May 2012 Tutorial - Create Seamless Patterns in Xara Designer Pro X

[Gare]

Mike did a 50s pattern or two previously, I like some of that period art style, so here's my tribute today; you can download a png of it—I used the Shape Buidler tool to do the calligraphic lines, but aligning them wasn't as easy as one would think.



—g

[mwenz]

A little bit of flower-power created in version 8. The shape builder tool is pretty cool.

What I did in the attached XAR file is to "paint in" the color under the flower outline using the layer below the outline, so the colored in areas would be hidden by the outline. I can see this being a big boon to me.

The 3 screen shots show the PNG files that are below two clipped group variations.

I am up to eight, and I'll do four more for a choice of what to include in the ZIP Gary will put up on XaraXone.

Take care, Mike

[Gare]

Would it be cheating if I told you which ten of yours I'll pick?



Hey, this offer is open to everyone. Gimme ten I like, I'll put them up forever on the Xara Xone's freeware page.

-g-

[Gare]

Mike, I slummed it, and offer another way, similar to what you proposed:

You put a layer on top of your drawing layer, and then every color shape you add, you do in Transparency>Stained Glass blending mode.

The Xar file attached used a drawing I stylized, filtered and then saved as a bitmap. Then the shapes on top are all Stained Glass. Which is fine only if you don't mind duller colors in areas that are not white on the bottom layer.



—Oooh, the colors, —g

[handrawn]

that one I like a lot Gary - is it dull, or just 'pastel' ?, and the composition is great

good tiling one and all

[Gare]

Thanks handrawn—

Technically, chromatically, I'm not certain the effect is either dull or a pastel. "Stained Glass" is simply a renamed "Multiply" blending mode, which in photography is based around the real world subtractive color model. The result color is always darker than the color you begin with. So it's not a perfect solution for coloring in a B&W drawing, but it's interesting.

If anyone would like to more than a sensible person would (!) on the subject of Xara's Stained Glass mode, there's a well-written paper on it >>>here<<<.

Keep on posting, folks! Let's see if we can top the number of views we had back on January's tutorial!

My Best,

Gary

[angelize]

here is one I did to quickly replace the butt ugly desktop image that comes with windows 7 on my new pc.



happyface.xar