Gary Bouton's Xara Stuff

[Gare]

My advice based on your comment, David, is to try to get into the head of an architect, not necessarily an artist with a surface in front of you.

An architect plans from the ground up, works from the general details to the specific final embellishments, and everything they do is with whole, discreet pieces of things: a chair, a lamp...what I'm trying to get at is that all my life I worked "analog", soft watercolors that never come out the same way twice, random strokes I really like but cannot repeat, because "analog" is a medium of blending things together, not always distinct edges, and this is where Xara and vector design programs totally break the norm.

If you were to design an olive, for example, you begin at the foundation with a large greenish oval. Then you put the pimiento shape, another oval, on top and slightly asymmetrically to the olive object. Perhaps then a toothpick. Now this woulds go both on top where it penetrates the olive, and then a second piece more or less aligned with the top piece to suggest the toothpick has skewered the olive.

That's the hard architectural part; the creation and placement of shapes. The, you "paint" the "rooms". You might want to use an elliptical gradient on the olive to make it look more round, you might add a specular highlight shape (whitish) to suggest the olive is wet or highly reflective, having a smooth surface.

Then you add a shadow behind all the shapes to suggest the olive is resting on a surface.

David, do you see how, with words, I built this "drawing"? Procedurally, with objects, no smearing stuff, no erasing things. Vector art is indefinitely re-definable, sort of like the Colorforms set I had as a child. Little pre-made geometric shapes made out of thin vinyl you could put on a dark, slightly adhesive surface. You composed and moved object around until they became artistically meaningful to you.



You can't change the world, but you can change the way you think about things.

Perception is what keeps an artist going.

I'm going to have to post another drawing. This is getting to philosophical, and everyone knows I'm a pseudo-intellectual!

My Best,

Gary