Synopsis
Learn how to save ClipArt drawings from PowerPoint into the vector EMF format.
Video Script
Hey this is Bryan Jones from eLearningArt. I’m just following up here. This is the second lesson on how to create clipart icons in PowerPoint. What I’ve shown you in the last lesson was how you can kind of trace over an image to create your own, and I ran out of time at the end there, and I felt like it was worthwhile showing you guys a couple of things.
One was how you can save out the icon so. A simple — a simple thing you can do is save it as a PNG, just copy and pasting the picture, or as an EMF. And I also wanted to show you how – why I choose simple style icons as well.
So let me just charge through this really quickly. So one of the things that we need to do is, this was created as a semi-transparent image, so that you can see the picture underneath as we drew it. Well we need to remove that and make it – get rid of the transparency again.
So fill, you’ll see the transparency, let’s go ahead and move that back to zero, and if – don’t forget those spokes were actually lines, so let’s go fix those individually. Or, sorry, as a group here. So let’s click on all of the things that were lines, okay.
Now we can format that, and you’ll see the line color, we had the transparency – I forgot to do that before and it messed up my EMF. So, now the transparency is zero. Now we have this and we can turn it black. So, let’s do the fill color as black for – for that. And let’s make the spokes black too, I could have done that in the last step but I forgot to.
And there we go. So now, you can just copy this, so copy and then you can paste it as a picture, and now it’s just a single object here. But that’s going to be a PNG, you won’t be able to scale it all the way up. The other thing you can do is – let’s get rid of this. Let’s save as picture, and let’s call that – well you can save it as a PNG, but we’re going to do it as – as an EMF.
And we’ll call it bike three. And let me then insert that image, and you see bike three, now it’s actually going to be fully scalable. And, again, now that you’ve saved this out, you can do the same thing with ungrouping. Control shift G, yes, control shift G to ungroup.
Remove this top part and, you know, you can turn – you can turn the bike frame different colors and it gives you some flexibility there. So I hope that helped you out. But one other thing I wanted to tell you is, I think the problem when you go out and you – you find an icon style you like, if you pick something that is complicated, you might get yourself stuck where you’re going to have to hire a graphic designer to do all the editing.
So picking simple styles is – is a good thing to do. So, you know, I really like doing this simple black 2D style where I can then recolor them to fix them. So I have all my people, icons, and navigation, and things that can be landscapes, and web icons, and transportation. And then if I had to go modify some of these, I can do a little bit on my own just with recoloring, or – or drawing a simple object myself like with we just did with that bike there.
I also really like the – the hand-drawn style as well, and this is done as clip art. This is not as easy to re-draw within PowerPoint, but again it’s simple, and if you had to hire somebody to do that you could. So anyways, there’s some advantages to thinking simple things beyond just creating new icons. It’s also, it’s representative of what the object is.
You know, this is a phone and you’re not messing around. This is a bar chart, it’s clear what these things are. So a couple of advantages to picking simple styles, but , you know, it’s a personal preference of what you want to do with the styles you choose.
Hope you found that useful. I have a whole bunch of lessons on clipart, and icons, and recoloring, and animating. So check out eLearningArt.com to see more of those, or – or the YouTube channel that I have. Thanks so much. Have a good day.
