In my BLue Period

[sallybode]

Another shadow painting with some experiments with bitmap overlay. The hair is a brush that comes standard with CD.

[TwidderBird]

strong features, Sally. do like the blu hair-do. as I was looking at her (not sure if you've finished yet...) it seemed her eyebrows gave the appearance of a kinda hollowed-out eye structure rather than true eyebrows. don't know what your plans are for her, but I can see her also portrayed with exotic-type head / face culture ware

you were missed here on your birthday. hope it went specially
nance

[Sark]

What you're proving Sally, is how well you can use this technique for giving structure to a face. With PP, or PS's filters to give true skin texture to a face, you could produce some really amazing results starting from within Draw.
Although Grafixman suggests feathering, or soft edged strokes are best done from within a bitmap program, it can still be tiresome editing and working with a large number of layers in the layers palette, compared to simply selecting objects/shadows on the page. And of course editing the shadow, or stroke in PP, or PS is limited compared to editing a shadow attached to a path, as in Draw.

Sark

[sallybode]

BTW, this was done entirely in DRAW, and I suppose that if the file size became too large, then you could merge portions you didn't want to change. The best would be to save the file in steps so that if any of the merged portions were in need of editing, you could go back to that one section and reimport it in the final.

The difference between the ability to render in CD in this manner, flesh vs. a Xara illustration is that the results, as I've tried both, gives an easier edit than Xara, also the technique I've discovered is easy for me to control.

Oh, Twiddler, the light eyebrows were intentional, just as the rendering in predominantly blue. I was going for a more futuristic illustration, slightly gothic.

For me, learning to render has always meant doing it in a monochrome to begin with and then going to full color as I understood technique better.

I am wondering if the version of Hedy Lamaar on the CorelDRAW 8.0 package was done this way in shadows. His technique is much tighter than my own. I did a drawing of Greta Garbo in Xara, trying to ape his style, took me forever and I had to send it off to a Xara guru to fix the file as it had a major crash.

[Sark]

Sally.

I tested file size issues some time ago (albeit in CD9) by adding lots of drop shadows onto the page and did not found file size to be an issue. Maybe it's because at 72DPI the bitmaps are quite small. Also once you reach the undo limit you just write over existing undo. You can of course increase the DPI after completing the image. You just need to scale the image by a negligible amount, after increasing, to apply the change.

As for the Heddy Lamar image, this is featured in the Corel Draw WOW book, I believe it was done with blends mostly, will have a look tonight.

Sark

[sallybode]

It may be the way John Corkery did it, however, I don't see how when the edges would meet from the various blends and gradients that there would not be some mark somewhere. It was done in DRAW but how much is PhotoPaint? Or DRAW converted to a bitmap and then there are many of the same filters available in DRAW which PhotoPaint has.

Since he drew it using PowerLInes, which weren't available from 7 on, he must have drawn it in 6.

Very impressive still.

[Sark]

Sally, according to the CD WOW book, which shows the steps taken, the Heddy Lamaar image was mostly blends. It seems to suggest gradients were often blended, which would make sense.

The image in the book is not as smooth as you would achieve with shadows, but the version on the cover of the Official CorelDraw 9 book is smoother, and unlike the original, also has some colour added. This suggests the initial work was created in Draw, but various versions may then have been tweeked in PP, or similar.

Sark

[sallybode]

I did a tutorial for three joined tubes which form an optical illusion in DRAW, and via using PowerClips which can look seemless. I redid it today to include several more PowerClipped elements that include shadow painting to add to the effect.

I was thinking the same thing could be applied to the Hedy Lamaar. I have the write up in the CorelDRAW Wow Book back from 9.0, all the way down to 3, can you believe it.

[Sark]

An interesting effect. The shadowing certainly gives it a more realistic feel.

As for Heddy. I'm sure you could achieve similar results, and even smoother results using shadows. With careful thought during development, you could probably use one shadows feathering to reduce the feathering on one side of another shadow. There are certainly some interesting possibilities.

Sark

[-=Drifter=-]

That blue hair is so cool! It's almost like candy, wet candy... or clay. I love it!!!