January 2013 Guest Tips and Tricks - Making A Handcrafted Valentine Card

;)) That is definitely different! I can see you had fun with it. I hope it doesn't get you in too much trouble! Thanks for showing us all your Valentine.

Thanks for the tut. Francis, I've added a few flurry's and extras, hope you don't mind, just to impress the girl!:D and as always a great tut., although a transcript would be nice :D but I know it's a lot of time for you and Gary to spend writing these transcripts. As regards a mix, short or long tuts., I'm not bothered either way as you have lives to lead your selfs as well, so it's your time to consider when composing a tut. in my opinion.

Stygg

Angelize,

I do have a question. I was following your Valentine tutorial and everything was going good, but after I added the patternmap.png, and I click dragged the outer transparency handle to reduce the transparency (figure 8), it skewed the pattern. I kept trying to straighten it back but would not go, almost like it was snapping to the grid at an off angle. Any ideas how I can get around this? Thanks!

Hi bean pole first when you say skewed do you mean rotated? To skew the transparency (see my images below) you need to hold down the shift key while dragging. If as I suspect you just rotated the fill then a quick and easy way to return it to straight is to make sure the magnet icon on the info bar is still down to enable snap to objects (you should have done this in the beginning) and snap the horizontal transparency handle to the side of the rectangle. To reduce the pattern without rotating it hold down the ctrl key while dragging the transparency handles.

If you actually did skew the transparency the simplest way to return the transparency to normal is to remove the transparency (chose no transparency from the drop down list at the top left) and then apply the transparency again.

No, it was actually rotated. Can't seem to get the pattern to run up and down, it is either rotated to the left or right.

Perhaps my settings are wrong?
Attachment 94214

Hi BeanPole—

To rotate a pattern within a shape, you use the control handles, and if they're not visible, you click the Show Fill edit handles button on the Infobar when the shape is selected and the current tool is the Fill tool.

Simple, right? :)

Okay, there's no simple way to straighten out the orientation of a bitmap fill other than to re-apply the fill. but first, you want to press Ctrl+Shift+O to display Options. Under General, there's an item toward the bottom labeled "Angle Constraint". Now you say when you apply the pattern fill, it's oriented "to the left or right", which means it's 90 degrees out of whack (the technical term for this). So you can set the Angle Constraint to 30 or 45, and then close the Options box.

Then, with the Fill tool selected and this misbegotten shape filled, go up to the Infobar and you will see a Bitmap Name drop-down list with thumbnails of all the bitmaps saved within this Xara document.

1.) Choose the fill Frances provided for this tutorial and then click the Apply button on the info pop up to the right of the Bitmap Name preview.

2.) It's not oriented in the upward direction now, right? Okay, with your cursor, click either one of the ends of the control handles above the shape.

3. ) Hold Ctrl (constrain) and then drag counterclockwise or clockwise depending on the current orientation of the fill, and you should meet one or two "stops" as you drag. That visual feedback is the rotation hitting the constraint angle points you defined in the Options box. If the image is 90 degrees awry and you specified 45 as the angle (degree) constraint, two stop points while you Ctrl+drag should righten the fill.

Let me know if this works for you.

It should, or it's Thursday,

Gary

I had a great time creating my Valentine’s Day Card! Great tutorial!
Here it is!

Attachment 94220

Have a few questions though!
When I grouped the diamonds and copied them and flipped the copy, my shadow was on the wrong side, so I adjusted this.

When I moved the necklace over to the card, somehow the shadow looked white. So I ungrouped deleted the shadow and reapplied a shadow.

When I selected the red velvet bitmap and clicked the fill button all was good. But when I tried to adjust the fill handles to reduce and rotate the fill, it shrunk the pattern inside the rectangle, so I ended up with the 8 sided shape you see quite by accident. Not sure why I could not reduce the pattern inside the square.

Also, when I grouped the whole card together, the white in the red/white pattern effect went really dull, so I left the objects ungrouped to keep the white bright.

Any ideas why these things may have happened?


Thanks Again!

Gary, the answer is Yes and No!

I found the problem was that, because my Xara was default centimeters, when I went into options and changed the Major spacing to 1 inch, I needed to change the number of subdivisions from 2 to 16 (like a ruler). This stopped it from rotating the pattern when I tried to reduce it.

However, after I changed my subdivisions to 16, I was able to follow your instructions above and straighten up the rotated pattern.

So, I got it! Thank you!

@BeanPole—

Ta-dah!

Um, as far as the rotation thing is concerned.

The only thing I can think of that would cause the card to go dull when grouped, is if you had an odd shape somewhere sandwiched between other shapes, or in the act of grouping, one of the Live Effects was disabled and caused a change.

You have enough posts now that you can accept and send Private Messages. And of course you can post images and attachments. If Frances would be up to taking a look at your Xara file, you could post it. And if she's too busy (and who isn't?), I could take a look at it over the weekend for anything wonky in it.

It's her tutorial and I don't want to step on anyone's toes, not with my cleated Winter boots on, fer shure...

-g

Hi Bean pole, sorry I haven't been ignoring your questions sometimes real life concerns need my attention, and yesterday was a busy day for me :) I think that what may be happening with the red velvet is that the fill tiling needs to be set to repeating. I provided a screenshot of that if you take a look at figure 24 on the Xone tutorial page, but forgot to add it into the written copy.

I'm not sure why everything went dull , as Gary said if you can attach your .xar file here and I'll have a look at it and see where you went wrong.

@ Gary: My toes are fine, thanks for helping :)