Creating Spirographs with Microsoft Acrylic
Reviewed: Geetesh Bajaj
Date Created: November 23rd 2005
Last Updated: February 21st 2009
Here's how you can make a spirograph in Microsoft Acrylic:
- Create a new document in Acrylic and draw any shape. For this
tutorial, I selected the Ellipse tool (keyboard shortcut R) and
drew a longish oval as you can see in Figure 1.
Remember that the R shortcut key toggles between the ellipse and rectangle tools.
Figure 1
- Make sure that the oval has no fill attributes. This can be
checked in the Paint Style palette as shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2
- Make sure your oval is selected, and them click on the Rotate
tool (or activate it with the keyboard shortcut Shift+R) from
the tool bar. Now click outside the oval area to set an anchor
point as you can see in Figure 3.
Figure 3
- Once this anchor point has been determined, Go to Transformation
palette (see Figure 4) and set the rotation angle. I set the rotation
angle to 5 degrees and clicked on the duplicate button to create
the graphic that you can see in Figure 5.
Figure 4
Figure 5
- Keep clicking the Duplicate button on the Transformation palette
to add more overlapping copies to complete your spirograph. Figure
6 shows the completed spirograph.
Figure 6
- Save your spirograph to a file.
