March 2014 Giveaway - Wisps of Smoke and Steam

**handrawn** · 22 March 2014, 08:13 PM

it's a very effective fish Stygg I like it too

**angelize** · 22 March 2014, 08:36 PM

Yummm Smoked Salmon now you've made me hungry Gary!

Here is an abstract piece I did using some wisps. I put this together and recoloured the wisps in Designer Pro, but the light flares I did in filter forge.

**Gare** · 22 March 2014, 08:57 PM

Although there are a lot of free "lens flare" brushes for Photoshop out there, I thought I'd offer an additional option, because Xara can't understand Photoshop's Brush file format, and buying Photoshop only to create lens flares is a little like buying an in-ground heated swimming pool to skip rocks across.

50 high rez PNGs of lens flares, just glancing at them I'd say more than 50% are immediately useful for a project, and because they're PNGs with transparency, you can just drag them into Xara and use them immediately.

And I'm not taking anything away from Filter Forge: it's a great program and at least half the free textures I post I used FF.

By the way: If you go fetch these, please aDD A Thank you to Shahadat Rahman's post on MediaMilitia! And 50 high res PNGs come out to 189MB, so even with our fiberoptic connection, it took me about three minutes to download the zip archive, which is about 10x longer than it takes to download a purchased copy of Xara.

Just sayin': it's going to be a wait, but worth it, I feel. Just look at thew thumbnails on the link page.

-g

**wizard509** · 23 March 2014, 01:49 AM

That's interesting Frances, those look more like veils of fabric now than they do smoke, and I like it.

**wizard509** · 23 March 2014, 01:53 AM

Thank you for that Gare. I'm pretty sure I had downloaded them some time ago.

**angelize** · 23 March 2014, 03:46 AM

Those are very nice lens flares on media militia. I know we are getting off topic here but there is a way to convert photoshop brushes to png files that can be used in Xara programs. At Texturemate.com you can get a free copy of AbrMate a small utility that can open and preview PS brushes and it can export png files with alpha transparency

**stygg2003** · 23 March 2014, 05:55 AM

I think that's one of those artifacts (#46) from Warehouse 13 handrawn,I like it

Stygg

**handrawn** · 23 March 2014, 11:00 AM

now there's a good thought...

I was thinking 'Heath Robinson' ...

tried making a lichen stain, such as you see on't rocks in't pennines but I think it needs more work

[wisp melted, cloned and recoloured]

**Gare** · 23 March 2014, 11:40 AM

Hi handrawn—

It's a very handsome texture and yes, we are going a little off-topic on this thread. Not that I mind all that much, but it makes it s harder to scan through for questions, but as I said earlier "diversity" is key to the pursuit of good Art, and I'm glad you shared the image.

If you can create a larger version of this, say 512 x 512, I'll see if I can't make it a seamless tiling texture. I know I could use it immediately to represent what our lawn looks like after we've been hit with 47,000 cubic yards of snow this Winter.

No shortage of water here!

My Best,

Gary