Blobman - first Xara post

[Albacore]

Have you tried this method for your cartoons drawings. The video shown here is using Illy but it could be for any vector drawing. The video is quite long and it just repeats the technique shown right from the beginning going over it time and again. I just checked to see if the link would work before I posted it but it did not. What the video showed that the cartoonist made a copy of the object that he was drawing filled it black with no line fill, scaled it up very slightly, put it to the back of the original and then edited the black filled object so that it looked like it had a line thickness and because of the editing the line thickness was thick in some areas and thin in the next just like a hand drawn cartoon. I am working today and I will try later to reproduce the effect for you.

[handrawn]

also Bob Hahn's tutorial ' Cartoon Drawing in Xara' here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQKIbTIEAwQ

good for showing how he does the lines and fills

think he has others too...

[Skaven252]

you have two options:

1. Open Menu "Utillities" -> "Options..." and select the option "Give new objects most recent attributes". After that, each new object becomes the same attributes as the last one.
2. Or select a old object, type CTRL+C, select another object and type CTRL+A to paste the attributes from one object to another.

Ahh, very handy! Thanks for the tips!

Just to let you know, there is a forum here dedicated just to showing ones work... I think it is called the xara gallery... You might want to post your images in that forum... (the moderators can get testy at times if you throw stuff willy nilly around here... Dey like organization)

Good point.. but does that area allow deeper discussion about vector drawing? I wanted to do both in this thread, so I pondered for a moment where to post...

(my apologies if this thread is against this forum's policies)

the cartoonist made a copy of the object that he was drawing filled it black with no line fill, scaled it up very slightly, put it to the back of the original and then edited the black filled object so that it looked like it had a line thickness

I think you can do this in Xara this way:
1) Create closed shape (stroke profile can be used)
2) Apply "Convert Line to Shape"
3) Apply "Break shape" (this separates the inner and outer lines to separate shapes)
4) Arrange / put the outer shape behind the inner shape
5) Fill inner shape with color

You can then edit the outer shape to modify the outline thickness, just like you described.