Sparkle Challenge

[John Rayner]

okay here is another attempt.

[jclements]

John, I think you have Corian down pat.

[jclements]

Judi, you have a digital camera or scanner so you can post a picture of what this looks like?

[amoore]

Originally posted by John Clements:
John, I think you have Corian down pat.

ROFL! It does look like some Corian I considered for my kitchen a few years ago.

[John Rayner]

We might not have gotten sparkles right, but we have super balls and counter tops down pat.


Hmmmm... did superman have superballs, or regular ones. where is loius lane when you need her.

[Mike S]

Judi, i was looking in the xarazone since i remember seeing a tut in there from Gary on gel text see here i think with this and Dimtry's spray plugin i think you will get what you are looking for. we are all trying to make what you want but we arent using text. we are using round objects and corian counter top bears i will give this a try later tonite and post what i get. i am sure once these 2 things are put together it will be what you are looking to achieve.

[mlill]

Ohhh! Ohhh! I can do this one!!!



Here is my Sparkle sample! I made a couple of bitmap fills from some glitter I had. The cool thing is, you can fill any shape you want, then duplicate the shape and fill with whatever color you want. Set the transparency to Hue to change the Sparkle color! Here's a link to my Xara file. I can't add it to the post 'casue it's too big with the bitmap fills in it.

Sparkle Xara File

Thanks for starting this challenge, Judi! It's given me a lot of good ideas!

Cheers!
Michelle Lill

[Mike S]

Nice Michelle how about posting the bitmap you made?

[mlill]

Mike-
It's in the Bitmap Gallery in the Xara file I linked to. You can get it from there.

-Michelle

[Su Lawrence]

I enjoy experimenting with different sparkly type stuff, most often I use a bitmap transparency overlay with a highly defined profile (culttext.jpg - is my favourite - it is one I downloaded from Xara.com and is also somewhere on the Xara X disc). It works fairly well for things like fireworks / explosions (in blends) and for creating star fields, (for when I get in the mood to do a space picture).

In case anyone's interested ... the settings for the bitmap transparency are 270 dpi, with a trans profile setting of around 0.45 or 0.5 in the top box (depending on how many sparkles you want) and -1 in the bottom box (as far left as it will go to give sharp definition).

Often the biggest problem is exporting this kind of thing; due to bitmap export smoothing, which can make the sparkly bits look blurry. So it takes a bit of tweaking with the never smooth option in page options > view ... and using a defined bitmap copy in your picture and/or sometimes a screen grab, to help get what you are seeing on screen. Also jpgs can desaturate coloured sparkles, so sometimes a gif or png can be better to use.

Not exactly sure what a sparkly gel pen line looks like, but I assume that some of the sparkles would catch the light and others wouldn't and so would look darker? ... like with other types of metallic glitter. Anyway had a quick go with a sparkly coloured pen line in the attached picture.

Regards

Su