You’ll end up with a small, perfectly cut shadow to place over your trunk. Now, make sure the tree trunk it on top of the shadow, select them both, and head up to Object > Clip > Set. Leave the tree trunk in position as we’ll be clipping it for a proper shadow. To do this, I copied the tree top and tree trunk and gave the tree top a black fill with a 50% opacity. You’ll see below that it adds some depth.įor even more depth, I wanted to add a shadow to the tree trunk. Then, I copied the entire tree top and flipped it horizontally, shrunk it, rotated a bit, and gave it a slightly darker green color. Optionally, you can select both leaf objects and do a Path > Union to merge them.

After all, your tree will look entirely different from mine. Then you’ll need to tinker with positioning a bit to get it to look just right. To fix this, let’s just copy and paste the leaf bunch and flip it vertically. Unfortunately, that leaves our leaves looking particularly bad on the bottom. Go ahead and give that trunk a brown color.

You should end up with something that looks like the tree below. Select both the tree and the shape you just drew and use Path > Division. Now we need to chop some wood! Just grab the Pen tool and draw a shape that we’ll use to roughly separate the leaves from the trunk. This will convert this into a much more simple shape. Make sure you select your tree and head up to Path > Stroke to Path. Since there’s so much detail here, it’s probably running pretty slow.

Tree image for inkscape vector