Inkscape is a completely free graphics program in a similar league of the paid for alternative Adobe Illustrator. By doing it myself I found some cool techniques that really look great for plants and roots. There isn’t that many options in BioRender for plants and roots. This is for you if you need more than the free version of BioRender, which is amazing but is limited in output quality (dpi) and with what you can do in the images. I’m definitely not an expert, not by any stretch of the imagination, but from one novice to another this is how I approached it.

I thought it might be useful if shared some of the things I learnt on how to create a diagram in Inkscape, so if you fancied using Inkscape too, you’ve got somewhere to start from. I decided to use Inkscape create my images. Not going to lie, it took me a while to put them together but I’m glad I took on the learning curve.

Over the last week I had some fun making a couple of diagrams for our World Congress of Soil Science 2022 poster.

Poster inkscape