Lyrics, poetry and colourful places

[pduggan]

Oh dear, oh dear... I seem to have hit a surrealist phase and I'm sure a psychiatrist would have a field day with this! The game was to include as many of the following as possible in the same drawing:

<ul><LI>The Red River Valley
<LI>The green banks of Shannon
<LI>The yellow brick road
<LI>Those blue remembered hills
<LI>The white cliffs of Dover
<LI>Miles and miles of golden moss
<LI>The purple-lin&egrave;d palace of sweet sin (!)[/list]

And here it is:

<br clear="all">

Larger version (note that this link now points to a later version - JPEG 122K, 839x714 pixels, opens a new window)

(The balloon and the floating onion just kind of found their own way in!)

BTW, anyone got any good tips for the perspective/mould tool (which strikes me as more of a kind of fancy 'squashing and stretching' tool)? The lack of true perspective is obvious enough in my 'yellow brick road', although I can't say it bothers me in this context...

Peter</p>

Peat Stack or Pete's Tack?</p>

[This message was edited by Peter Duggan on April 02, 2001 at 04:22 PM.]

[This message was edited by Peter Duggan on April 04, 2001 at 09:44 PM.]

[pduggan]

Oh dear, oh dear... I seem to have hit a surrealist phase and I'm sure a psychiatrist would have a field day with this! The game was to include as many of the following as possible in the same drawing:

<ul><LI>The Red River Valley
<LI>The green banks of Shannon
<LI>The yellow brick road
<LI>Those blue remembered hills
<LI>The white cliffs of Dover
<LI>Miles and miles of golden moss
<LI>The purple-lin&egrave;d palace of sweet sin (!)[/list]

And here it is:

<br clear="all">

Larger version (note that this link now points to a later version - JPEG 122K, 839x714 pixels, opens a new window)

(The balloon and the floating onion just kind of found their own way in!)

BTW, anyone got any good tips for the perspective/mould tool (which strikes me as more of a kind of fancy 'squashing and stretching' tool)? The lack of true perspective is obvious enough in my 'yellow brick road', although I can't say it bothers me in this context...

Peter</p>

Peat Stack or Pete's Tack?</p>

[This message was edited by Peter Duggan on April 02, 2001 at 04:22 PM.]

[This message was edited by Peter Duggan on April 04, 2001 at 09:44 PM.]

[RTK]

Wow! That is a very nice illustration!

Great colours and composition.

It looks like you had a lot of fun doing it.

The colours of the balloon really makes it stand out - who's in it?

Great framing job to [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img]

Thanks for sharing it!

Risto

[pduggan]

Thanks, Risto, but you're far too kind!

It's not a great drawing, but perhaps it could have been if I'd had the Xara skills to carry it through properly. Although the concept of all those quotations still amuses me, and there are aspects of the piece that please me, I'm prepared to offer some fairly sharp criticism of my own:

<ul><LI>The composition is close, but not spot on! The tower strikes me as being not quite in the right place. (It's been part of the pic for longer than either that great skeletal roof over the arch or the shamrock texture in the foreground, but now I think it would look better if I moved it left a bit and re-sliced its foundations to sit among the shamrocks.)

<LI>I had a devil of a job trying to give the tower a remotely plausible shadow up the hill, and perhaps I shouldn't have tried.

<LI>The 'Red River' looked out of place till I floated a giant onion in it!

<LI>Although my Xara skills are clearly improving (and I'm having a lot of fun with shapes), I still can't handle textures anything like the way I could with pencils or paints. I cleared out all the textures from the foreground and middle distance several times to go back to block colour and try again, but the tower still looks like it's floating rather than rooted to the slope. And there's still no real sense of shape to the supposed ups and downs of the foreground.[/list]

And now for the things I do like:

<ul><LI>The sky and the hills came out fine.

<LI>Making use of that roof shape to create the balloon and the onion still seems like a happy idea (I nearly made an egg timer and a whisky still as well!).

<LI>Despite my reservations about textures, that strange 'shamrock and frogspawn' feel to the foreground might just have something...

<LI>Can't quite explain this but, to me, the balloon and the onion are clearly travelling in opposite directions!

<LI>And I'm pleased with the mount and frame too...[/list]

As for who's in the balloon, well, who knows? Perhaps it's me, but then perhaps I'm everywhere in this scene! (Hence my comment about psychiatrists, because who knows what we're all giving away when we start making things up? It started with a simple collection of quotations, but all kinds of worrying possible interpretations have been occurring to me as it took shape.)

One more thing I can say is that I've learnt more about Xara in six weeks of these forums than the preceding six months! It's time to stop sitting at my computer day and night and get on with fitting out my boat, but I'm going to have another go at the bits of this picture that still bother me, and further constructive criticism will be welcomed with that in mind.

Peter</p>

Peat Stack or Pete's Tack?</p>

[pduggan]

This is the kind of thing I was thinking of, although perhaps I should keep the front corner and whole right wall of the tower visible to help draw in the eye. And a few more shamrocks of varying transparency could just be what's needed to add that missing sense of depth to the foreground?

Peter</p>

Peat Stack or Pete's Tack?</p>

[pduggan]

Balloons, boulders, bubbles, cannonballs, grapes?

Dunno, but does it work (and never mind the 'perspective')?

Well, on a straight comparison with the original, I'd say probably yes, but...

1. <LI>What does anyone else think?
   <LI>Have I finally flipped?

Peter</p>

Peat Stack or Pete's Tack?</p>

[This message was edited by Peter Duggan on April 04, 2001 at 02:11 PM.]

[gwpriester]

Peter

I hope that's not the Corel balloon entering your Xara fantasy land illustration [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_eek.gif[/img]

Fun image, and matted and framed to boot!

You could take the yellow brick road envelope, convert it to Editable Shapes, and then apply a Default Envelope (the first rectangle envelope on the Infobar) and create an S-shaped brick road.

I did a tutorial back in 96, I think it was, on clouds. Maybe you could incorporate some nice fleecy white clouds into your color names compostion?

Gary

Gary Priester

Moderator Person

Be It Even So Humble...

[pduggan]

Excuse me for asking (no Corel products around here), but what's the Corel balloon when it's at home?

Don't know if there's room for an S-shaped brick road (I'm not moving that tower again!), but I might try just for the fun of it. It's already been manipulated in the default envelope (oops, sorry, the default perspective!), and betrays some of the problems of trying to do perspective with the 'perspective' tools (the mortar doesn't thin out towards the vanishing point, and the bricks are kind of distorted too). Unlike my carefully constructed tower (see attachment)! And never mind the bizarre non-receding effect of all those same-sized balloons (which I think I rather like)...

Fleecy clouds might look pretty, but could I find a quotation naming them as a 'place'? I nearly set the whole concept as a challenge (thought it was right up Risto's street!), before deciding there was so much to draw that no-one might respond. There should have been bonus points for parking a Model-T Ford ('any colour so long as it's black') on the yellow brick road, even if that would have interrupted the flow in this particular pic...

Larger version linked from my original post now replaced with latest version (see above so I don't have to keep editing more than one link).

Oh, and BTW, your even [sic.] changing signature has been noted!

Peter</p>

Peat Stack or Pete's Tack?</p>

PS Another thought - I could have had the mortar for the yellow bricks in some kind of perspective if I'd converted the lines to shapes before applying the mould, but I'm easy with that - it goes with the balloons!

[This message was edited by Peter Duggan on April 04, 2001 at 10:59 PM.]

[This message was edited by Peter Duggan on April 04, 2001 at 11:18 PM.]

[RTK]

I like the clovers, they add some more fun into the picture. The bubbles are neat too, but there are so many detailed ones that they steal some of attention away from the main objects, I think.

You have great patience Peter!

Risto

[pduggan]

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>The bubbles are neat too, but there are so many detailed ones that they steal some of attention away from the main objects, I think.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Impossible, isn't it? I've tried everything from wall to wall bubbles to just a few, and every which level of (varied) transparency. Thought I'd found about the right mix, but time will tell...

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>You have great patience Peter!<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

So when is anything ever 'finished'? But I take it you prefer the latest version to the original?

Cheers



Peter</p>



Peat Stack or Pete's Tack?</p>