Making Simple Shapes: Star, Cloud, and Sun

Cloud, Star, Sun

Here are some more simple shapes that you can make on Muzy.

Star

What did your teacher stick on your paper when you got an A? A gold star, of course. Muzy is a gold-star kind of place. So let’s look at how to make a simple star. Read the rest of this entry »

Making Simple Shapes: Heart and Flower

Want “stickers” to put on your photograph? Why don’t you make your own custom one? After all, what is collage but a super-sticker machine? Here are some simple iconic objects that you can make in Muzy collage to stick anywhere, using a little shading and a few simple 2-dimensional shapes.

Heart

Let’s start at the “heart” of things, as it were. Hearts are everywhere. There are plenty of hearts on Muzy, but why not make your own? Personally, I prefer the swirling, free-style hearts that are off-center and tumbling over themselves toward something amazing… but let’s start with a balanced, geometric heart. Read the rest of this entry »

Making Simple Shapes: Three Dimensional Shapes

3-D Shapes by 1918underwood

Three dimensional shapes are the real-life objects we see around us every day. This is the world that we interact with: height, width, and depth. If you can draw simple three-dimensional shapes, you’ve got the building-blocks of drawing the three-dimensional world.

Cubes and Rectangular Solids

A cube or rectangular solid is like an extension of a square or rectangle into three dimensions. Rectangular solids surround us: buildings, filing cabinets, stereos. Read the rest of this entry »

Making Simple Shapes: Two Dimensional Shapes

All Around by bldalton. Click to view.

Simple shapes are great additions to Muzy. After all, every complex shape is made up of simple ones… Here are some tips and ideas about making simple shapes.

Straight Lines

Lines are the simplest shape, aren’t they? They’re useful for so many things. Of course, drawing a line is as simple as putting down your brush and moving it on the canvas.

A straight line is a little tougher. On Muzy, you can draw a straight line by holding down ctrl (or command on the Mac) before you start drawing. You can also hold down shift to lock your line into 15 degree increments. This lets you draw a straight line at a perfect angle, if you desire it. Read the rest of this entry »

How to Make a Cylinder out of a Gradient

Basic shapes are good for collaging, because they can be used in many different ways to construct a more complicated picture. A cylinder is one useful basic shape… it can be a shower rod, or a cane, or a table leg, or a coffee cup.

The collaging tool on Muzy makes creating a shaded cylinder simple. All you need is a gradient, which you can make yourself or find premade on Muzy. By resizing a larger gradient, you can get a perfectly shaded area, without having to painstakingly make a consistent gradient over a small area. Here are the easy instructions to make a cylinder in Muzy, using an existing gradient. Read the rest of this entry »

How to Shade a Sphere

Here is a shaded sphere drawn in Muzy… It’s actually not too difficult to draw. Just start with a circle. One of the benefits of Muzy is that you can make a circle by choosing a large brush and just making one dot on the canvas.

Once you make a circle with your darkest color, it’s time to start shading. In this case, I used white, with a low opacity (10%). Starting with the highlight, I colored a small area… then colored a larger area over it… and so on, so that I had rough shading, starting at the highlight and getting darker toward the edges of the sphere. Read the rest of this entry »