Remembrance Poppies: make your own clipart in Pages

Readers of our magazine are mostly Brits living in Normandy. So every November we run Remembrance day theme.

The distinct symbol of Remembrance is the red poppy. The connection comes from the killing fields of Flanders (Belgium) where many soldiers died during World War I: red poppies in wheat fields are like drops of blood.


This summer I took a series of photos of red poppies near the town of Falaise where fierce fighting took place in the final days of the battle of Normandy in 1944.







To create your own original clipart:

- Import the photo in to your Pages document and choose an element in the photo to make into clipart
- launch Instant Alpha (under Format menu)
- remove background by continuosly dragging the Alpha tool over the photo

The poppies in my photo are now on their own, without the ripening crops in the background. Next I mask the photo to leave just one flower. Now it is ready to be resized and copy pasted as a Remembrance Day clipart.

You can also 'Print' the Pages document to iPhoto and then crop the JPEG to keep it with your stock of clipart images. This option is under PDF drop down menu available in Print Dialogue window (Command+P).





Clipart JPEGs created this way can also be used as bullets (as, indeed, any other image).

- In Text Inspector click on the List tab
- and choose Custom Image from the drop down menu.
- Click Choose and import your clipart image.

While Instant Alpha is a wonderfully powerful tool, you may find that with some photos it is very difficult to 'separate' the background from the desired object. It happens when background colours are similar to those of the object. I have a beautiful picture of a holly bush with bright red berries which I wanted to make into Christmas clipart - but couldn't, because holly leaves blended with thick forest foliage in the background. (Update: a year later I cut off a twig of holly with berries, took a photo against blue sky and made it into clipart for my Christmas card.)

Bear it in mind if you are taking photos to make them into clipart. For example, when taking a picture of an apple, angle your shot so that the apple is against blue sky. If it is a red flower, it is best to have green leaves in the back.

Have a look at 'paper' Remembrance Poppy designed in Pages here and an example of a magazine page with the Remembrance theme here.


Please read these previous articles about creating clipart with iWork/Pages tools:

Creating your own clipart with Instant Alpha
How to design folders with Pages tools
Creating clipart and original shapes in Pages
Curving lines and shapes: make them in Pages
Maps in Pages

and about an easy way to make your Pages document into a JPEG:

Quick JPEGs straight from Pages