Gary Bouton's Xara Stuff

[Gare]

Hi Ho and thank you, Fred—

Actually, if anyone was interesting my personal timeline of acquiring and becoming proficient in software, it does relate to your sculpting paradigm.

My first two programs were Aldus PageMaker v 3 and CorelDRAW version 2 I think, back in 1990. I needed work and the papers all mentioned proficiency in these programs for PC/Windows shops.

I, too, was amazed at how "plastic" vector shapes are, and then one (unfortunate) day when I had to go in for hip replacements, my wife brought me a graphics book and my jaw dropped at this wondrous rendered model on a train. I asked myself how much learning it would take to get a handle on 3D sculpting, in addition to recovering and my workload at the time.

So it's almost a quarter century later, and somewhere along the line I says to myself, "Self? Why are you doing this 'either/or' stuff? Why give up drawing for modeling?? You've been doing a physical drawing every day for almost 35 years!"

Happy coincidence Chris Dickman and Gary Priester turned me on to Xara Studio, which was licensed by Corel, and then became its own thing after 5 years and then MAGIX has the program under its wing now.

The short version: there are more similarities than differences in computer art programs. If you just ignore the UI and get to the essense of the program, learning one helps you learn a different one, and for me, a literal symbiosis happened where today I probably use no less than 3 programs—the strengths of each— to make one single composition.

Yeah. Sculpting is cool! :)

My Best,

Gary

[Gare]

This is mostly an illustration I did in Xara. Actually, I did the compositing work in Xara; Graeme's body is a model, but the rest is drawing, scanning, photography...Xara.

-g

[Gare]

I have had a love affair with comic book art since I was old enough to read and buy one of them (10¢ at the time, I recall). So I wanted to create a generic superhero, but wanted him physically fit but not on 'roids like Superman and other comic book heroes are drawn today. I thought Ryan Reynolds was superb as the Green Lantern because he was physically fit and a good specimen of humans, but not bulging at the seams.

Give kids someone they can dream of becoming like, without the over-the-top physique.



My Best,

Gary