Lesson video

Hi, my name is Jordan Bickel, and this is lesson five of six of vector drawings.

In this lesson, you're going to be learning about manipulating objects.

You're going to need parent or carer permission to use their Google account to access Google Drawings.

Now, find a quiet place with limited distractions where you can do your best work.

Pause the video here until you're comfortable, and then press play to continue.

In this lesson, you will group objects to make them easier to work with.

To do this, we're going to first copy part of a drawing by duplicating several objects, and then we're going to group to create a single object.

Finally, we'll reuse a group of objects to further develop your vector drawing.

What could you do if you wanted several copies of these images? Pause the video here, to have a quick think.

You may have said something like you could copy and paste the image to make duplicates.

And in this lesson, we're going to have a closer look at how you can do that.

What went wrong? Below is a vector drawing of a house, and then next to it, I've tried to duplicate the image.

Have a quick thing of what could have gone wrong.

So when trying to duplicate the image, it's possible that when I tried to copy and paste the house, I only selected the roof.

And so on the right hand side, you could see I still only have the roof, and I haven't actually duplicated the house itself.

So now let's take a look at how you can copy and paste on Google Drawings.

Google Drawings demonstration, selecting all objects in a drawing.

To select all the objects in my drawing, I'm going to click my mouse just on a blank space, near the shapes I want to select.

And then I'm going to still click and drag until this blue box is surrounding all of the objects that I want to select.

when I unclick my mouse, you'll see now that all of these objects are selected.

In the example below, you could see I've copied and pasted all of the objects in the vector drawing of a house.

This has created many duplicates of that picture.

However, when I moved the first house, you can see it all moved together as one object.

But then when I tried to move the second house, only the roof moved.

Now this can be quite frustrating.

To prevent this from happening, we use something called grouping.

Grouping, to group objects, you need to first select all the shapes.

To do this, you click and drag to select them all, and then right click on that.

Then you'll see the option to group.

Once all the shapes or objects are grouped together, you can copy and paste them, rotate them, and resize them all at the same time.

Google Drawings demonstration, grouping.

Once I've selected all the objects, I can group them to make one object.

So while all the shapes are still selected, I'm going to right click my mouse.

And then here, you'll see, I have the option to group.

So when I click this, you'll see now all of this blue outlines are gone, and my lion is just one shape or one object.

And now when I move it, all of the objects move together.

So now I know that they are grouped.

Task one, grouping and copying.

In this task, you're going to be practising grouping and copying.

First, you'll need to open up a drawing that you've made in a previous lesson.

Then click file and select new.

Next, you're going to group the objects together, and then copy and paste them in the new drawing, so you have more than two.

Let's have a closer look at how you'll do this.

Using the worksheet, complete the grouping and copying activity.

Pause the video to complete your task.

Press play when you're ready to continue.

Task two, making changes to copies.

Would everything look the same? If you had three buildings, animals, or plants, what would you expect to be different? You might think that you could change the colour, or possibly resize them and make them larger or smaller.

Let's have a look at some examples.

In the example below, you could see that the sheep has been duplicated, and then the body has actually been made larger.

To do this, you first need to ungroup the shape, so you can manipulate only the body.

And then after that, you want to make sure to group all of the objects together again.

In this example, you could see the parrot has been duplicated, and then some of the colours have been changed.

To do this, again, you need to ungroup the objects first, to change only specific shapes.

And then when you finish changing the colours, you need to regroup all of the shapes or objects back together again.

In this final example, you could see that a tree has been duplicated and then actually flipped.

To do this, you could select to rotate, and then choose the option flip.

This is a good way to make animals look the other way, or to give the same exact tree, a different look.

Google Drawings demonstration, grouping, ungrouping, and flipping objects.

Now that I've made duplicates of my lion, I can start to manipulate different parts of it to give a different effect for each one.

So I'll separate my lions here.

And the first thing I'm going to do is I might just make them slightly smaller.

So they're all grouped together still.

So I'm able to make these changes all at once.

And now if I wanted to make some changes to each individual lion, I'll have to first ungroup them.

So I'll right click and select ungroup.

And now I'm back to having all the individual objects so I can make changes if I want to.

So, one thing I might change is, maybe the mane colour here.

So unclick, and I can just click on the main, and I could perhaps make that one just slightly darker to give a bit of a different look from the other lions.

And I'll copy that for all of the fur here, so it matches.

And when I'm finished making changes to this lion, I'm going to click and drag again to select all of the objects, and then I'll right click and press group.

So now you can see one of my lions has a darker mane.

If you want, you can also just change the size of one of the objects.

So you've seen that since they're all grouped together, I can make the whole lion larger at once, or undo that go back to size.

Similar to the sheep example we looked at, I can ungroup, and then select one of the shapes to make them larger just to give a bit of variation to my lions.

So now you can see I've got a bit of a larger lion there.

Maybe he's not chasing after his prey as much.

And then now that I've finished making my changes, I'm going to right click and group them back together again.

If you forget to do this, you're going to get in one of those situations where you try to move it, but it doesn't quite move the way you want to.

And only one of the objects moves, which can be quite frustrating.

So just remember that to group them back together when you're finished.

And then finally we can also flip or rotate the object.

So I could spin one of my lions on its head or even sideways.

Don't really want to do that, undo.

But I could flip it to make it look like it's facing the other direction.

So this one's still grouped.

And I do not need to ungroup at this time.

And so I'll right click and go to rotate.

And I want to flip this horizontally.

And so now looks like my lion is facing the other way.

And for some reason, I feel like I should make this just a little small lion, maybe a baby, even though I don't think a baby lion would have a mane, but it's just giving more variation to my picture.

These are different ways that you can make changes to vector drawings you've created.

Task two, making changes to copies.

Look at the copies that you created in your new Google Drawings in task one.

Can you make the following changes so they don't look the same? So first look at changing how big or small they are, and then you can look at changing colours of different parts of the vector drawing.

And finally, try to use the flip function to show something looking the other way.

Remember, after you've ungrouped your vector drawing to make changes, you always need to regroup it afterwards.

Using the worksheet, complete the activity on Google drawings.

Pause the video here to complete your task.

Press play when you're ready to continue.

Google Drawings demonstration, adding a background.

To complete our vector drawing, we're going to add the background.

In Google Drawings, you're able to search for images, but you'll need permission from a parent or carer before doing so.

To search for a background, we'll first press insert, and then we'll press image.

And we're going to search the web.

So here, you could see I've already searched for lion habitat backgrounds.

And now I can just scroll down the images here that have already come up, and I'm going to try and find one that doesn't already have a lion in it.

So here you could see is a nice background.

There's not many other animals in it, so I've clicked on it, and now I'll just insert.

And you could see a beautiful line habitat here, but now all of my lines have gone missing! So remember we need to use layers here.

And so I want to take my background, and I'm going to send it all the way to the back layer.

So I've right-clicked, and I'm going to go to order, and send straight all the way to the back.

And my lions are back.

So now you can, is the fun part.

You kind of place your lions to give the desired effect that you want.

So I'm going to keep my small, little baby lion here, my cub with the mane.

And I've decided this might be a family here, a little family, make it a bit smaller.

'Cause they kind of look like giant lions.

Oops, now you could say maybe he's a bit too narrow, so I could just drag him this way again so it looks a bit more natural.

And then even here you could see how layering is used to make it look like they're together.

And now this bigger lion here, larger lion, since he's in the background, to kind of give that effect of him being far off in the distance.

I'm just going to make him a lot smaller, and then place him back on the ground, there we go.

And then I can also do the same for this lion here.

I can make him a bit smaller, bring him back down to earth.

Oops, oh, here you can see this one is not actually grouped.

So I'll undo that, and then I can just drag, and see that blue box there, so I can select all the objects.

I've accidentally selected the background, so I'll press control on my keyboard, and then click the background.

So now I've only selected that lion.

And I'll right click and just group, oh, looks like maybe he was already grouped.

Right, so now I have my small lion here.

Well, a bit larger than the other small one.

But he's also looking the other way, and it kind of like, I've got that one looking the other way so I can remember flip this one, so he's facing the other direction.

And I flipped him horizontally.

And now I'm quite happy with that overall effect.

And I would say my vector drawing is finished.

Task three, adding a background.

In this final task, you'll be adding a background to the drawing you've been working on.

This will help make your drawing look more realistic.

Don't forget to send to back in the layers.

Using the worksheet, add a background to your drawing on Google Drawings.

Pause the video here to complete your task.

Press play when you're ready to continue.

Here are a few examples on how backgrounds can be used to add more detail to vector drawings.

Below you could see the example of a house that we made in lesson one.

This has been duplicated, and then ungrouped, and all of the doors have been made a different colour.

And then finally, a background of a sky has been added.

In this example, you could see the sheep have been flipped on their axis to be looking in different directions.

And they've also been resized.

So they've been made smaller, and put farther in the background of a field.

And in this final example, you could see a background of a rainforest has been added, and the parrots have been resized and flipped on their axis.

You've reached the end of lesson five.

If you'd like to, please ask your parent or carer to share your work on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter, tagging Oak National and #LearnwithOak.

I'll see you next time.