Fun at Play

One of my favorite Christmas presents as a child was a spirograph. The spirograph kit included a drawing board, a handful of plastic disks and some round paper. If I remember correctly, you put a pencil point through holes in the disks and then spun it around on the paper. The result was a "way cool," totally useless piece of paper with spirals drawn all over it. The downside of the kit was that it came with a very limited number of precut papers. Once the paper supply was depleted (after the first 3 minutes of play,) you had a bunch of useless plastic disks. These would eventually be strategically scattered around the house--attracting and slicing bare feet late at night. They made good ninja stars too.

There is a little trick you can do in Illustrator that lets you draw designs that remind me of those old spirographs. And, since it is done in Illustrator--you never run out of paper!

You can use any of the basic drawing tools, but my favorite is the Star Tool.

• Choose a Stroke color
• Choose No Fill
• Click on the drawing tool you want to use.
• As you begin drawing your shape, hold down the ~ key. (This should be at the top left of your keyboard, directly under the Esc key. I have never had any call to use this key for anything other than this. Do you suppose it was created for this one purpose?)
• Slowly move the drawing tool around on the page while you continue holding down the ~.
• This will create some 22 billion shapes in about 2 seconds, so unless you want your computer to explode, don't get carried away with it.

If you want to get fancy, use more than one color.

• Open the Layers Palette (Windows>Layers).
• Expand the layer by clicking on the little triangle to the of the layer.
• You should see a ton of separate sublayers. Select some of the sublayers by clicking on the small targets to the right of the sublayers. Hold down the Ctrl. key if you want to select more than one at a time.
• Use the swatches palette to change the stroke color for the select sublayer objects.

If this just seems like too much trouble, but you would kind of like to play around with a spirograph, try playing with the digital spirograph here.

Can anyone tell me how I applied the gradient to the spiro at the top of the page? There is a trick to it!