Draw: the Basics

Tom Beeley presents a beginners' guide to the basic functions of RISC OS Draw

This article is supplementary to a practical tutorial on turning a photo into a drawing in Draw, and is intended to help you get to grips with some basic features of the Draw application.

If you are an absolute beginner, or you have forgotten all you knew about using Draw, do not despair! This article presents a group of twenty-six introductory interactive Draw file worksheets that will teach or remind you about, and give you some experience in using, the elementary facilities of the application. These pages will simply guide you through the toolbox icons, including:
  • Selecting and deselecting objects (both text and line-based) using the Select tool;
  • Drawing straight open lines, straight closed lines, open and closed Bézier curves, circles, ellipses, squares and rectangles (all referred to as line-based objects);
  • Moving selected objects by clicking and dragging;
  • Text manipulation, including: text colour, fonts, font size etc.

If you need a comprehensive introduction to Draw, then you should work your way through all the Draw files in the order they appear below. Just click on the 'Run' icon for each one in turn, and discard each file when you feel you have mastered the skill it concerns.

To get to grips with the particular techniques required in the accompanying tracing article, concentrate on the following pages: Holly and Holly Leaf; Page 9, Page 9(a), Page 9(b) and Page 9(c); Sprite 1, Trace 1 and Trace 1(a); and finally, Select 9(c) and Select 9(d).

Zip
See

Begin

Run  Introduction: selecting and deleting objects
Run  Page 1: the Straight Line tool
Run  Page 2: the Closed Straight Line tool
Run  Page 3: the Bézier Curve tool
Run  Page 3(a): the Select tool
Run  Page 4: the Closed Bézier Curve tool
Run  Page 5: the Ellipse tool
Run  Page 6: the Rectangle tool
Run  Page 7: the Text tool
Run  Page 8: the Select tool revisited
Run  Page 9: editing a straight line object: open and closed lines
Run  Page 9(a): editing a curved line object: open and closed curves
Run  Page 9(b): changing the shape of a line
Run  Page 9(c): drawing practice

Menus

Run  The font style menu (1): setting the font name and size
Run  The font style menu (2): setting the font height and colour
Run  The font style menu (3): more about setting font colours

Printing

Run  The Printing Area: setting the page size, shape and printable area
Run  Printing: the Print dialogue box and printer drivers

Sprites, Tracing and Grading

Run  Holly: explanation of how to create a holly leaf
Run  Holly Leaf: create your own holly leaf
Run  Sprite 1: what you can and cannot do with sprites, as opposed to drawn objects
Run  Trace 1: first steps in tracing sprites in Draw
Run  Trace 1(a): demonstration of the effects of tracing a sprite
Run  Select 9(c): the Select menu's Grade option
Run  Select 9(d): the Select menu's Grade option (continued)

Points to note:

  1. The tutorial pages presented here are extracted from a commercial tutorial package on Draw. Therefore, in some pages there may be occasional references to other pages or files which are not provided on this CD.
  2. Illustrations of the Draw toolbox on some pages were created using the RISC OS 2 version of Draw, and their appearance will not match the toolbox in the RISC OS 3 and 4 versions. However, the function and order of the tools in the toolbox is identical in all of Draw's revisions.

Draw Interactive Tutorial  

Interactive Draw Tutorial

Tom Beeley's Interactive Draw Tutorial is a comprehensive course which allows anyone to learn how to use Draw effectively. For more information, click the image to the left.