January 2015 Video Tutorial -- Tracing Is Not Cheating!

[Gare]

The bunch of you produced an amazing amount of fantastic work in a very short time! I feel compelled to congratulate every one of you based on the merits of the work and what you learned:

• Maya: you're a ringer, you know more than I do about art, you win as always, get out of here.

• Egg, your observations on photographic accuracy are welcome. Also, your work on the glass bottle, which was out of focus (genuine Depth of Field, not simply blurred) and naming the colors puts you in the front row, mate. Your own embellishments on the can brings something fresh and unexpected tot the party. Me, I was desperate and found the first set of floral ornaments in my type case that I could find! Well done! Okay, I've got a follow up challenge for you: I did a slightly different render here, with the bottle in the metal rack in focus.



• Frances, your work is excellent and I only hope to see some of the stuff you did on this in your own compositions in the future. I love it when you innovate, and the distressing on the can is a wonderful touch. I'd kick out the jams on this effect, though; do twice as much distressing. Barbara was an associate at an antique store years ago, and true antique, not restored, are heavily patina-ed and distressed.

• csehz, you worked blazingly fast, and like most of the others of you, your trace was better than the one I did as an example. I don't know why you choose to keep your talents as a hobby, but I understand everyone needs a place to go to after working al;l day. And for you, if it's art, more power to you. I remember the day I quit advertising in NYC. I think I immersed myself in music, just playing guitar and keyboards for almost a year before getting back into drawing and writing books about drawing. It's the world's loss, though, if you don't get published, I'm serious.

I'd like to ask a question of you all, and I don't require a drawing or anything: what single technique made the most importance to your tracing?

Let me explain what my process is in text instead of a 200mph voice-over.

1. I think of or find a visually appealing shape that could be better if it were drawn. There's no sense in drawing a photo that cannot be improved upon, or a model. That's why I have a modeling gallery on Xara's non-Xara Art area: I could have traced over any of these, but they would not have been better. This is where the "artist" part comes in and makes the whole process a worthwhile one.

2. I import the picture, scale it to about 500 pixels and thenb lock it.

3. I set the nudge value to about the same width, so I can work on a piece, nudge it over, work on another piece and nudge it over, so my view of the original photo can always be uncluttered and my tracings always align to each other, and to the photo.

4. I use a white outline a lot so I can see the edges of areas to be traced, with no fill specified. I also move stuff over a little to see the color values and sample them, but them move the piece back so it aligns to the original.

5. I try to work from front to back in the photo, but that doesn't always appeal to me. so I've memorized Ctrl+Shift+B and Ctrl+Shift+F.

6. I use Boolean Operations—Anrrange>Combine Shapes, and then the subtract and add and all those guys. Now you could just have the Arrange menu displayed as a toolbar, but what I do is Alt+drag the buttons I need off the button palette in the control Bars section and then try never to reinstall Xara! Seriously, you save time, like with that transparency fiece you first did if you just draw a coarse loop around the target area, CTRL+K a copy of what's directly underneath and overlapping, thebn select both shapes and choose Intersect (shapes). It's precise and takes very little time.

7. Fills usually need multi-color stages because of the way light travels across curved shapes. A lot of times a linear gradient with about four control color points does the trick, but us Blend steps if the lighting gets too complicated. Also, don't be afraid to use transparency shapes in Stained Glass and/or Bleach mode, stacking them until you have a painterly look. I know Maya does that to get a pain quality to her illustrations.

Now here's one of the neatest things I've found (Gary discloses all now, heads up!) to make tracing faster still, and more of a judgement thing instead of just tracing like a drone: have your object auto-traced. Use Xara's auto-trace or use Vector Magic.

The result is that the software program evaluates a lot of the photo's colors, does some averaging so you're not using 20,000 colors, and there is some banding where there should be a gradient, and that's useful, too, because this is a signal when you should use a gradient, or use Blend shapes.



Honest to gosh, vector tracings help me sort out which details I don't need (because the vector trace didn't have them), and finally I go back to the photo and see if the auto-traced missed something my artistic eye couldn't tell whether it was superficial or a supporting element.

I've attached the can file.

Once we've worn this into the ground, I'll provide a different image and let's see if you can wing it without the detailed tutorial. It's a test to see what you remember.

Hey, I appreciate all the kind words about my effort this month, thank you. In reality, I must say, though, that Google analytics are the only measure that my bosses can go by to judge the success of a piece, and statistically, a lot of the audience moves on after 4 minutes, so the call has been to keep the tutorials down to 6 minutes, tops. This was a story that could not be told in installments and certainly not in four minutes. I think the speed-painting videos on youTube are fun, but they're not tutorials. So what I said at the beginning of the thread was a bonafide apology in advance in case anyone was expecting a 3 second gem instead of excavating a while in a mine.

I find I get my hands dirty doing art a lot

My Best,

Gary