December 2012 Video Tutorial -Deck The Halls! Making a Garland Brush

[Gare]

How a propos, stygg!

It sort of reminds me of that ring-toss game at amusement arcades!



Inventive and well done!

-g

[angelize]

Great Job Stygg!

[Gare]

It's funny how many fonts there are, and how few unique names.

When Grace told us that she used "Acropolis" as her font for the design, I said to myself, "Hmm...I thought I had Acropolis installed..."

And I do, and it looks nothing like Grace's copy! Mine's from the P22 Type Foundry, and I've used it before to recreate the iconic design of New York City's Greek Diner coffee cup:



Just shows to go ya.

Happy Holidays, everyone. I think The Boutons are checking out for a week.

Make it a Joyous and Safe one (don't use indoor lights outdoors!)

--Gary

[stygg2003]

Francis I know you will be busy with the holiday period coming up and this is totally going off topic but have you or anyone else applied the Plastic wrap textures to anything? I've down loaded them but not sure what to apply them to except for one I aged a photograph with. Any feed back would be accepted most gratefully

[BeanPole]

Ouch!

I followed the garland tutorial and Xara froze up on me. I had to force close it, but the problem continued as soon as I tried to open Xara. After booting my computer I tried again and still Xara froze. So I waited, and waited, and finally Xara read the file and I deleted it and the garland brush stroke too.

As advised in another thread, I went into options, selected the Backups tab, and turned off "backup open documents on program close and restore on program start". So now, even if Xara freezes up on me, when I go to open it again, it won't try to open the offending file.

I figure I did something wrong in the garland tutorial. Was I suppose to trace the pine cone too? I just used the pine cone given in the tutorial.

What is the purpose of tracing? Is that to reduce the image size so that the brush stoke doesn't take up as much memory?

[Gare]

Hi BeanPole—

As far as Xara freezing up, there could be a number of reasons, many of them unrelated to Xara itself.

How's your system memory and video memory?

1. No, you just use the pine cone in the file, you don't have to auto-trace it.

2. The purpose of auto-tracing bitmaps, at least specific to this tutorial, is to then be able to scale the resulting brush stroke as large or as small as you need for print or posting on the web. Now, if you auto-trace a bitmap and the resulting collection of individual shapes is over 100, this is going to slow you down, or perhaps even freeze Xara.

Creatively as well as technically, vector shapes are economical. If you auto-trace, say a photo of an apple, and the apple photo is 12MB, the auto-trace most assuredly will be smaller in saved file size. However, certain types of scenes lend themselves to pixel-based (bitmap) format and auto-tracing is a waste of effort. An example is a starfield: you'd have thousands of shapes if you saved a starfield auto-trace as a vector file, and at this point the vector rendering of the stars would be ungainly to work with.

You always need to ask yourself whether an idea can be best expressed as a vector (resolution independent, sharp edges, not usually photographic), or the resolution-dependent bitmap graphics format (photographic, can't really be scaled up because no more detail is gained).

I'm attaching a file for you, BeanPole, that can a screen capture in it of the Line Gallery (in version 6, sorry, but it's the same in 8) and the finished garland stroke. You can select it, copy it (Ctrl+C) and then get out the Freehand and Brush tool and make a stroke. I think this should work for you.

Please let me know if you succeed in working with this a little without a program halt, okay?

Actually, the difference and appropriateness of bitmaps versus vectors might make a good discussion/tutorial in the future, no?

My Best,

Gary

[BeanPole]

Thanks! I will give it a try. Thank you for explaining the reason for tracing and its effect on memory size.

I have an i7 processor, 2GB NVIDIA GEFORCE video, and 8 gb ram (1 terabyte hard drive)

[Gare]

Okay, BeanPole, in my estimation, if you can't open and work with the file I posted in #16 here—if your app or system freezes, it's not your card or memory. I'd submit a ticket to Xara concerning the problem, because it stands to reason that I have similar specs on one of my systems and if I can create the brush on a machine, you should be able to open and work with it.

Or the Fates are frowning on you.

And you need to reinstall Xara, or get Tech Support from Xara, or if there are any more details about this specific problem you can share, someone brighter than either of us might drop by and solve this for you.

-g

[Gare]

It will take a day or so to get this PDF up on the Xara Xone tutorial page for December, seeing as I just transcribed it 20 seconds ago. The pixels aren't even dry.

So here it is now: Creating a Garland Brush, attached.

My Best,

Gary

[BeanPole]

Gare,

I took your transcript and tried the tutorial again. When I tried to use the brush I created Xara froze on me.

After force closing it. I tried the attached file you gave me of your brush. I was able to do two strokes and Xara froze up on me again.

So, nope! That tutorial doesn't work for me. Don't know what it is, but it could have something to do with Windows 8. Anyway, I did the Valentines Day Card today and was able to create, and use, the diamond brush with no problem.

I guess I will just have to admire everyone else's garland brush!