To begin our cube we must first draw up an outline. When drawing your outline, think of it as a 2D square, skewed into a 3D perspective. Draw one side of your cube using the lines that we have discussed before. This is done using vertical lines for the sides of the cube and the angled lines for the top and bottom edges. You can see below my completed side for my cube.

Figure 1.8

As you can probably see, I have included the middle line of the shape so I can line up the mirrored piece in a moment. Now once you have got your side done and you are happy with it; drag a selection around the image using the selection tool as shown below.

Figure 1.9

Next go up to the edit menu and select copy. Alternatively you can simple press the keyboard shortcut of ctrl+c. Once you have done this you will need to change the masking options for your copied selection. This is achieved by clicking on the second icon which looks like a bunch of shapes on a yellow background, with a floating selection. As you can see the floating selection does not have a white background like the alternate icon above it. This simply means that and colours in your selection that contain your current background colour on the palette, will appear transparent. Below I have highlighted the mask selection box that you need to select, with a red circle.

Figure 2.0

Ok now that we’re past the tedious part of mirroring and getting your selection backgrounds transparent, we can focus on creating the rest of our cube. Let’s start by again viewing the edit menu, but this time selecting paste instead of copy. Again alternatively there is a keyboard shortcut that saves you having to use the mouse, pasting something on to your canvas is simple a matter of pressing ctrl+v. Okay, after you have pasted a cloned image of your selection should appear on the canvas. Do not click anywhere on the canvas once you have this floating selection, or you’ll have to undo the process (ctrl+z) and start all over again. Below you can see my floating selection of the cube side I copied and pasted on to my canvas.

Figure 2.1

Right, now we are going to move the selection across to the other side of the cube that is already drawn up. Hopefully your white background is transparent and the only things visible and moving are the lines that make up the side of the cube. Once the selection is positioned we will need to flip it so it mirrors the other side of our cube outline. To mirror the selection we select the Image menu and then select the option Flip/Rotate (shortcut ctrl+r). A popup menu should appear as shown in the example image below.

Figure 2.2

Now we want to only flip our selection horizontally so we make sure that the horizontal option is selected. Once done click the ok button and you should return to the canvas with the selection mirrored and ready to be joined to the rest of the cube. To do this simply move the selection across so the middle line overlaps the middle line of the already made side. Well done, you’ve (hopefully) just completed your first outline for a basic isometric cube. It should look something similar to the image below.

Figure 2.3

Once we have the outline completed it’s time to colour or cube. Let’s use a nice green for this cube. In order to create a sense of 3D within the picture different shades of the same colour are used to create a light source. A light source is simple where the main directional light would be shining from, with the appropriate shadows, light and darkness to follow. For this example our light will be shining from the upper top left of our canvas as shown below. Please note that you don’t actually need to draw on your light source as I have done in my example. You can if it helps though but it won’t be there in the final product.

Figure 2.4

The light source is always up to you but in most of my work it usually is in the upper top left of my canvas (we will cover this in a later chapter). Now we can select our green colour. We can do this in many ways, one of the easiest being simply selecting the colour green from the pre-defined palette on the bottom toolbar. Asides from being too bright this green is extremely ugly and over the top. We need to dull it down a bit, but not too much as to have a faded appearance (well you could use the faded look, it’s really up to you.) Let’s now double click on the light green (almost neon) colour from our palette at the bottom of the screen. I have again outlined the step in a red circle below.

Figure 2.5

Upon doing this a popup menu box should appear like below. It contains a whole series of boxes, each containing the default colours. We want to use the advanced options to alter our colour so we need to click on the ‘define custom colours’ button at the bottom of the popup menu. This will widen the popup and you now should have a large colour selection box consisting of all the colours you could imagine! See below for what your screen should look like by now.

Figure 2.6

To change our default ugly green to a nicer green colour we need to drag the small crosshair shape that is currently up the top of the palette. It is here by default because we have selected the ugly green colour before-hand. If we were to select a different colour it would appear in a different place. To change our colour we need to affectively alter the hue and saturation of it. The hue of our colour is the actual colour we see, whether it be red, green blue etc. The saturation is how much of the colour is retained before it simple fades and you are left with a black or grey colour. The more saturation the brighter your colour, the less and obviously the darker and washed out it is going to be. To get our colour that we want to use for our cube we simple drag the crosshair to about the middle of the palette, still staying within the green colour sections. You can make your green a lot more natural looking by adding some yellow to it. This is done by dragging the cross hair into the part of the palette where green meets yellow. Remember to achieve this colour you will always need more green colour than yellow. Below you can see where I have positioned my crosshair. I wanted a more natural green colour for my cube; you can choose what you want to use it doesn’t really matter. Once you have decided on a colour make it a bit darker using the side vertical bar that shows your colour. To do this, simply drag the slider down until the colour is dark enough.

Figure 2.7

Now that we have our colour chosen click the ok button and it should appear as your foreground colour in the little foreground/background box next to the colour palette. Now we can simply get our fill tool (the little paint bucket being tipped over) and click within the right hand side of our cube. The colour should fill the white part within the lines with our colour we just created. As it is the darkest side of the cube (remember our light source), it needs to be a tad darker than the other sides. The opposite side (left side) needs to be lighter than the right side so we repeat the colour process but this time we don’t touch the actual colour selection part but jump in and adjust the brightness of our colour so it is brighter than our colour we used before. Once this is done fill the other side of the cube. Repeat this process of filling with colour to the top of the cube, making the colour even lighter than the left-hand side colour. Now you should have something similar to below.

Figure 2.8