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I am using Xara Photo & Graphic Designer 9 and a Wacom Intuos Pen & Touch Tablet to etch over old photos. Then I delete the photo leaving an old-time woodcut-style white-on-black image. Here are some examples. Just one color (white) for all the lines (thousands in the case of Teddy Roosevelt).
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Theodore Roosevelt
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John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club
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Coo Coo Ca Choo, I am the Walrus
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Tried a quick tint of the jpg files with Adobe
It's actually more of a scratch board look, but I quibble. Great images.
I agree with Gary, but they are wonderfully done. Thanks for sharing.
You are right in that this technique started as a scratch board. This is how my style evolved over just 5 days.
I bought a $40 Boogie Board LCD 8.5" scratch tablet to draw doodles. It is a black surface that you scratch on
with a suppplied stylus. Slow and firm strokes create a thick line, and quick flicks creat a thin line. Pointillism
works the same way, hard press = big dot, light press = small dot. The only control is an electronic erase button
that turns the surface black again. Good for about 50,000 erases.
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Day 1 Abe Lincoln and Fish doodles on the Boogie Board. Note: white lines on black background
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Day 2 Copied a woodcut of John Muir (hint you can print an image on paper, put the paper on the
Boogie Board and trace the outline to get you started). Drew a Walrus (note thick vs thin lines)
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Day 3 Bought a Wacom Intuos Pen & Touch Tablet and redrew John Muir with Xara P&GD9.
Redrew the Walrus with P&GD9 too.
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Day 4 Uploaded an old photo of John Muir onto Xara and digital photo etched it with the Wacom tablet
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Day 5 Uploaded a more challanging photo of Teddy Roosevelt and digital photo etched it
It all started with the inexpensive and easy to use Boogie Board LCD. I highly recommend it as an artistic tool.
The pressure sensitive lines are better than a real pencil or paint brush. The lack of undo makes you commit
and loosen up. The erase button makes sure you don't covet your work too long. You cannot download a
Boogie Board image on the basic model, but you can take a photo of it.
Sorry I can't resist, but Abe looks like he walked into an offensive odor.
And then got a black eye.
I like the look it produces, WR. Very cool looking work.
I like what you are doing, WildRice.
I am new to the Wacom Intuos Pen & Touch Tablet and had only drawn previously with Xara using a mouse.
The first Teddy drawing is actually just practice with the Wacom. I think it is a bit overdrawn and took too much time,
so I just redrew it starting completely over. Although it looks nearly identical, this latest sketch has only about
half the number of lines and took me just half the time. When you lay down thousands of lines Xara P&GD9 gets
a little bogged down and inputs lag. To make Xara more responsive again, I select all of the lines on the drawing layer,
convert lines to shapes, and then add shapes making them one object. Then I start another layer of lines and repeat as
needed. Only down side is that it is harder to correct once shapes are combined. This technique is not difficult at all and
certainly not very original, but is a good way to learn about light. When you draw with a dark pen or pencil, you are drawing
shadow. With this method you are drawing light, which makes it interesting to sketch, and you learn about how light reflects
off of textures. The major pitfall is to avoid overdrawing in white, as pure white has no textural information.
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Started over but this time it took half the time.
Here is a portrait of Albert Einstein. His photo was mainly grey, so this time I used 9 shades of
grey in addition to white and black. I took care not to overdraw it so you can still see the sketch
marks and texture. This time I used one pen thickness except for a little thicker for the white hair.
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Albert Einstein looks great, Wildrice.
Did you do that in Xara?
Yes, this was done using Xara P&GD9 and a Wacom Intuos Pen and Touch Tablet (medium, $199). I open a photo with P&GD9 in a layer named Photo, duplicate that layer naming it Background, make the color of the duplicated photo black (creating a perfectly sized black rectangle), add another layer named White Lines, hide the Background to reveal the photo, and then start drawing over the photo on the White Lines top layer.
White Lines (selected for drawing)
Background (hidden)
Photo
When you are finished, unhide the black background and you are left with the sketch lines on a black background. It is basically digital tracing and very easy to do. It just gets meticulous with a detailed photo. You may have to go back and forth between the photo and background to fill in any gaps. The Einstein photo got covered up with lines so I printed the photo out to do some touch ups in this later version. I have found that the major pitfall of this technique is to try to get too perfect and over sketching it. It often looks best with a little black background showing through like an old woodcut. Here is the photo for comparison. Looks like I still need to lighten up his right cheek. I just made the background a gradient as in the photo (darker for more drama), but then grey shined throught, so I had to put a black shape behind him so my black low lights would be evident.
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Excellent work, Wildrice.
And you've got one of my heroes as your avatar!
I can't take credit for the Bruce Lee avatar image. Some other artist did that years ago before I had Xara. I will have to redraw one myself.
Two more examples of using the $40 Boogie Board LCD, this time using pointillism. I did a product modification by gluing a domed pencil eraser to the blunt end of the stylus which is good for pressing and creating big dots. The pointy end of the stylus is good for small and medium dots (touch sensitive). The Boogie Board images do not upload or save in the $40 version, so you have to take a photo.
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Pointillism using dots and dot/drag with an eraser (see how I glued it on the blunt end of the stylus). Less than 60 seconds draw time.
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Pointillism using both ends of the modified stylus to make dots. Its there a way to do this easily in Xara P&GD9? This goes very fast with the Boogie Board LCD.
Colors enhanced by software.
I like that Pointillism effect. Both examples look good but I am partial to the frog.
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Here is a very simple one, mostly undraw black. Wilhelm Roentgen holding and X-ray tube.
Wacom Intuos Pen & Touch Tablet using Xara P&GD9. It looks good as under-drawn. You
have to know when to stop.
You can stop posting the same thing in multiple threads. (:|Quote:
Originally Posted by WildRice
I am sorry for double posting. I would prefer to just edit my old posts to add something and not create a new post, but I only have a few hours before I am locked out of editing. I will stifle myself more.
Here is Robert E Lee. Had to deal with a lot of "grays" using just white lines on black.
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I really like this one WildRice.
The Theodore Roosevelt Association decided to use my digital etching on their web site to promote their annual meeting. I sent them the Xara PGD9 etching and they did the cropping and insertion into a graphics banner. They have access to every phot of T.R. ever taken, so it is interesting that they selected this drawing for their banner. It shows that this technique has a graphics quality that can enhance a standard photo. I think they did a good job. If they were smart they would make T shirts or coffee mugs with it.
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http://www.theodoreroosevelt.org
Kudos! That is great news. He was a great president and that is a great rendering.
Congrats WildRice. That sure would look good on a coffee mug and/or T shirt
That's really great.
Well done indeed. :-bd
Congrats from me as well :)
That's a stunning image and well deserves to be used. Excellent & congratulations.
I suggested the T-shirt and coffee mug idea to the Theodore Roosevelt Association and they are definitely thinking about making a coffee mug (swag/memento) for the attendees at their annual meeting. I don't think they are T-shirt type people. The banner design would look good for the event swag item. The full portrait would be good on a more timeless coffee mug for sale on their web site, but what do I know.
The American Roentgen Ray Society (one of the major radiology journals) is interested in my Wilhelm Roentgen portrait. I am a radiologist. Sadly 9 out of 10 of my radiology residents can't identify him (no sense of history with young people nowadays). They all can recognize Miley Cyrus though.
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Wilhelm Roentgen, discoverer of X-rays, close up
My Xara digital etching technique lead to a newsletter article with one of the major publishers in my field of Radiology. Here is the article about how radiologists need to develop their artistic eye. The editor said it was the best article she has produced and doubts that seh will ever be able to top it. Tell me what you think.
http://www.arrs.org/uploadedFiles/AR..._fall_2014.pdf
Wildrice, I want to thank you for all the images you put into this post, because I came here tonight looking hopefully for some advice about how Xara interacts with a graphics or pen tablet. I've been looking into these this last week as a way of maybe helping solve my deficiencies trying to create art/designs/vectors with a mouse, but everyone always talks about AI or PS - never Xara :'(
From what I have learned over this week, the tablet you have been using is just a 'drawing board' yes? As in, your results show up on your laptop or desktop screen, not on the tablet itself. Unless you have prior experience using a graphics tablet, the speed in which you developed your skills so fast on the one you bought is astonishing to me.
I also love the way that you've approached these in a back to front kind of way - by adding white onto black to create them.
Please can you tell me, have you found any issues at all since you began using the Wacom with Xara? Are any of the features and functions not working or need a workaround at all?
To any other members who use a graphics/pen tablet, please can you offer your experience, what you use, what Xara product you use it with etc. I see people saying to buy a small less expensive one to begin, but if I do that, I won't have the money to buy a bigger better one once I know their value and potential in helping me. But just as important, is knowing that various ones (not just Wacoms) work with Xara.
Mods, if you prefer I make a new post, please advise.
Thanks again Wildrice for any feedback/advice you can give, and congrats on your art being used too.
Oh, one last general question. Does the size of a tablet, if smaller, not restrict the size of a drawing you can create? I appreciate if you're doing vectors once finished, this is irrelevant. But while working, if you can only see & work on a portion of your work due to the workspace area size, does this not hinder you in any way or make you have to keep zooming in and out all the time. I can't quite work this out in my mind, how it works from a small tablet size to a larger tablet size, thinking all smaller tablet size owners are all working on small designs etc.
Thx again.
Most of this technique was done on a Wacom Intuos Creative Pen & Touch Tablet with Xara PGD9 software. The Boogie Board LCD tablet is a great way to get started though. The Wacom tablet is indirect but has a paper like texture. I can run the same software on my Surface Pro 2 computer for direct on screen work, but the stylus indexing can be off for detailed work and the glass surface lacks texture resistance. But I have still done publishable work on it. The zoom in function makes it easy to draw at any scale with either set-up. The only problems is that after a few thousand line objects are drawn the program can bog down a bit. Grouping lines as one object helps some, but then makes it harder to edit individual lines.
I just got a major journal article approved called "The History of Light: An Illustrated Retrospective" that describes the work of Roentgen, Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Doppler, Rembrandt, and Vermeer in the physics and interpretation of light photons, using artwork (my own, living artists, and dead artists). It was accepted by a major radiology technical journal with no major revisions.
Quote:
Originally Posted by puw
Well done. Hope you post a link once it is published.Quote:
I just got a major journal article approved called "The History of Light: An Illustrated Retrospective" that describes the work of Roentgen, Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Doppler, Rembrandt, and Vermeer in the physics and interpretation of light photons, using artwork (my own, living artists, and dead artists). It was accepted by a major radiology technical journal with no major revisions.
Thanks for the reply too :)