Google Drawing was added to the Google suite of tools in 2010, but I have found this tool has not made it into the mainstream for many users. The name may be part of the problem as many people assume it is just a “drawing” program. Google Drawing can be so much more! In fact, it can take care of most of your image needs.
Often students and teachers want an quick and easy way to place text over a picture for projects. There are many programs out there that can handle this task but many (like photoshop, illustrator, and gimp) are way too complicated. Google Drawing fills this void. To illustrate this let’s look at the graphic I used in my post about using Evernote on field trips:
In this picture there are three things happening: The main picture of Mount Helena, the text overlay stating “Field Trips with”, and finally the Evernote graphic logo. This was all put together using Google Drawing in about one minute. Let’s take a look at how this worked….
How To:
First make sure you have a Google Account. Once logged in, go to your Google Drive.
In your Google Drive, click on the button and choose Drawing.
In your Drawing, click the add picture button:
I already had saved my picture of Mount Helena to my desktop, so I just need to browse my desktop and open:
Now my image of Mount Helena has been added to my drawing area and I am ready to add text over the top by click the Textbox button:
As with any text, you can change the Font, Color, Style to achieve the look you want. After I set my text, one more click on Add Image and I grabbed the Evernote logo that was on my desktop. Under the “Arrange” menu you can send pictures forward or back to make your layout work the way you want. Each picture can be resized or rotated by clicking and dragging on on of the corners of the image (use the circle to rotate the image)
You may have noticed the checkered background behind the images. That is the canvas area and it needs to be resized to only be as large as my imported image. If you don’t resize the canvas background your image will have a big space before or after that will cause you problems when you work with the image later. To resize the canvas, click and drag the bottom right corner of the canvas to the edge of your picture. This will make the saved image the size of the imported picture and the new image will act as expected when you use it with text.
After resizing the background canvas you can export the image as a .jpeg and use it anywhere. Remember copyright implications when working with pictures.
As always, share your thoughts in the comment section below…