Designing the Desk Tidy Back

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Creating a sketched drawing around a picture

  1. Scan and save a copy of the image you are going to use for the background (eg in Corel Photopaint)
  2. Open Pro/DESKTOP
  3. From the File menu select New
  4. Choose Drawing
  5. Select OK
  6. Accept the default settings
  7. Maximise the screens
  8. Choose Insert Object from the Edit menu
  9. Select the Create from File and Link options and Browse to your background image
  10. Select OK 
  11. If required, resize to fit the image using the corner points of the image
Transferring the sketch to the computer


  1. Choose the Create Spline tool.
  2. Carefully draw around the curved areas of your design in a series of curves - be sure to start each new section exactly on the end of the last section you drew - a small black rectangle will indicate that you are starting in the right place
  3. Use the Create Straight tool to add the straight edge sections (Tip: Hold down the Shift key as you draw to keep the line vertical or horizontal)
  4. Check that your sketch is valid ie is a continuous closed series of lines by choosing Filled from the pop-up menu for the sketch in the Drawing Browser
  5. If the sketch now appears filled, everything is OK and you can unfill the sketch in the same way
  6. From the Edit menu choose Select All to select all the lines in the sketch
  7. From the Line menu choose Move to Design...
  8. Choose New Design and Workplane 'frontal'
To re-scale the sketch to the correct size
  1. Measure the length of the base line by selecting Dimension from the Tools > New Measurement menu
  2. In your drawing window, click on the base line to select it and its measurement will appear in the Value box
  3. Use the calculator to find a suitable scale value to change this size to 150mm (divide 150 by the measured value)
  4. To resize the sketch choose Select All from the Edit menu
  5. Then choose Transform > Scale from the Edit menu
  6. Enter the scale factor from the calculator - select OK
  7. Your sketch should now be the correct size
To create a solid feature from this sketch

  1. Choose the Extrude Profile tool from the Features toolbar
  2. Ensure that the Sketch to use as profile box is set to use the sketch created above
  3. In the dialogue box enter a distance of 4mm, check the Add material and Above workplane options
  4. Select OK.