March 2013 Free Giveaway - Bouton's Spring Seamless Textures

[Barbara B]

10 Spring Textures - March 2013 Giveaway




Ten—count ‘em 10—seamless tiling textures are yours this month, courtesy of Gary and the Xara Xone Giveaway. They’re organic, they’re unique and they’re as fresh as Spring (unless you live in Syracuse, NY where it’s still snowing).

Grab them and then show us here how you add texture to your Xara artwork.

[steve.ledger]

(unless you live in Syracuse, NY where it’s still snowing).

Or other parts of the world outside of the US where it's Autumn (for example)

Thanks for the free giveaways, Gary..!

[Gare]

The question has come up a number of times at TalkGraphics, “How do I access a bunch of bitmap textures directly in Xara?”

The answer is, Do this:”…

1. Create a folder on your hard drive(s). It can be anywhere, but if you have multiple drives, it might be easier in the future not to put the folder on your system drive (C, by default). Put it anywhere (else) and probably name it “Xara textures” for easy location later.

2. Put bitmap textures such as the March Xara Xone bitmaps in this folder. Generally speaking, PNG, JPEG, TIFFs with or without alpha channels, BMP (which is becoming a legacy file format), GIF, and Targa files are fine for this folder. Keep other non-texture files out of this folder.

3. In Xara, open the Fill Gallery (Shift+F11). Click the Disc Fills button at top.

4. In the Add folder to Gallery dialog box, navigate to the “Xara Textures” folder you created in Step 1. Click the folder icon just to select it, and then double-click it (which opens it within the dialog box) to tell Xara to parse the contents of this folder.
5. Click Add and the directory box is replaced by a dialog box. It’s asking if you’d like to create an index for the selected folder. Yes: click Create, and Xara will create thumbnails for the folder’s contents.

6. You have a new folder on the Fill Gallery. Now you can drag one of these textures to the page, or click Fill when a shape is selected to fill the shape. You can also use a selected texture as a transparency map by clicking the Transp button on the Gallery.

An equally-asked question is how to use a seamless texture to repeat an indefinite number of times within a filled shape:

1. Once a shape is filled with a bitmap, you’ll see handles sprouting from the center of the filled shape. If they’re not visible, try clicking the “Show fill edit handles” button, the pain can icon, on the Infobar. The center control pint at the vertex of these two handles is for repositioning the fill—drag the point around with the Fill tool or the Selector tool cursor. The outer handle points are for scaling, rotating, and skewing the texture inside the shape. Now, if you scale the texture smaller than the container shape, and the texture won’t repeat—this means you’ve broken the program. I’m KIDDING: go to step 2.

2. With the Fill tool selected, go to the second drop-down list on the Infobar. Your choices for the Fill Tiling options are •Single Tile (which never repeats) •Repeating Tile, which is your best choice with textures that are seamless tiling, and •Repeat Inverted, which is an interesting choice when textures do not seamlessly tile.

Have fun, especially if this is for work!

Gary

[dcahall]

Love these fill textures. Wish I would have had a couple of them for some earlier exercises.

Thanks a ton.........

BTW: Would you do this same thing for the borders from February's post?

[angelize]

Yes you can do the exact same process that Gary describes in his post above with the borders except I would put the borders into the Designs Gallery.

Thanks for these textures Gary!

[Gare]

If you, Dave, or anyone wants faster access to your Xara files, for scrapbooking, reusing content, whatever, follow my steps for the Fills Gallery, except (as Frances mentions) run the steps, substituting the Designs Gallery for the Fills Gallery.

-g

[angelize]

I have several custom folders added to my Designs Gallery and one thing to keep in mind is that if you add to those folders you can simply save a new document or image to the folder but you will need to update the folder in the Gallery before your new content will show in the Gallery.

Follow the same procedure as for adding a folder (Starting at step 3) but when you get to step 5 in Gary's post Click update instead of add.