Synopsis
Sometimes you don’t quite have the perfect image in ClipArt. Never fear! You can easily ungroup and mix and match shapes to create brand new custom images.
Video Script
Hey this is Bryan Jones from eLearningArt. Today I’m going to show you how you can ungroup clipart and change it to meet whatever your needs are. So let’s go ahead and get into this slide here. I’m in PowerPoint here. And let’s – let’s get a better zoom there. That looks good.
So basically everything on the left here is the clipart that I started with, and then what’s on the right here is how I ungrouped it and modified it. So here you’ll see I made it from the, you know, the chart going up to the chart going down. Here I actually changed the time on the clock.
And then here I actually ungrouped and then combined these two elements, or pieces of these two elements, to create this alien with the body. So let’s actually just throw away – well, let’s not throw it away, let’s move it. Let’s move everything off-screen. Okay.
So the first thing I want to do, let’s start with the bar chart. And I’m going to control D to duplicate it and drag it over here, and now I want to ungroup this – this clipart so that I could edit some of the – the pieces. So ungroup, yes, and you always have to do it twice, it’s just a weird thing. Ungroup. Okay.
So there are a ton of little elements here and we don’t – I want to keep the grid the same. So what I want to do is that I know that it’s a few different pieces. It’s the arrow head there and then the line. So let’s go ahead and click that, and control and click on this, make that a single shape. And I’m going to control G to group those, so now these are a single group.
And really all I want to do is flip it upside down. So if I go to format, and I just go to rotate, and I can flip it vertically, and there we go. And actually I changed it to red, and you can change the color. Nope, I don’t want to change the whole thing, there let’s make that red too. There.
And we could actually – we can change it a little bit, you know, drag it around. But I actually liked how it was, it was fine. So that’s a simple one. Let’s go ahead and move to the clock. And so let’s duplicate this clock, control D, let’s drag it over here, and the same thing we want to break it apart.
So control shift G, yes, control shift G again, to ungroup it. Now here’s an interesting thing, this didn’t do exactly what I wanted it to, and sometimes it’s not going to. This ended up as a single piece and not three individual elements, so what I did to change that was I actually just made that shape myself.
So I went to insert a shape, and let’s grab a circle, and if I hold shift, it will lock the aspect ratio, and we can make – that looks about right. And then I inserted another shape, I inserted a line, and now let’s draw that line there, looks good, and let’s duplicate the line, make this one a little shorter, like so. And then let’s duplicate this one, and we’ll actually put that down here.
And, you know, we can rotate it however you want to. But now, we need to make these – this one, and this one, a little thicker. So let’s right click, format object, line style, let’s just get the thickness up a little bit, that’s looking good, let’s take it to three, and call that good. Now we want to color everything black. So let’s make that black, and actually this circle I want to have – let’s format it, like a no line on that one.
Okay. And then we change the line colors to black and then we’re good. And then we can just, you know, take those, throw them in there, and maybe the sizing is not perfect but, you know, I can – I can tweak that. And that looks pretty good.
No, I like that to be a little bit longer. So let’s do that, and good enough, I can go back and tweak that. Really quickly, I want to get into this. Let’s go ahead and duplicate this. Control D, and we’re going to combine these shapes, so now control G – control shift G, ungroup, yes, control shift G, ungroup.
Let’s get rid of the shapes I don’t want. And let’s take this, duplicate it, control shift G ungroup, so that I can recolor it. And I’ll throw that head on there, let’s get – oops, get the clock out of the way. And turn it green.
[End of Audio]
