Hi, all! It's been awhile. Nice to be here again.
I just created a new t-shirt design using mostly Xara 10 and some ornery old Photoshop.
Feedback would be welcome! And thanks!
Attachment 130803
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Hi, all! It's been awhile. Nice to be here again.
I just created a new t-shirt design using mostly Xara 10 and some ornery old Photoshop.
Feedback would be welcome! And thanks!
Attachment 130803
very nice TC - makes a change from unicorns :)
good to see you back
Not keen on dragons, but I like yours. :)
Very creative, toon.
Thanks for the feedback, guys! I really appreciate it. And it's great to be back!
I'd like to ask you all a question, if I may - is the lasso in the newer Xara versions as good as Photoshop's? And is there a magic wand equivalent? I'm asking because I still can't color in Xara the way I can in PS - if I drop a color within an image I've outlined in Xara, the color seeps out somehow and goes all over the place. But when I do the exact same thing in PS, it fills the image very nicely. No leakage. So I'm wondering if the lasso might help solve that problem (even better if Xara now has a magic wand...)
short answer - no magic wand; a magic wand is only possible if you are drawing on a pixel canvas as in PS, where the magic wand selects pixels to modfy; there are no pixels to select in a vector drawing app like xara when you draw, so you cannot set tolerance or threshold; in xara it is 'all or nothing' so a wand would be pretty pointless; that is why in xara if you have even the slightest gap the colour spreads out like water as far as it can acroos the page
if you want to freeform 'lasso' an area to fill, use the freehand/brush tool - when you complete the shape to fill it will automatically fill with a default colour which you can then change - because xara is vector this fill will be a seperate object to your drawing lines, it may need repositioning behind your drawing lines
to get a fill in xara as I said earlier you must have no gaps in the outline, and it must be all one line, just placing separate lines so they touch does not work
A belated thanks, Handrawn!
"to get a fill in xara as I said earlier you must have no gaps in the outline, and it must be all one line, just placing separate lines so they touch does not work"
Well, that does explain a few things! I thought if the lines touched, and I grouped them, then a paint bucket pour would stay within those lines! Boy did that drive me nuts when it didn't work!
I have used the freehand brush tool to fill in areas, using a sort of trace action - setting the brush to a very small size. It works, but boy is it tedious. I wish Xara would come up with a way to let you group lines that would contain a fill via paint bucket. If it did, I wouldn't have to use PS for coloring. Oh well...
we discussed way back the way to do it in xara by converting line to shape and breaking shape - sure it is complicated compared to PS
if you create line art in PS and want sharp vector though, you can export your line art layer and vectorise [auto-trace] it
so the steps would be:
create art in PS on separate layers for line art and colour at say 300 dpi
create a copy file to use and merge any clipping layers which xara does not support
make sure there is a background [bottom] layer that is filled with white and nothing else
hide all layers except line art and the white background - save this as a PNG
in inkscape [free] import the PNG and use the path menu > trace bitmap function to automatically trace the art work to vector - inkscape places the trace directly over the bitmap and so makes replacement practical; xara bitmap trace does not do this and in this respect is a total pita
without moving either save your lineart and vector from inkscape as SVG
in PS hide only the line art - save all the rest including the white background as PSD
import the PSD into xara - at the correct dpi aand as objects not layers
import the SVG into xara
group all the imported PSD
the SVG shoud be imported as a group, if it is not, group it
select both groups and use xara's alignment tool to place the SVG import over he PSD import - use horizontal: align left and vertical: align top settings - the two groups should align to the white backgrounds and therefore the vectored art should be placed directly over the coloured art - you won't see this though until you go into the page and layer gallery and hide/delete the background in the SVG import group and in the PSD import group if you don't need it
simple eh? :D - well I do it a lot so I can then export as PDF and import into TB Harmony therefore I might be biased [ I use Painttool SAI not photoshop - I prefer raster brushes to vector brushes for cartooning]
Good description handrawn.Quote:
Originally Posted by handrawn
thanks Larry - it's a pity inkscape does not import PSD, although the inkscape Ui is very clunky compared to xara, but it would align juat as well; if you only have a single layer of colour though you could import that into inkscape as another PNG of course