February 2015 Video Tutorial -- Creating a Casino Poster Part 1

[Egg Bramhill]

Hi Gary,

Had a go at producing the text element. Didn't follow your tut to the letter but very close. One thing I found interesting is when looking at your method I thought " If the drop shadow is down & right that indicates the light source is up & left, so therefore the bevel should have the same light source which in your tut is exactly the opposite. It's quite a suprise to see how something so simple as the bevel light source direction changes the look of the final image. I attach my example.

On the left is my creation keeping the same direction of all the light sources, bevel, shadow & highlight. This gives a very plasticy look.

On the right is exactly the same image apart from the bevel of the text has the light source the same as in your tut, down & right. This gives a far more glassy look.

By the way the text on the attached xar file has a named colour and it's fun to drag the named colour onto the colour editor to instantly change the look. I'm a great enthusiast of using named colours

[Rik]

The Roulette Wheel part is really interesting.

I've never used your 'blend' method to intersect a circle.
That's really, really interesting.
Gonna give that a go, for sure.

OK. A bit of math is involved, so, I'm gonna see if my method of just cloning and rotating, and cloning and rotating, and cloning and rotating (you get the idea!) is easier or is it worth working out what you want to achieve and then doing that in one go.

[Egg Bramhill]

Hi Rik, Didn't want to distract from Garys tut so I answered your question HERE I hope

[Albacore]

Yes Gary I am the same as Rik I found the blend method refreshing to see. I always use a long line which I centre it on the circle then rotate it A.C.W to the value then duplicate it, rotate it, as you did then join together the lines to make one shape. Then I move away from your method I use Ctrl with a set constrain angle set in the Page Options and rotate the shape while right clicking to duplicate.

[Gare]

I was interested in created a mathematical solution to creating the roulette wheel slots, folks, mostly because I found myself growing older using repetitive steps to reach 39 shapes! Okay, also, I was lousy at math when I went to college, my primary reason for dropping out of Pre-Medicine, and ever since I shamed my family I've been dipping my toe into geometry and the Basic Four (+, -, ÷, and ×) to embrace what I fear.

@Egg,

Glass, like water, has a refraction index. Semi-transparent objects bend light quite like a lens and the reason why putting a highlight in a reversed gradient looks like glass is because the drop shadow on liquids is optically flipped like lenses tend to do, the accumulation of light closest to the source of illumination is a specular highlight, and we find this phenomena visually interesting. Airbrush painters have been rendering glossy shapes for decades.



The file is attached. Gary Priester taught us how to render "jelly" in Xara in a Xara Xone tutorial a few years ago. Figuring out how to compose it is the hard part, as it is with physical art. Creating it is a set of simple steps, though.

Oh, hell: we only have six posts ans already I'm off-topic. Sorry!



-g

[Egg Bramhill]

Yes, that works equally well although I find if the angle of restraint is small it's very easy to make an error.

Meanwhile here's my completed (part 1) poster. The roulette wheel I drew a while back so I just used it here.

[Egg Bramhill]

Okay and thanks for the info Gary. Staying off topic then, here's the water droplet from your xar file with some adjustments

[Rik]

Here's my effort on Part 1, of the tutorial.

I did the roulette wheel, as per the instructions.
Because, what I've never really used before is the 'Fit Blend to curve' and 'Rotate along curve'.
So, that was a new skill.