Interweaving vines with 3D text

I was trying to use the Clip tool in the Photo flyout toolbar. That was the one I did not get to work correctly the first time.

I am not going to give up on ArtRage but I am seeing whole new avenues with the XP&GD that seems to be a better match for my talents (?). I like the painting possibilities but as I said, I am seeing the tool in a different light.

I did recommend your book to someone earlier today (if they can find it). This is the most sharing community I have ever seen. Those of you who have the talents are very good at sharing them with people like myself who are trying to learn. I have even shared some things with others today and felt good about doing it.

I look forward to the next exercises/challenges so that I can learn more. It is certainly giving me a lot of pleasure here in my retirement and making me wish I had some way to put these new found treasures to work (although satisfying myself is great feedback as well).

dcahall, angelize, & gare

Thank you for the very interesting thread. I have to admit this one was a tough one for me. :p

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Originally Posted by BeanPole

dcahall, angelize, & gare

Thank you for the very interesting thread. I have to admit this one was a tough one for me. :p

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Nice one BeanPole, I'd say you made it look easy, love the snake. What techniqe did you favour for the weaving, Clone, Erase or Clip?

Stygg

I tried all 3 and erasing worked the best for me. A trick Angelize suggest was before I started erasing, put a copy (of the snake or vine) in the back. That way when you erase if you are not exact, the one in the background will show through so and your inaccuracies with the eraser will not show.

I agree, this has been a fun thread.

Just a point of fact with the Eraser tool: Vector shapes suffer permanent editing when you use this tool, but on bitmaps (photos, pixel-based paintings, and so on), you're only masking an area and if you open the Page an Layer Gallery, you can edit and delete the mask. also, as long as even a portion of a bitmap is on the page and the document is saved, the "original" bitmap is stored in the Bitmap Gallery and you can drag a copy onto the page at any time.

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Actually, it was easy. It was all the things that I did wrong that I had to correct that made it hard! I started out with the tutorial on "Interlocking Rings". This uses the combine shapes - intersect shapes. That was easy and worked very well. Then I did the name and interweaved a snake shape using the intersect shapes.

When I tried to do the line like Gare showed (an earlier post), I couldn't seem to get the intersect shapes to work so I ended up using the eraser. (Later I realized that if I had changed the line to a shape, the intersect shapes likely would have worked!)

For sure the eraser was easy and seemed to work the best for me as well. Ah! Just love that UNDO Button!

Xara Xhris does have a really nice tutorial on YouTube that demonstrates how to use the Boolean operators in Xara (add, subtract, intersect) to make "neighboring" shapes that overlap one another with a space. I'd shown something like this technique in the Official Guide and an interlocking set of initials like you see on cologne bottles.

Don't forget to use the Bevel tool to make your work look puffy or popping off the page, or engraved. It's quick and easy.

-g

Thanks Gare

I used the bevel tool on the text and it did look much better!

Bevel shapes aren't for "everyday Artwork", but the feature is usefull for dimensionalizing flat art, and it's good for more than simple web buttons.
I used the Rounded 2 preset on the attached piece; it's a seamless tile, BTW. You keep the Contrast down and just play with the options you have.

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My Best,

Gary

Boy am I dense..........I have tried multiple times/ways using the combine shapes process and cannot get the results.

Someone point me to those tutorials because I am sure doing something wrong.