Creating the Frame

You wouldn’t build a house without first building the frame, and the same principle holds for little cubes. Once you have the frame, you can literally snap the objects onto it. Get ready for some more dragging and duping.

	NOTE There are three different places where you can enter this exercise. You can easily start from scratch, or you can download cube.cdr from the Sybex Web site. Page 1 of that drawing includes the basic elements and Page 2 shows the finished drawing.

1.  In an untitled drawing, drag one vertical guideline onto the page by clicking and dragging on the vertical ruler. Save the drawing, giving it any name you want.

2.  From View, check the status of Snap to Guidelines. If it is not checked, then turn it on.

3.  With the Rectangle tool, create a perfect square by holding Ctrl while dragging. Position the square so that its right side is touching the guideline.

4.  Switch to the Pick tool and click a second time on the square to see its rotation handles (you might have to click right on the outline).

When you select an object and click on it again, DRAW takes you into a “rotation mode” in which you can rotate or skew an object by dragging the handles that are around the periphery.

5.  Click on the middle-left rotation handle (the vertical arrows) and drag up approximately 20 degrees. The rotation value in the property bar will tell you after each action how much skew you have introduced; you want it to read approximately 340. You don’t need to be exact.

You have now created one side of the cube, and now you’ll use the first side of the cube as the basis for creating the other two sides. Here goes:

6.  Click again on the square (it’s now actually a parallelogram); the regular selection handles return.

7.  Click on the same middle-left handle, hold Ctrl, and drag the square across the guideline to the other side.

8.  While still holding down Button 1, tap Button 2 once.

9.  Now release Button 1.

This is a variation of the drag-and-dupe maneuver that we introduced in Chapter 3. We guess it would be called flop-and-dupe. Anchored by the right side, the duplicated square flopped right over across the original, leaving two perfectly symmetrical parallelograms.

Next, to create the top side, you will follow the contours of the first two sides, and that means you need another type of snap: Snap to Objects.

10.  Go to View Ø Snap to Objects and click on it if it is not already activated.

11.  Activate the Freehand tool from the toolbox (or press F5) and place your cursor near the top-left corner of the left square. Because of Snap to Objects, all you have to do is get close.

12.  Click once and follow the square to the bottom-right corner. As you move nearer, your cursor should snap to the corner. When it does, release the mouse.

13.  Click on the Pick tool (or press the spacebar) to select your new line segment. Because it follows the contour of the square precisely, you’ll only see the line’s selection handles, not the line itself.

Now you want to perform half of the flop-and-dupe—just the flop part—to mirror this line above:

14.  Hold Ctrl and drag the lower-middle handle above the line until it snaps into its mirrored position. Then release the mouse.

15.  Now flop and dupe this line segment from its left to its right to complete the cube. Deselect to get a good look.

You know that this cube is proportionally correct because the second and third faces were created from the shape of the first side. Drag-and-dupe and flop-and-dupe were the featured performers.

16.  Drag a marquee across the entire cube and go to Arrange Ø Combine to turn them all into one curve.

Creating the Sides of the Cube

The three sides to the cube are nothing more than squares with letters inside of them, and we doubt you need to be led step by step through this part. Create the first one (hold Ctrl to ensure that it is a perfect square), assign a color to it, and remove the outline. Now use drag-and-dupe to create a second, and Repeat (Ctrl+R) to make a third. Don’t worry about their positions; any empty part of the screen will do. Finally, make each square a different color.

Next, create three separate text strings, each with one letter. (We used A-B-C and chose three totally different typefaces.) Size each letter so that it fills out the square. Finally, group each letter with its square. Here is what ours looked like.

You’ll note that we turned off the guideline (View Ø Guidelines) as we no longer needed it. We also could have simply selected it and deleted it. Now follow these steps to assemble the cube:

1.  Make sure that Snap to Objects is still activated.

2.  Select the first square and move it next to one of the sides of the cube.

3.  Go to Effects Ø Add Perspective. When you do, the selection handles around the square will give way to four nodes, one at each corner, just as you saw previously in this chapter.

4.  Take one of the nodes and drag it until it snaps to the corresponding corner of the cube. As you do, the square and letter will distort severely. That’s okay. In fact, it’s expected.

5.  Snap the other three nodes onto the corners of the same side of the cube. To snap the fourth one into place, you might have to drag it all the way into the middle first, so you can see the corner, and then snap it to the corner.

6.  Repeat steps 2 through 5 for the other two sides of the cube.

7.  When you are done, you may want to delete the frame or change its outline to a light shade of gray, or to another color.

We consider this to be one of the ideal uses for the Add Perspective command. With it, you can take simple shapes and figures and add realistic dimension to them.