Although most people think of PowerPoint as a slide program, it's also a great drawing program that can in many ways be more easier to use than
full-fledged illustration programs. Agreed, PowerPoint is not that full-featured as far as drawing goes, but sometimes quick and easy is all you
need! In this tutorial, you will learn how to draw a tree with just two simple shapes in PowerPoint 2010:
- Create a new presentation, or just add a new slide to any
existing presentation. Make sure that it uses either the Blank or Title Only slide layout (see
Changing Slide Layouts in PowerPoint 2010).
- Select the Insert tab of the Ribbon and click the
Shapes button. This opens the Shapes gallery that you can see in Figure 1 - in this gallery select the Rectangle
shape (highlighted in red in Figure 1).
Figure 1: Rectangle shape selected within Shapes gallery- Place the cursor on your slide and click once to insert a Rectangle
(actually a square). Now, resize it into a vertical rectangle which
looks fairly like the trunk of a tree (see Figure 2).
Figure 2: Rectangle shape resized to match the trunk of a tree- Now, open the Shapes gallery once again and select the Cloud shape as shown highlighted in red in Figure 3.
Figure 3: Cloud shape selected within Shapes gallery- Place the cursor on the top of the tree trunk you just created, and click once to place a cloud shape -- you'll notice that the cloud looks like
the top part of a tree! Resize it so that the resulting drawing looks
like a tree, as shown in Figure 4.
Figure 4: A rectangle and a cloud is all you need to draw a tree- Now, change the fill color of the trunk to
brown and that of the top-of-the-tree to green, as shown in Figure 5.
Figure 5: Fill colors of the shapes changed to match a tree- After changing the fill colors, group both the shapes. Now
you can remove outline from both the shapes in the group.
Your tree drawing is now ready, as you can see in Figure 6.
Figure 6: Tree drawing is ready after removing outlines- Save your presentation often.
Tip: Try using different shapes other than the cloud to create other types of trees -- you can use any of the triangles, and use the
oval tool to create circles, ovals, and even thin Popsicle like top-of-the-tree green shapes. You can also combine multiple triangles to create a
conifer tree (see Figure 7).
Figure 7: Conifer tree drawn using rectangle and triangle shapes
Sample PowerPoint Presentation
Click below to view on Slideshare
