Layers???

[Zamber]

Well Suz the base things you'll use are the pen, transparency and fill tools.
Using the pen tool is quite simple and intuitive. Look on this video tutorial maid by Egg it's about extracting a part of a photo. Look how Egg uses the pen tool to get the cows shape. I a few minutes you have it ready .

If you are makeing a vector art like this take a look on the attached xar file. I've maid the girl from a photo, a couple of shapes, layers, gradients and you have it. On each layer you have a seperate part of the art. Try to drag evything around and make it messy. Look on the outlines (on the right from the line width dropdown menu you have is "Set view quality").

Don't be discouraged by this work. I took me 4-5 hours to make it and I was really pissed while doing it becouse the hair were all the time bad and not maching to my vision.

Make a simple exercise. Find a simple photo of an object you like. For an example a rubber duck. Load it to xara. Make a few layers (base photo - lock it, the shape, lighter parts, darker parts, the face, the eyes, etc.). Working with layers is very comfortable cecouse your work is not messed and you can navigate to diffrent parts of the work in seconds. When you fahe the layers done try to trace the parts of the duck (the shape, dark areas, etc) with the pen tool. When you have the shape and f. eg. the dark parts try to apply the transparency on the shades, so it will have a nice look. When you take the transparency tool click on a shape and choose a transparency method from the drop down menu in the left corner, for a example take the linear. Now you have the transparency on the shape. You can drag the transparency line while holding the left mouse button and look on the shape if it has the desired look. Play with this tool to get famillar with it, it's very important!

Working with shapes is hard for begginers. Make a couple base shapes like a rectangle, a circle and a star. color them in diffrent colors. You can see that diffrent shaes are under or benath other ones. you can take a imafe in front by a key combination ctrl+f (it's on the top of all shapes) or ctrl+shift+f (take it in front of the nearest shape).
Now a key feature while working with shapes is combining shapes (look in Arange > Combline shapes > ...). You can add, substract, intersect or cut them. You have an example of this operation in the attached image. to apply one of these tou have to have atleast 2 shapes selected - shift+click on a shape while using the selectior tool or just make a rectangle with the selector on the desired shapes (the whole shape must be in the rectangle, if not the shape will not be selected).

Final thoughts:
Using key combinations is very usefull becouse there is no need to take things from the drop down menu.
Don't try to make things complex, if you have a lot of shapes and you can combine them without losing the quality and usability - do it.
When you have a selected shape hit ctrl+k to clone it - now you have a clone shape selected and ready to use. (visually it won't have eny effect if the shape is in front of other) Play with cloning for a while becouse it's also usefull.
Check out evry tool and post questions! Remeber also that xara has a help file (hit F1 in the program) with a lot of tips!

Hope it will help
Post your first attemts! Evrybody will support you with answers on your questions .

Peter.

PS
Woah, the biggest post I posted yet
Great tutorial Egg the style of that artist is stunning!

[jclements]

I think Suz needs help with understanding how the Layer Gallery works.

Suz, go to: Help Menu > Movies

then to the "Moving Objects" category and choose "Using Layers".


John

[Suz]

Thanks for everyone's replies

When I get a free HOUR or so, I'll go ahead and really, really study these replies and see if I can't get it figured out.

p.s. Egg, I've attached a small photo for you to "layer" for me - Thanks so much! Maybe if I see how you do it, I can figure it out!

[masque]

Hi
Open the attached file in Xara by clicking on it.
Open the layer gallery and you will see the file has three layers.
Place a tick in both boxes on each layer then untick the left hand box to hide each layer in turn starting with layer1.

Layer 1 is the original photograph
layer 2 is a line drawing of the horses head which is a simple closed shape and can be filled with a colour or further detail added to make it better.
layer 3 is the photo of the horse's head with the background removed by using a copy of the drawn shape of the head to crop a copy of the photograph.

(Lay the drawing over the photograph, then select both
>arrange, combine, intersect shapes)

Good luck
Derek

[Intbel]

Not sure exactly what is wante here ... however, if this is of any use, here is the photograph of your horse spread over six layers.

[Egg Bramhill]

And here's a vector drawn horse over several layers. The more time you spend on the drawing the better the effect of course.

FOOTNOTE: Both mine & Intbel have used Suz original image, but whilst Suz original is 100Kb, both mine & Intbels file size has shot up to 800Kb. Velly Odd!

[sallybode]

In Photoshop you have channels and to work with them often is helpful when you are screen printing as you can directly edit what is on the specific color plate which the screen printer works with.

Often times an person will put their final work on a layer, make it 100% black. Because not everyone knows how to split and send channels or what they are doing working with spot color. Yes, I know, they are supposed to teach this in college. Shall we say, it is a complicated process when you are learning, you are working on colored masks in a way. But when theses are sent to a plate maker, the plate maker sees BLACK and the printer applies the colors you choose.

Suz, layers is not like the above in Xara.

Layers in Xara is as though you did your drawing by hand, then took a piece of clear acetate, and used a brush and ink and painted your lines of your illustration.

Then on the next layer of clear acetate, you applied a sheet or zipatone, (like contact paper with dots) This layer looks black but you are going to print it in blue.

Then you do the next layer, same thing, it also looks black, but you are assigning it to a flesh tone. Not CMYK because the screen printer can print any spot color we want.

Top layer, more acetate, but instead, now we are cutting rubylith, (transparent red which photographs black by a stat camera) and we get to peal off the excess. Bright red lips, call the layer.

This is the way it used to be done to make a sort of "Andy Warhol"-effect on a t-shirt. But who is around that knows how to do it by hand any more.

Did a mention, by hand you put registration marks and must lable each layer as for color.

If this is what you are doing, you'd need to be working in spot color and on layers and since it is easier to do this in Xara X1, that is what I'd use if I were to do it.

But if this is what you are after, you can still use Xara Xtreme and see color by making your layers black but by using what I like to call a "coloring layer" in between. It is a transparent layer which colors the pixels underneath it to where you see the color you want, usually can use Stained Glass or even Bleach depending upon the color. If it is interferring with other colors, then you make your shape specific to that color then your on-screen view is correct.

[Suz]

Thanks for everyone's help!

Intbel (Raymond), I couldn't get your image to open. When I clicked on the link, it was a blank new page.

Egg, I love your picture! That's exactly what I was looking for.

In the meantime, I was messing around and after reading everyone's posts and looking at examples, a "lightbulb" went off in my head and I finally figured it out! I've attached what I've done.

However, I STILL don't understand how to "save" each individual layer.

I clicked on egg's picture he made and saw his individual layers, but NOW WHAT do I do with them? I clicked on each one to see what would happen, but nothing.

What can't I understand here? How important are the layers? How I did mine, I just traced, moved shape away from the original photo, filled, and then put them back where they belong.

I'm thinking there must be a better way?? And what about the "combine objects" feature? Is that automatically supposed to put my shapes together for me? That would be nice...

In the meantime, attached is my first attempt with this layering stuff....I think it turned out pretty good for my first try (Except for the right eye - i'm still working on that - as it is on the side of his head and i'm finding it hard to draw this way)

[parahandy]

Thanks for everyone's help!

Intbel (Raymond), I couldn't get your image to open. When I clicked on the link, it was a blank new page.

)

I clicked on Raymond's .xar and it works fine with me.

[-=Drifter=-]

egg, thanks again, i learned a lot by looking at your .xar file
i have yet to use layers in ANY of my drawings (except animations) - i'm not sure of the need
but your .xar file helped me to getting closer to seeing the value of them

and yet, then i looked at suz's horse .xar file - very nice suz - and she did not use layers - at least not that i can see -

she did what i would probably do

what's the diff??????????????????????