In the photo above, I rotated the shape in the direction of the blue arrow. If I click and drag one of these arrows in the corner, the shape will rotate in the direction I drag my mouse. The arrows in the corners of the shape are the arrows that will allow us to rotate the object (again, the red arrow).

You’ll see four arrows along the sides of the shape (blue arrow in the image above), and four arrows on the corners of the shape (red arrow). If I click directly on the shape with my select tool, the handles will change. These handles that first appear allow you to change the size and aspect ratio of the shape. Once you have this tool selected, the handles around your shape will change to black arrows at various parts of the shape (blue arrow). However, to rotate the shape, we’ll need to grab the Select tool in the tool box (red arrow in the photo above). These handles are for adjusting the width and height of your shape (the square handles) or adding roundness to the corners of your shape (circular handle). You’ll also notice there are 3 handles on my shape – a square handle in the upper left and bottom right corner of the rectangle (blue arrows in the photo above), and a circular handle in the upper right corner (green arrow).

When I release my mouse, the rectangle will now appear on my canvas with the color I selected from the swatches panel (red in this case) as the fill color. To do this, I’ll grab my rectangle tool (red arrow in the image above), left-click on a color in the Swatches panel (blue arrow) to select a color for the rectangle, and will click and drag my mouse on the canvas to draw the rectangle. Method 1: Rotate On-Canvas with Rotation Handles

Inkscape crop image to selection