cartoon you!

Making a cartoon you!

Believe it or not, I made this from shapes in powerpoint. The art of shape and clipart manipulation is just a matter of patience and practice – like all worthy endeavors!

Now I am going to break down my picture, to show you some ways to get creative with clipart!

Start with a head! And it doesn’t have to be perfectly round. Next are the features. Zooming in helps with the smaller features,

**tip, choose an object before zooming or it zooms into the center

or you can enlarge the shapes to see them better.

**tip, if you want to make a bunch of separate shapes bigger or smaller, group them so they stay put (under "Arrange").

For the eyes, I use white circles or ovals, colored circle irises to match my eyes, and black pupils – **tip, when choosing a color, play with the spectrum of custom colors.

The eyelids are chords and the eyebrows are arcs, outlined in a little darker shade.

**tip, the yellow squares help you choose the length of the curve.

The lashes are tiny arcs.

**tip, once you make one eye, group it and copy it and  flip it (under "Arrange").

The nose is a scribble, the mouth another arc. The neck is a rectangle, or a pentagon if your shirt will be a v-neck.

**tip, group after completing a step to make the next step easier.

The hair is the hardest…

I used the chord for the larger piece behind the head and lots of moon shapes for wisps and accents - I highlighted the shapes to show you...

**tip, you may have to play with the "bring to front" or "send to back" to get stubborn pieces to lay right, just like in real life!
And finally, the accessories.

My glasses are rounded rectangles, lines and an arc. The shirt is the “flowchart delay” shape.

**tip, to get a fancy fill, right click on the object, format picture, fill, click on clipart and type in what you are looking for, denim, pattern, flowers, etc.

To make any clipart into a blog-ready picture,

•make sure it is grouped

•right click, choose “Save as Picture”

•if you have a photoshop program, you can check it out and crop as needed.

These are basic, basic instructions - so if you have any questions you can leave them in the comments or email me. Or you could just ask for one =) taratylertalks at g mail dot com.