How To: Make a forum avatar in Inkscape

Thought I might write a simple how-to for this.  It's easier than you might think. Even for those without much artistic talent.

First install inkscape, it's in the repositories.

sudo apt-get install inkscape 

Next, decide on a theme, for example, a cute kitten.

In Inkscape's file menu go down to "Import from Open Clip Art Library"

Then in the search box type "kitten" and hit the search button.  Find an image that won't lose too much of its detail when made small.  The search feature can be a bit slow, and clicking on a result loads it from the web, which can be very laggy, so be conscious of that if you have a slow connection.

Once imported click on it with the selection tool (the regular arrow) and click on the picture of the lock, so that you can resize it proportionally.

Next, click in the W or H textbox with the larger number, manually change this to 60.  This will bring our image to the necessary 60 pixel size required by the forum.

Then press shift+cntrl+d or alternatively go to File -> Document Properties.  Here change both the height and width to 60.  You can close the Document Properties window now if you like. 

Zoom into the now avatar sized image by using the Zoom tool or just pressing the "5" number key, which is the shortcut for Zoom to Page.

Now your image might not be square.  If you're okay with that then you can go ahead and click File then Export Bitmap.  But you probably want to make the image square.  Because you're working on an SVG you can do this any number of ways.  For the image I selected I'll just resize the background portions individually to fill the square.

First I want to center the image I have, so I will open the Align and Distribute Menu by either pressing ctrl+shift+a or going to Object -> Align and Distribute.  Then I make sure the image is selected with the Selection tool, and that the Relative to drop down menu is set to page.  And then I click the Center on Horizontal Axis button which centers my image beautifully.

Now I make sure once again that the image is selected with the Selection tool and click the Ungroup Selected Groups button as many times as it takes to ungroup the piece of the image that I want to change, in this case the brown bit at the bottom of the image.

Once that's ungrouped, I clear the selection by clicking in an empty white space and then select the brown portion exclusively by  clicking on it with the Selection tool.  A bunch of handy bi-directional arrows show up around the image border.

I click on the bottom arrow and drag it down to the bottom of the screen, making sure not to go past the page boundary.  You can do arithmetic to measure and make sure you get this exactly right, but I just eyeball it, and drag the arrow down until it looks about right.  Once you've got it about right you can go up to the Y text box which in my case was reading -0.067 and just change that to 0, perfectly squaring the bottom of the image to the bottom of the page.

Next I deselect everything by clicking on a white space. and go to File -> Save and make a saved copy of the SVG which is easily editable, then go to File -> Export Bitmap, saving the .png for uploading.

Your avatar is ready to upload.