March 2014 Giveaway - Wisps of Smoke and Steam

[Gare]

The trouble smoking fish is which end do you light.

I'd venture to say you'd light the end that offers the least resistance.

I finally quit pipe smoking yesterday: I'd smoked drain pipes, bagpipes, but then when I tried a steam pipe, that made it quits for me.

-g

[wizard509]

I'm very pleased that some of the content this month has generated so many views! Especially for a "Giveaway Of The Month" thread.

Because this is the Xara Xone thread and not an off-topic or other software thing, I feel obliged to bind Chaoscope just a little to Xara for a moment here:

• Experiment with the controls for any given equation, be it Polynomial, Lorenze, whatever. You'll see that if you choose to Render the equation as a gas, or a liquid, or a solid, you'll get different options on the View Palette. Also, I use the Gas Render option a lot and this produces a gradient at the bottom, making the transition in the image go from a background to foreground color. If you render a white on black picture and want to use it in Xara, you need to assign the picture Bleach Transparency mode to drop out the black background, and the converse it true when you have a black piece of art against white. There are also some presets you can access by right-clicking over the gradient strip.

It's important that you let the render finish to get the most refined image, but once the statusa line at the bottom of the UI tells you the render is completed, you can adjust the gamma and contrast on the View menu before exporting and you'll see that you get very different results. And save your "seed file" because the Opern Sorce people who made this program saw no sense in flashing you an attention box about saving!

Attachment 101256

I did a little Contone adjustment to the imported file here, and have attached the file if anyone would like to see the steps I've listed above in action.

Attachment 101257


My Best,

Gary

That's a good tip Gare, thanks

[wizard509]

plankton...

{lorenz-84]

Pretty neat handrawn.

[handrawn]

the voice over my shoulder with the coffee says I meant art nouveau not deco, and of course as usual, she is right...

[Gare]

There's another program—it produces fractal patterns that look like flames, so it's not a String Theory or Chaos generated program, but Apophysis, free and open source, might be used for stellar backgrounds for your Xara artwork.



Download Apophsis for free

Yeah, this is O/T but my excuse it that I haven't maintained a Shareware section on Xara Xone.

My Best,

Gary

[Gare]

I forgot until I had breakfast this afternoon! Here's another occasion when the pictures might come in useful:



My Best,

Gare

[stygg2003]

My attempt at Design for coffee cup.

Stygg

[csehz]

Stygg you still must be very diligant if this attempt is the 88.png

But seriously I like the smoke mould even more than on the top, also the cup has the plastic material feeling like in real

[Gare]

I like the form of the text, the centering, the choice of sizes, and the colours, but you need to get away from sans serif typefaces, stygg, and I'm not singling out you. I feel as though when it comes to using text in a design, people use the first font on the drop-down list: Ariel.

The "tone" of the printed message comes form the font used. Coffe is warm and inviting, this text you used is cold and authoritative.

This example isn't perfect, but it does demonstrate "tone" when conveying a message. I used Kabel in different weights for the main message because although it's a san serif gothic(ish) font, it's designed so it has a little "fun" in it as you'll see in the attached XAR file. I introduced a softer store font, and I encourage everyone to experiment with typefaces. I can't believe anyone has fewer than 20 typefaces ready to use in Xara! I converted all my text to curves but if you're insterested in the specific fonts I used:

NEW=Frankfurter Heavy (URW)
AT=Brothers Pi (P22 I think)
Lisa’s (Fresnel Script (ITC I think)
Aromatic and all the others=Kabel




I like your intelligent and ambitious approach to the graphics on the cup, stygg. I do believe that I need to get back to the page layout seminars perhaps in a month or two, and focus on Typography.



My Best,

Gary

April Fool's Day was yesterday, so serious up! :)

[stygg2003]

Stygg you still must be very diligant if this attempt is the 88.png

But seriously I like the smoke mould even more than on the top, also the cup has the plastic material feeling like in real

Thanks for your kind comments Csehz, I'll buy you a cup of coffee next time I see you

Stygg