My annual New Year's card with a study after Modigliani, a Snowman and a little Robin. To add the past year's flavour I drew a few covid masks, a subject of so much debate and angst.
Everything here is drawn using Pages tools.
The mask itself is a modified Polygon from the Shapes menu with a Border and an Advanced colour fill. The straps are curved lines with endpoints.
The figures 2021 are drawn with the Pen Tool. When you click on Shapes in the Tool Bar you can see it in the top right corner.
'Modigliani's' model is a combination of edited shapes with colour fills.
See previous years' Snowmen and Robins at this link. Includes tutorials, tips and videos. Some menus and tools may be different in the current Pages version (6.3.1) but the basic principles remain the same and still work.
A reader suggested how to curve small amounts of text for design purposes, like for instance, an address. The idea is to put each letter in its own text box and then arrange the boxes in a curving line. (click here and go to the last comment in the thread)
I've tried out the technique with 'rue des Pages', a real street in the town of Flers, Normandy (see picture in the side-bar and this earlier post).
It works, but it is time-consuming. Thanks for the nice suggestion.
A few tips:
- uncheck ‘object causes wrap' in Wrap Inspector, otherwise the boxes will interfere with each other and letters will disappear.
- when arranging boxes press Command while moving them. This disables ‘snap to grids' function which gets in your way and may be very annoying.
You may want to do it this way if you have a favourite font. But I would also suggest trying to draw your own letters - do the whole alphabet! - and then copy-pasting them as objects and arranging them in a curving line. I've described how to in several previous posts, for example here, and on using various styles of shape frames to make letter here. Look here for a list of related posts. It may take the same amount of effort as doing it with text boxes.
A reader of this blog is asking: Let's say I made a shape with curves, but then I wanted to add more points to it, how do I do that?
This is how:
- press and hold Option (alt) key and move cursor over the border of the shape at the point where you want to add a new point - when the cursor turns into the little pen with a plus sign next to it click on the border and you get a new point - the point is a white circle with red border which means it is ready to be moved and to take part in changing your curves - when you finish click outside the shape. To delete a point just select it by clicking twice, slowly, not double-clicking, and when it turns white hit Backspace or Delete.
You may find that deleting points is more useful than adding new ones. When you create a Custom Shape with smooth curves, you may find that fewer points make it easier to achieve exactly the curve you want. On the other hand, when the shape must have a very particular contour, e.g. a map, adding more points does help.
Whenever I use draw tool I can't help but feel a little bit nostalgic. It reminds me of the technical drawing classes we had at school back in the early 70-s. We used to spend hours making complex curved shapes by connecting dots manually with a pencil and a tool called French curve(photo by Radomil Talk). By sliding the tool this way and that you had to find the right curve to connect three dots, then add another one, and again, looking for a connecting curve. Some of us were actually driven to tears... With computer aided design it's all but history. Still, even now I find that the skill learnt in those classes helps me, even though many of us thought it was completely useless.
It seems that many Pages users are simply unaware of the power that Draw Tool gives. It is not just curving lines you can create with it, with drawing tool you can do exactly what it says - draw. And 'write' too. In fact, you can create your own full alphabet in any language - and original cards and drawings. I have published several articles here on various uses of the drawing tool. With the holiday season approaching many of you will be looking for ways to do greetings projects. Pages is a fun tool to accomplish them - with all the family taking part.
Chattering classes debate these days which year was more important in recent history: 1979 or 1989? In 79 Mrs Thatcher came to power starting the new conservative 'revolution' that reversed the decline of the West, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan which brought about its implosion, Iranians toppled the Shah and seized American Embassy. In 1989 defeated Russia pulled out of Afghanistan, the Berlin Wall fell, Gorbachev and Reagan, encouraged by Mrs Thatcher struck far-reaching disarmament agreements and the Ayatollah declared a fatwa against British writer Salman Rushdi.
I myself think 79 was the beginning of 89, so was more important. But 89 was more fun.
And while I pondered, listening to John Lennon's 'Revolution Number Nine' (from the White Album), I doodled both dates in Pages'09.
Here's how.
Let's see how number 9 can be drawn in three dots:
1. Make a rough outline.
2. Under Format menu choose 'Shape>Soften path'. Sharp angles will turn into soft curves.
3. Moving red dots and curving handles shape the curving line into number nine. Use keyboard arrows to move dots point by point. To disable 'snap to guides' function press Command as you move dots.
4. When the line does look like number nine, choose the shape of your line in Graphic Inspector. Pages'09 offers a wider choice of lines/frames, than previous versions of iWork.
5. Now you can choose colour and thickness: click on the colour bar and then change point count to make the number thicker.
It may sound fiddly, but in practice drawing numbers, letters or other original shapes doesn't take very long and it gives enormous creative satisfaction.
You only have to create your own original set of numbers, 0 to 9, once. Save your Pages file and reuse the numbers when needed. To turn them into graphic elements use screenshots: Command+Shift+4.
Six and nine can be used as one - in Metrics Inspector flip nine vertically, then horizontally - and you get a six. Here is number 69 made of the same 9 we've just created.
