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Creating Spirographs with Microsoft Acrylic

by Geetesh Bajaj , November 23rd 2005

Here's how you can make a spirograph in Microsoft Acrylic:

1. Create a new document in Acrylic and draw any shape. For this tutorial, I selected the Ellipse tool (keyboard shortcut R) and drew a longish oval as you can see in Figure 1.
   
   Remember that the R shortcut key toggles between the ellipse and rectangle tools.
   
   
   Figure 1
   
   
2. Make sure that the oval has no fill attributes. This can be checked in the Paint Style palette as shown in Figure 2.
   
   
   Figure 2
   
   
3. Make sure your oval is selected, and them click on the Rotate tool (or activate it with the keyboard shortcut Shift+R) from the tool bar. Now click outside the oval area to set an anchor point as you can see in Figure 3.
   
   
   Figure 3
   
   
4. Once this anchor point has been determined, Go to Transformation palette (see Figure 4) and set the rotation angle. I set the rotation angle to 5 degrees and clicked on the duplicate button to create the graphic that you can see in Figure 5.
   
   
   Figure 4
   
   
   Figure 5
   
   
5. Keep clicking the Duplicate button on the Transformation palette to add more overlapping copies to complete your spirograph. Figure 6 shows the completed spirograph.
   
   
   Figure 6
   
   
6. Save your spirograph to a file.

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