Rotating Objects in Inkscape | The Complete Beginner’s Guide

• September 9, 2019
• Nick Saporito
• 7 comments

In this post I’ll be going over how to rotate objects in Inkscape; including rotating multiple objects and rotating objects around a point.

Rotating Objects in Inkscape

Rotating objects in Inkscape is so incredibly simple that there isn’t even a dedicated tool for it like there is in Illustrator — it’s all done with the Select tool. Here’s a brief overview of how it works.

Rotating An Object

To rotate an object, first grab the Select tool and click on the object in order to select it. You will notice the scaling handles around the perimeter of the bounding box, represented by the black arrows. You can click and drag on these arrows to scale your object.

Once you have your object selected, simply click on it again to bring up the rotation handles.

You can now click and drag on those handles to rotate your object.

Rotating An Object Around A Point

Rotating an object around a point in Inkscape is quite simple. Once you bring up your rotation handles, you’ll see a tiny cross in the center of the object. That cross represents the axis on which the object rotates. You can click and drag that cross and place it anywhere you’d like on the canvas.

Rotating Multiple Objects

Rotating multiple objects with Inkscape is similarly easy. All you have to do is select all of the objects you’d like to rotate. You can select multiple objects by holding Shift and clicking on each of them.

Once you’ve selected multiple objects, you can rotate them the same way you’d rotate a single object — by clicking on one of them with the Select tool in order to bring up the rotation handles, then using the rotation handles to rotate your multiple objects.

Rotating Multiple Objects Around A Point

You can rotate multiple objects around a point the same way you would a single object — by placing the little cross in the center of the design wherever you’d like the rotation point to be.

Incremental Rotation

If you’d like to rotate object(s) incrementally, you can hold Control on your keyboard while clicking and dragging. This will confine the rotating to 15 degree increments.

If you’d like to change the incremental units, you can do so by going to Preferences (control + shift + p), then navigating to Behavior -> Steps and changing the value from 15 to whatever you’d like.

And that should do it for this lesson. If you have any questions simply leave a comment below.

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