airbrush with XARA X

**jens g.r. benthien** · 05 March 2001, 05:54 AM

what started out as a bit more than a simple illustration for a lipstick has now been completed.

It's absolutely fantastic to work with the precision of X, with the layers, highlights and shadows. It's almost a digital airbrush for hyper realistic illustrations - I simply love it.

This one turned out to be really nice
- perspective for the cap
- highlights and shadows
- and best of all the reflections on the 'glossy surface'

Still anybody out there who is convinced he has to wait for the next patch? This illustration is a perfect proof that X is a superb tool, don't you agree?

OK, I discovered that the transparency slider jumps to 100 if you type in a value and press ENTER, but what the heck...

Any comments and input are as always appreciated !

jens

**jens g.r. benthien** · 05 March 2001, 05:54 AM

what started out as a bit more than a simple illustration for a lipstick has now been completed.

It's absolutely fantastic to work with the precision of X, with the layers, highlights and shadows. It's almost a digital airbrush for hyper realistic illustrations - I simply love it.

This one turned out to be really nice
- perspective for the cap
- highlights and shadows
- and best of all the reflections on the 'glossy surface'

Still anybody out there who is convinced he has to wait for the next patch? This illustration is a perfect proof that X is a superb tool, don't you agree?

OK, I discovered that the transparency slider jumps to 100 if you type in a value and press ENTER, but what the heck...

Any comments and input are as always appreciated !

jens

**Soquili** · 05 March 2001, 08:14 AM

Hi Jens,

Great use of highlight, shadows and reflections. It would make a great advertisement for the company.

Xara X is a great drawing tool, even with the known bugs.

Soquili [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img]

**RTK** · 05 March 2001, 08:40 AM

Jens,

Amazingly well cretaed illustration.

The shadows and highligts are awesome.

The Gold color is 24K and the Red looks good enough to eat!

I agree, it would make a great advetisement for the lipstick, and Xara.

Risto

**mike engles** · 05 March 2001, 10:35 AM

Hello

An excellent illustration.
Just one observation, should the sparkles be the same and should they have a reflection?

Mike Engles

**jens g.r. benthien** · 05 March 2001, 11:59 AM

Mike,

good point, but...

01. the light comes from front, top left (or y+2000, x-2000, z-2000 speaking in CAD terms), so the light forms the sparkles on top of the edges, which means from this point of view (camera = my eyes) I won't be able to see the sparkles in the reflection. In addition, ** IF ** I would be able to see them, they would be a lot weaker - being already very thin, they would have disappeared.

02. However, the highlight at the bottom ring shouldn't appear in the reflection as it does now, instead it should appear in reduced intensity.

03. the sparkles are in slightly different angles: the top sparkle is rotated + 10 degress counterclockwise, but yes, the others feature an almost indentical angle - 1 degree difference is not noticable.

04. in photography you will be able to generate sparkles without any additional lenses or filters only if the light source in placed in the background and directed straight to the camera, producing nice lens flare auras as well. This means that the sparkles are just an illustrative effect, but highly unrealistic.

However, if you use a sparkle filter, the sparkles wouldn't differ too much if they are at the same height in the picture frame and at the same distance. No, I don't want to write a book here about photography and filter techniques, but this is a physical effect which can be calculated with some weird math formulas. Short example: take a picture of the sea with sunrays pointing to the camera, using a sparkle filter. The sparkles will have different angles because they are in different distances and generated at a different height. (sorry, I'm not too good in explaining math and phyics stuff, shame on me).

Last, but not least, I tried it with different angles, but a deviation of more than 10 degrees didn't look natural to my eyes anymore.

And another important glitch: the logo doesn't mirror. OK, it's facing upward, that means if I would have placed in onto the reflection, I would have had to distort it, and taken into consideration that the reflection would be a lot weaker, I just skipped this tedious task.

Finally, the Shiseido corp doesn't feature this kind of lipstick at all - I've made this from memory when I strolled through a cosmetics department in a Charlotte mall last November. I just grabbed that logo from their website, because I could turn the white background invisible by applying a 'stained glass transparency'...

Oh, and the red reflection on the cap is a bit too bright, but a lot nicer than a 'realistic' reflection.

All in all, thanks a lot for your encouraging comments! Before I forget, this took me 3 hours - I really don't know if it's fast or slow, because I am working much more with CAD and 3D...

jens

P.S: the gold texture is one of my endless creations for my 3D scenes - sample follows below!

**Ross Macintosh** · 05 March 2001, 03:07 PM

Jens - I find your reference to airbrushes interesting.

Going back a few years, all my illustrations were either pencil or pen&ink. I thought the logical progression was to airbrush and I bought all the gear and started to learn. (My airbrush mentor has gone on to become very successful airbrushing murals. He does most of the Rain Forest Cafes all over the world). At about the same time I bought the first version of corelxara and realized I didn't need that unforgiving airbrush! I found that conceptually the two weren't very different. I focused on learning xara and the airbrush, paints, and compressor collect dust. I still often find myself thinking of the airbrush when I build up effects from transparent colours.

Nice lipstick! Very phalic!

Regards, Ross

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