January 2015 Video Tutorial -- Tracing Is Not Cheating!

[Egg Bramhill]

Hi, I like all of these but I think doing the reflection requires more work. In Gary's tutorial he uses a lot of blur & then high levels of transparency which gives a decent type reflection, but if this isn't done as drastically you can see the "arced" floral pattern in the refection which is arcing in the wrong direction, it should arc in the same direction as the reflected object. Just pointing this out

[Gare]

Let me riff on Egg's point for a moment; I have other comments even though we're only two days into this tutorial!

First, reflections are continuous with the plane up which the object is resting. Actually a good example is if something is floating 6" above a plane. Standing at a superior view, you cannot see the botrtom of the object, but you CAN see its bottom in the reflection.


(From the immortal classic Xara Xtreme 5: The Official Guide)

Look carefully at what is easily mirrored, and those areas that require tracing and/or a completely different reference for the perspective when you get around to tracing the reflection area.

As for blurring, in this example, yes, egg, that was a cheat. It enabled me to dismiss the accuracy of the text, and accuracy of the other areas. This is only acceptable if the oblect is reather dead-on with relationship to the camera, and little or no arcing is going on, as if you're looking down at the object.A good general rule is if, say, you're drawing a cylinder, and you can see that the top lip is an oval, you have too much perspective to easily draw the reflection and should lower your view (or camera).

What I have to say about blurry reflections I'd also say about blurry shadows: they both happen in life, but you should not overuse the effect. It got tiresome real fast in Windows 7 where the Aero interface blurred and darkened everything behind it, suggesting but not accurately capturing the effect of glass. It looked more like sandblasted glass!



The above is an example highlight text. Imagine it's that floral pattern n the watering can. As you can see, from the perspective, the reflection is a lot less arced and that's because thew camera angle is almost on the table, but when you look at an object on a highly reflective surface, the reflection and all its details are along a continuous plane. From the side, the can and it's reflection look like the drawing at the right, and not the left.



Make sense, at least optically?

Truthfully, I'm a little bushed today, after providing the video, plus the written tutorial, all in the span of a week's work. But I want to keep this discussion and the best wat to get the profile, the perspective and the fill of photographic objects looking as good as the original by tracing and drawing in Xara.

My Best,






'

[Crow Haven]

Thanks Csehz, Rik, and Francis. Francis, great distressed look on the watering can!

Good reflections info, Gare!

[Gare]

The bunch of you produced an amazing amount of fantastic work in a very short time! I feel compelled to congratulate every one of you based on the merits of the work and what you learned:

• Maya: you're a ringer, you know more than I do about art, you win as always, get out of here.

• Egg, your observations on photographic accuracy are welcome. Also, your work on the glass bottle, which was out of focus (genuine Depth of Field, not simply blurred) and naming the colors puts you in the front row, mate. Your own embellishments on the can brings something fresh and unexpected tot the party. Me, I was desperate and found the first set of floral ornaments in my type case that I could find! Well done! Okay, I've got a follow up challenge for you: I did a slightly different render here, with the bottle in the metal rack in focus.



• Frances, your work is excellent and I only hope to see some of the stuff you did on this in your own compositions in the future. I love it when you innovate, and the distressing on the can is a wonderful touch. I'd kick out the jams on this effect, though; do twice as much distressing. Barbara was an associate at an antique store years ago, and true antique, not restored, are heavily patina-ed and distressed.

• csehz, you worked blazingly fast, and like most of the others of you, your trace was better than the one I did as an example. I don't know why you choose to keep your talents as a hobby, but I understand everyone needs a place to go to after working al;l day. And for you, if it's art, more power to you. I remember the day I quit advertising in NYC. I think I immersed myself in music, just playing guitar and keyboards for almost a year before getting back into drawing and writing books about drawing. It's the world's loss, though, if you don't get published, I'm serious.

I'd like to ask a question of you all, and I don't require a drawing or anything: what single technique made the most importance to your tracing?

Let me explain what my process is in text instead of a 200mph voice-over.

1. I think of or find a visually appealing shape that could be better if it were drawn. There's no sense in drawing a photo that cannot be improved upon, or a model. That's why I have a modeling gallery on Xara's non-Xara Art area: I could have traced over any of these, but they would not have been better. This is where the "artist" part comes in and makes the whole process a worthwhile one.

2. I import the picture, scale it to about 500 pixels and thenb lock it.

3. I set the nudge value to about the same width, so I can work on a piece, nudge it over, work on another piece and nudge it over, so my view of the original photo can always be uncluttered and my tracings always align to each other, and to the photo.

4. I use a white outline a lot so I can see the edges of areas to be traced, with no fill specified. I also move stuff over a little to see the color values and sample them, but them move the piece back so it aligns to the original.

5. I try to work from front to back in the photo, but that doesn't always appeal to me. so I've memorized Ctrl+Shift+B and Ctrl+Shift+F.

6. I use Boolean Operations—Anrrange>Combine Shapes, and then the subtract and add and all those guys. Now you could just have the Arrange menu displayed as a toolbar, but what I do is Alt+drag the buttons I need off the button palette in the control Bars section and then try never to reinstall Xara! Seriously, you save time, like with that transparency fiece you first did if you just draw a coarse loop around the target area, CTRL+K a copy of what's directly underneath and overlapping, thebn select both shapes and choose Intersect (shapes). It's precise and takes very little time.

7. Fills usually need multi-color stages because of the way light travels across curved shapes. A lot of times a linear gradient with about four control color points does the trick, but us Blend steps if the lighting gets too complicated. Also, don't be afraid to use transparency shapes in Stained Glass and/or Bleach mode, stacking them until you have a painterly look. I know Maya does that to get a pain quality to her illustrations.

Now here's one of the neatest things I've found (Gary discloses all now, heads up!) to make tracing faster still, and more of a judgement thing instead of just tracing like a drone: have your object auto-traced. Use Xara's auto-trace or use Vector Magic.

The result is that the software program evaluates a lot of the photo's colors, does some averaging so you're not using 20,000 colors, and there is some banding where there should be a gradient, and that's useful, too, because this is a signal when you should use a gradient, or use Blend shapes.



Honest to gosh, vector tracings help me sort out which details I don't need (because the vector trace didn't have them), and finally I go back to the photo and see if the auto-traced missed something my artistic eye couldn't tell whether it was superficial or a supporting element.

I've attached the can file.

Once we've worn this into the ground, I'll provide a different image and let's see if you can wing it without the detailed tutorial. It's a test to see what you remember.

Hey, I appreciate all the kind words about my effort this month, thank you. In reality, I must say, though, that Google analytics are the only measure that my bosses can go by to judge the success of a piece, and statistically, a lot of the audience moves on after 4 minutes, so the call has been to keep the tutorials down to 6 minutes, tops. This was a story that could not be told in installments and certainly not in four minutes. I think the speed-painting videos on youTube are fun, but they're not tutorials. So what I said at the beginning of the thread was a bonafide apology in advance in case anyone was expecting a 3 second gem instead of excavating a while in a mine.

I find I get my hands dirty doing art a lot

My Best,

Gary

[Egg Bramhill]

Hi Gary, I'll get back to your comments above asap. In the mean time I've been trying an experiment to further expand on my relection comments. I'll let the images do most of the explaining I hope. I do note the curved text uses different criterea though as in the text on a curve part of the images. I've copied Francis & Mayas images as well as examples, hope they don't mind.

[Gare]

Precisely, Egg. You can get away with flipping a copy of the viewing angle is not too high. If it is, you do something else!

[Egg Bramhill]

Thanks Gare. One thing I don't follow re your viewing angle above is why is your object tilted from the reflection plane?

[Crow Haven]

A ringer? What?

Here, I've been fiddling around some more with the reflections...I'm done with it. I've checked with a mirror like Egg did, and he's right you can't just flip the image down, the reflected image should be right to left but upside down and mirrored backwards, and this is about the best I can figure out for a close to accurate look. It'll have to do.

The tute was great, Gare. I don't use blends that often but they are great for items like the watering can and lots of other things. I don't use outlines much either as I like to see the shape as it looks at the start and I use a lot of feathering, flat transparencies and linear transparencies even with lines. I can't stand nudge factors of more than 1 pixel. I worked on my image with Xara 2013 and found it dropping various highlighting and other transparencies whenever I grouped anything and moved the group (even using clipview didn't help) so revisions were time-consuming....but I've got lots of watering cans now!

I haven't had any luck with the bitmap tracer and its settings, things come out very messy looking in way too many pieces.

[Egg Bramhill]

1. I think of or find a visually appealing shape that could be better if it were drawn. There's no sense in drawing a photo that cannot be improved upon, or a model. That's why I have a modeling gallery on Xara's non-Xara Art area: I could have traced over any of these, but they would not have been better. This is where the "artist" part comes in and makes the whole process a worthwhile one.

Can't argue with that, but I'm just a self confessed tracer, it gives me pleasure in just recreating an image in vector which was previously a bitmap photo. I don't profess to be an artist although I wish I had just some of the talents that some others do on this forum.

2. I import the picture, scale it to about 500 pixels and thenb lock it.

500 px is the very minimum I'd use. The bigger the better. I often work in Xara at 20% zoom. I do the same but tend to have 2 copies of the original side by side, one on a locked layer the other on a lower unlocked layer, which I can move around if required. I trace over the locked layer whilst using the unlocked image as a reference for fill colours etc.

3. I set the nudge value to about the same width, so I can work on a piece, nudge it over, work on another piece and nudge it over, so my view of the original photo can always be uncluttered and my tracings always align to each other, and to the photo.

Never do it this way. If I need to I just use Shift + Arrow Key and count the number of shifts. Once happy reverse the same number of steps.

4. I use a white outline a lot so I can see the edges of areas to be traced, with no fill specified. I also move stuff over a little to see the color values and sample them, but them move the piece back so it aligns to the original.

I tend to use purple line colours and no fill. Rarely do images have predominently purple fills but they often have black or whites and the line dissappears. I get my fill colour values from the second image as mentioned above.

5. I try to work from front to back in the photo, but that doesn't always appeal to me. so I've memorized Ctrl+Shift+B and Ctrl+Shift+F.

I tend to start from the total outline then delve down lower and lower into the smaller parts. Ctrl + Shift + F & B I use a lot but on more complicated drawings like heraldic crests etc I also need to use layers.

6. I use Boolean Operations—Anrrange>Combine Shapes, and then the subtract and add and all those guys. Now you could just have the Arrange menu displayed as a toolbar, but what I do is Alt+drag the buttons I need off the button palette in the control Bars section and then try never to reinstall Xara! Seriously, you save time, like with that transparency fiece you first did if you just draw a coarse loop around the target area, CTRL+K a copy of what's directly underneath and overlapping, thebn select both shapes and choose Intersect (shapes). It's precise and takes very little time.

I slice & dice constantly. I find in more complicted renderings it's far easier to select the shape you require from sliced & diced shapes than a drawing with lots of shapes overlapping. I don't have the Combine Shapes on my toolbar, just use Ctrl + 1, 2 ,3 or 4. If I get it wrong Ctrl + Z and try again

I wouldn't say Xaras Combine shapes is accurate. It often produces gaps which become fairly obvious. I recall a thread re this shortcoming a couple of years back. What I tend to do as a workaround to remove the gaps is copy all, open a new file Ctrl + Shift + V, Ctrl + G, Ctrl + 1 to add the shapes. Then go into wireview and remove all the rougue nodes and often use the smoothing tool to remove excessive nodes. Then after this, with just one shape I Ctrl + Shift + V it basck into the original file, send to back and give it a neutral colour to hide the gaps in the original. Sounds more complicated than it is!

7. Fills usually need multi-color stages because of the way light travels across curved shapes. A lot of times a linear gradient with about four control color points does the trick, but us Blend steps if the lighting gets too complicated. Also, don't be afraid to use transparency shapes in Stained Glass and/or Bleach mode, stacking them until you have a painterly look. I know Maya does that to get a pain quality to her illustrations.

I prefer to use various forms of fills rather than the blend option as it's more controllable. Using accurate fills requires the same/close number of nodes within the two shapes or it can quickly become a dogs dinner.

[Egg Bramhill]

• Egg, your observations on photographic accuracy are welcome. Also, your work on the glass bottle, which was out of focus (genuine Depth of Field, not simply blurred) and naming the colors puts you in the front row, mate. Your own embellishments on the can brings something fresh and unexpected tot the party. Me, I was desperate and found the first set of floral ornaments in my type case that I could find! Well done! Okay, I've got a follow up challenge for you: I did a slightly different render here, with the bottle in the metal rack in focus.

I cheated as well & used a Tudor Rose image I created years ago, The Black & White scrolls were a challenge though. The reference image had a group of flowers.

If you want me to try my hand at the in-focus glass image I'd like an image at least twice the size.

Never found much use for the tracing tool. Even Vector Magic can give iffy results.

Named colours can be a bit of a pain to set up at first but the ability to change an image instantly can be worth the effort. Biggest promblem is these named colours can only have shades within a set limit. Often you may need to expand to 2 or 3 base colours and as far as I'm aware there's no way of linking these.