Hello,
i'm tryng to do with inkscape this:



a simple spiro line with 3/4 duplicate which are scaled without loosing it's parent curves


i've tried with bezier tool, calligraphy with hatching, cloning object, etc.. but i can't get a good stuff if i duplicate and scale i lost original curves

any ideas? i'm using inkscape svn-dev version with new spiro features


p.s. original wallpaper image HERE

Not 100% certain that it'll fix all the problems you're encountering, but I was looking at good ways of creating swooshes in Inkscape and this tutorial from someone calling himself Mr Tentacle Guy was very helpful to me:

Link to DeviantArt tutorial

thank you for the answer digital_havoc i've learned another tricky way to do spiro curves following your link but it doesn't fix what i'm trying to do, the best result for now is this:

done by copy a star in the clipboard and using it with the new spiro bezier options

for the people who can't understand my poor english below there is what i have using the spiro tool


what i'd want and i can't obtain are the duplicated lines which follow it's parent curves parallels going from the right big one line to a small one to the left like in the original image in the first post

I've find a solution!
Sometimes things are easier than they appear...



to make it i've drawn an horizontal line with bezier tool switched to "normal" - "triangle in" style, next converted the line to a path, duplicated 3 times, drag the node of every line sequentially to make the line more tight and shorter, aligned the base with nodes snap helping, combined all togheter with CTRL++ so i had this:



next i've copied in the clipboard with CTRL+C and used the bezier tool switched to "spiro" - "from clipboard" style to draw what i wanted

All this is done with 0.47 pre release i don't know if this is possible in previous release too

That looks pretty good.

Having seen how you've done it, I can suggest an even easier approach:
Draw your initial line, using triangle-in (a great feature of .47)
[repeat]
Duplicate the line, and move the new line along the baseline, so you've got two parallel lines
[optionally] "insert new nodes" in the new line's last segment so the last-but-one node is at the right point
Use the node tool to shorten the new line by deleting its end node
[until enough lines]