Touchdraw - getting started

OK I'm going to start with a dead simple exercise - drawing up a nine-patch block.  Just follow me step by step.  For those of you who have missed earlier posts, I am doing this on the £6 Touchdraw app for iPad.

1.   Tap on New Drawing.

2.   On the top toolbar, tap on the i in a circle icon which the big arrow is pointing to.


3.   Click on Units and Rulers (which the big arrow is pointing to).


4.   Tap on Inches.  I start every drawing in inches although you can convert a drawing later on if you forget.


5.   I am going to make a square and fill it with colour.  On this app, you can only fill shapes with colour so for a nine patch, we need to draw nine squares.  Tap on the square rectangle icon on the side toolbar.


6.  Drag your finger across the screen to make a square or rectangle.  My arrow is somewhat redundantly pointing at the square I have drawn.


7.   Once your square or rectangle has appeared, drag any of the blue circles to make it bigger, smaller, shorter, longer.  I have made a 3" square.  My arrow is pointing at one of the corners with the blue dots.


7.   I am going to fill it with colour.  Click on the square so that the iPad knows you want to fill it with colour.  When it is selected, it will have dots on the corners as in the photo above.  If instead it has a blue line around it, this means that you can move it but not change its shape.  To revert to being able to change its shape, click on the spanner on the top toolbar and toggle Easy Drag Mode to "Off".


9.   So your square is selected and now you want to colour it in.  Tap on the fill colour icon on the left sidebar.


8.   Pick a colour from Wheel, List or Favourites and toggle the Fill to "On" in the top right hand corner.


9.   I now want to remove the block border from the square so I once again tap on it to select it and then tap on the border icon in the side toolbar.


10.   Now toggle the Stroke box to "Off".  In this box, there are plenty of other attributes you can play around with to change the lines around your shapes.


11.   So we have one square and now I want to make 8 more.  You can either draw eight more repeating what you did above or you can duplicate the one you've already made.  To do this, tap on the square you have made so that it is selected and then tap on the dialogue box at the bottom of the side toolbar. 


12.   Tap on "duplicate" and a new square will appear.


Repeat until you have 8 new squares. 


13.   Slide the new squares around with your finger to arrange them in a nine patch.  If they keep changing shape when you slide them around, toggle "Easy Drag Mode" to "on" (see step 7 above).


14.   If there is not enough room on your screen, put two fingers on your screen (or a finger and thumb) and slide them towards each other to zoom out a bit.  Or slide them sideways to slide the picture sideways if needed.  To return any page to its full size, think of Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz clicking her heels together three times; tap three times on the screen and the picture will return to the centre of the screen, full size.  If your squares won't quite click together neatly, try zooming in a bit, more gridlines will appear and you should be able to make them line up perfectly.

15.   Now let's colour the nine patch in different colours.  I want to colour in four of the patches dark purple so I want to select them all in one go.  You can colour them in one by one by clicking on each one and picking a colour from the wheel, list or favourites from the fill box mentioned in step 9.  But to select more than one, touch and hold the side toolbar in the empty space below the letters and above the dialogue box.  It will change colour to red.  Leave your finger there and select the shapes you want to select.


You can select several shapes at once. 


I have now selected four of the squares and filled them with dark purple selected from the fill box in the same way I selected a colour for the first square.


16.   Ta Da you have a nine patch.  It's not much to look at by itself but by playing with "Select All" from the Dialogue Box, "Group" and "Duplicate", I can make a row of these boxes, duplicate the row to make a quilt of boxes and then add large rectangles which I put to the back of the drawing to add borders.  I'm not saying you all have to work out how to do all this at this stage but this paragraph might give you some ideas to go off and have a play and try to make something more with your nine patch.


17.   Next time, half square triangles.  And in the meantime, if you do make anything, I would love it if you would upload it to my Flickr group so I can see what you've made.  To do that, send it to photos using the little sending arrow icon on the right of the top toolbar then upload to Flickr using your favourite Flickr app.


18.   Please add questions as comments here and I will answer them or, if I can't, Jon from Touchdraw will help me to answer them.  And if any of you are already using this app and can see that I'm doing it the hard way, or have any great tips or would even like to guest post a tutorial, step right on up.

Comments

  1. Thank you so much for this tutorial. I am excited to try it once the app comes out for the mac.

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  2. Oh hell, I am going to need this now.

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  3. Wow, this is great. I'm buying the app today. So excited to follow along........thank you.

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  4. It’s actually a nice and useful piece of post. I am glad that you simply shared with us. Thanks!

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  5. Tech maven. You need some gingermonkey specs to solidify the geeky look that goes with your geeky skillz. I bet your kids are well impressed now, right? haha.

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  6. To quickly go back and forth from-to the Easy Drag Mode (without having to go to the menu item) you can just do a quick vertical drag on the bottom empty area of the left toll bar. This toggles it on and off. Easy peasy. :)

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  7. Wow if Churchill had found your diagrams during the war he wouldn't have known who to invade when.

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  8. I'm going to hijack Mr. R's iPad and download this app to try my hand at designing. I might be bugging you a lot!

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  9. Well shoot! Now I'm going to have to get an ipad! You are costing me money, girl!!

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  10. Interesting......very interesting.

    It $9 here in the states. I'll be reading the tutorials to see if this is something I might be able to do without chuckin my iPad out the window. I have an old version of EQ and if this works well it's a whooooole lot cheaper.

    Thanks for sharing your smarts :)

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  11. I will be hanging about airports today, and will play and see what I get. Thanks for the details.

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  12. Thank you for sharing your brain cells!

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  13. That was fun...this could be highly addictive.

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  14. Thank you sooooo much Lynne - cant wait to try it out. You got skillz!

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  15. Thank you, thank you, thank you! That seems much less confusing now, I am off to the app store...

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  16. This looks far better that MS Paint, which is what I've been using for quilting design and "patterning" purposes.

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  17. Brilliant, thank you! Bought the app yesterday and was actually reading instructions for once, now I can ditch them ;-)

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  18. Thanks for this! I wouldn't have known where to start but am enjoying myself so far. I have been looking for just this sort of program/app for drawing out blocks and ideas. Awesome.

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  19. waaaaah!!! I want an iPad!!!!!!

    ;-)

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  20. Very fun! I am going to have to fiddle around with it to get more comfortable, but I can tell that once I get the hang of it I will be a quilt desinging fool!

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  21. I purchased TD, and I designed the nine patch, but I'm clueless when it comes to getting onto my flickr account. Any hints? thanks

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  22. I spoke too soon, I just got it to upload, Thanks for the instructions, I'm loving this!

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  23. Awesome, easy peasy even for cotton heads.

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  25. monawildchild - you can find it in the top toolbar by tapping on the icon that looks like two pieces of paper to the right of the "i" sign.

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  26. This makes me want an iPad even more.

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  27. This is great, I am very jealous of all of this iPad fanciness! If anyone fancies an alternative I've just started using Inkscape - a free vector drawing program that's very similar to Adobe Illustrator. The bonus comes with being able to make pattern swatches out of an image of the fabric you might want to use. Cue hours of fun mixing and matching all my favourites!

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  28. Thanks Lyn, first lesson completed without too many problems. I managed to select and duplicate the nine patch but it all went a little haywire after that ! Ill see if I can load it to flikr so you can tell me where I went wrong

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  29. Thank you thank you thank you for doing this Lynne. I am going to take this lesson tonight. I had already bought the app and didn't know where to start.

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  30. Thanks for this! You've totally got me started. I find that if I have multiple things selected, I can't move them as a group. The X & Y Move thing is tedious. Is there a way to move multiple selected items with your finger, and I'm just doing it wrong?

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  31. Where do we find group? Got the nine patch done and then came to a grinding halt. :) Thanks for the tutorial.

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