterns, gradients, and bring beautiful graphics details to your canvas. 👨🎨
The article is provided by Buninux.com — a place with heart crafted UI resources made to empower your workflow with new techniques and ideas.
Looper
My favorite tool for creating illustrations in Sketch, it allows to quickly manipulate layers, turning them into beautiful organic shapes and patterns.
Looper has its own interface that helps to perform operations on duplication, relocation, object scaling, and rotation.
You can quickly understand its operating principles by creating a random shape and hitting CMD + L keys to run your first loop.
Here are some of my commonly used presets:
6Spiral
This plugin is designed to bring spirals to your design, it has a great UI which at first can look overloaded, but each settings group is well explained in a tutorial file, kindly provided by the author.
Use 6Spiral to diversify your graphics with wave/worm-like elements or to create hypnotizing-abstract illustrations.
Start to select a layer and hit CTRL + SHIFT + 6.
You can make both 2D and 3D-like shapes by checking
helix from spiralcheckbox and setting up the right angle ratio, see the samples:
Sketch Isometric
A little instrument for creating isometric shapes. Unfortunately, it only works with rectangles, so I can’t recommend it for intricate illustration work.
Yet the plugin provides the most accessible way for creating simple isometric surfaces in Sketch, and in combination with Mirror, Angle, and Looper, it provides the most accessible way to create perspective mockups and patterns.
To use it — Select an artboard or layer and hit CTRL + SHIFT + I, you will bump into a tiny popover to set up direction, depth, and angle properties.
Triangle Fields
A tool for creating a Delaunay Triangulation, you can use it to make old fashioned backgrounds and triangular patterns.
The plugin makes use of object point distribution to generate various types of geometrical shapes, such as Triangle, Linear, Grid-styled, and Radial.
To use it — Select a Fill layer and run triangle-field to configure the pattern via a floating menu.
Chromatic
A handy tool that utilizes principles from Lab Color Space to correctly distribute space between color points and create better gradients for your website or dribble shots.
To use it, simply select the first and the last color, and the plugin will automatically generate a perfect scale between two of them.
However, the plugin has a flaw. It can only insert resulted color palette, and not the gradient :(. So you will still need to recreate the gradient manually, and then run Fix Gradient command, to “Fix” it.
Here are examples showing up the results:
normal gradients on the left, and fixed wih Chromatic on the right.
Easing Gradient
This tool is designed to transform gradients using a convenient and minimalistic UI with a real-time preview, that let you tweak color mixing and try different easings.
This plugin becomes highly enjoyable in combination with Chromatic by letting you play around the resulted gradient and try different color transitions.
To use it — Select a gradient filled layer and hitALT + CMD + G.
Rough
This little buddy can convert your vector shapes into hand-drawn-like doodles. Can be used for creating cartoon styled backgrounds and shapes.
Better Shadow & iShadow
Both plugins are helpful to create unique looking shadows. The difference between them is that:
Better Shadow puts numerous shadow properties upon your layer, to make the whole shadow look more multilayer and thick.
And, iShadow generates a single layer with Gaussian Blur behind the selected layer. Here, I have recreated the same shadow to showreel the insignificant difference:
Icons Flower & Conffeti
Tiny plugins to help create icon patterns.
Icons Flower is a straight forward plugin to arrange your icon set into a sunflower-like pattern.
And, Confetti differs with grid arrangement settings to predict the number of columns and rows, as well as have opacity randomizer option. Can form a more casual looking pattern. Paid.
Memorable mention
When writing this article, I came across a lot of incompatible plug-ins, the fate of which is unclear. That’s why I would like to thank all authors for their efforts on keeping listed plugins up to date.
And, if you know any other relevant and compatible plugin to add to this list, please let me know, or comment below.
