Blobman - first Xara post

[Skaven252]

Hello all,

Decided to purchase Xara Xtreme today. Let the scribbling begin. I bought Xara primarily for cartooning / character art purposes. I really like the stroke widths you can give to lines, it can give cartoons a lot of character. Yeah, you could do the same with real ink and a brush, but I like the tweakability.

The attached image serves no other particular purpose than quick exercise. Some comments:

• The nose, and the protrusions / bulges coming out of the blob's body are open, filled shapes as demonstrated by Ivan Louette. I like doing it this way because the outlines remain editable. If I Added them together, they would still be editable, but much more fiddly. Since the unclosed filled shapes work so nicely, why not make them a standard feature?
• The shading is made with an arbitrary black shape, feathered, transparent, and ClipViewed to the body. There is another similar shape in the rightmost bulge but it doesn't quite match with the body's shading.
• The highlights are feathered white shapes (no gradients). The highlights on the lips are feathered freehand zig-zag strokes. The blushes are feathered red circles (again, no gradients)
• The teeth are simple shapes, ClipViewed inside the mouth. The mouth has a gradient fill.

Overall, how do you prefer drawing cartoons with vectors? Some people create one layer for the lines, then another layer below it for color fills. I find the latter phase fiddly, because, well, the outlines are already supposed to define the outlines of the character. To create the fill shapes, you have to draw all those shapes again (or perform a series of boolean operations which makes the lines lose their editability). And if you edit the outlines, the fills have to be edited too! I found the Paint Bucket discussion very interesting. I'm curious to see if Xara will have something similar in the future.

Due to the problems I described above, I tend to draw overlapping and protruding forms with filled shapes, including the unclosed filled shapes I used on the bulges.

Advantages:
+ It keeps the outline behind the bulge editable as a single line, which gives it a much better flow than two separate lines would. Plus, it's easier to edit - you only have one line to move.
+ If you edit the outlines, the fills get automatically updated (you don't have to tweak the fills every time you've tweaked the outline

Problems:
- To create an even fill, you have to fill a lot of shapes separately
- The open filled shape is capped with a straight line to close the fill. This may not always work well for more complex overlaps (like a ring around a wrist)
- The several overlapping filled shapes make it difficult to apply ClipViewed shading (as you can see on the blobbie dude)

Trick: If you want to use a separate layer for color fills, but use filled (white) open shapes in the drawing, you can Group the lines together and set the group's transparency to "Stained Glass". This only works for black outlines.

Wow, that's a lot of text, but I posted this image mainly to discuss. Feel free to share any tips you may have.

[gwpriester]

Welcome to the Xtreme Conference

There are always many ways to do the same thing in Xara and you will find many answers to the same question.

Your drawing is very good and it is obvious you have figured out how to use Xara for what you want to do.

Gary

[handrawn]

Welcome to TG

As Gary says, you have got off to a good start here.

For myself I use the boolean method to intersect for color fills.
But I rarely create the image lines digitaly - preferring to use pen, then scan and bitmap trace.
I use the inscape bucket tool too, particularly if I want to use the scanned bitmap line rather than a vectored line.

I always put fills on a seperate layer either below [vector line], or above [bitmap line], - since I don't edit the lines much at all, and I am a firm believer in organising things in layers as well as groups.

Look forward to seeing more of your work

[Skaven252]

Here's another one. Just whipped it out.

Take a look at the nose, the ear and the chin. They're all made with unclosed, filled shapes that overlap the underlying filled shapes. They were really easy to "sculpt" out of the head since they cover the outline behind them automatically (something you can't do with separate layers of lines and color). The process was a little fiddly, because unclosed, filled shapes aren't a standard feature to Xara. Thand goodness they're still possible.

BTW, is there any way to select a line and say "I want the next shapes I draw to be like this selected shape in style". The "use this brush to draw with" command seems to be greyed out most of the time. And if nothing is selected and I set the defaults, they tend to change all the time by themselves.

[handrawn]

I agree regarding unclosed shapes - They are very useful for this sort of thing.

BTW: The latest versions of xara have increased the 'hit radius' distance for automatic line closing from 2 to 12 pixels - right pain as far as I'm concerned
Can be changed back by editing the registry though.


Not sure what you mean by 'use this brush to draw with' command sorry.

Nice drawing!

[Skaven252]

Thanks!

Not sure what you mean by 'use this brush to draw with' command sorry.

It's in the right-click menu when you select a shape in the drawing. Ah, apparently it only works on the custom brush strokes. Would it be cool if it also worked on any other shape (so that all the consequent shapes would be drawn with similar line, fill, transparency and feather)?

[handrawn]

Got you.

With a bit of luck the xara brushes will get an overhaul soon - its long overdue.

I may well use them a lot more myself then...

[a4hire]

Welcome! Nice cartoons. Hope we get to see more.

[remi]

BTW, is there any way to select a line and say "I want the next shapes I draw to be like this selected shape in style". The "use this brush to draw with" command seems to be greyed out most of the time. And if nothing is selected and I set the defaults, they tend to change all the time by themselves.

Hi Skaven,

you have two options:

1. Open Menu "Utillities" -> "Options..." and select the option "Give new objects most recent attributes". After that, each new object becomes the same attributes as the last one.
2. Or select a old object, type CTRL+C, select another object and type CTRL+A to paste the attributes from one object to another.

Regards,
Remi

[raynerj1]

Welcome to talkgraphics...

Just to let you know, there is a forum here dedicated just to showing ones work... I think it is called the xara gallery... You might want to post your images in that forum... (the moderators can get testy at times if you throw stuff willy nilly around here... Dey like organization)