November 2014 Video Tutorial -- The Importance of Backgrounds!

[Gare]

First, @ stygg— your attitude toward your work is even greater than the obvious amount of time and consideration, if such a thing is possible, man. Compositions are hard: no two ways about it. That's what prompted me to do some stuff on backgrounds this past month. It's just too easy for someone with talent to knock off a perfect foreground illustration and call it finished.

@ everyone: I'm exceptionally pleased that many of you took my striped wallpaper example in new and interesting directions. I realize part of this was due to the fact that GenoPal's server was serving up garbage instead of a stable product. I can and will say, "keep trying", because the public beta of 2 does indeed work for some artists, no idea what the criterion is, but I've been in contact with the programmer who apologizes (for being understaffed for one thing) and assures me that a stable version will be posted soon.

In the meantime, I sampled the area I showed in the video three times, and created a wood color palette once, and then rolled all the stuff up into an *.aco file. Yeah, it's an Adobe Color file, but it works flawlessly in Xara. All you do is unzip the attachment, have a document open in Xara and make sure you can see both the UI and the ACO file icon (which sort of means don't have Xara maximized onscreen), and then drag the icon into the page in Xara, not the color bar.

The colors will appear on the color bar, so in advance, it might be a good idea to load a preset page from a template that has very few colors attached to begin with.



That said, as this thread progresses, I see that Maya and others have tackled the beach ball (instead of kicking it), and overall I think you are all "getting it"...that a composition must have more than a single "hero" all alone by itself in the foreground.

Some of the most successful paintings in history were deliberately created to lead the viewer's eye from one area to another, let it rest on important stuff, let it move onto more trivial areas...it is a symphony done with vision.

My Best,
Gary