please help with illustration strategy and brushes to achieve look

[Tallis]

Hi guys, long time.

Friend died and trying to look at using Xara to design a tribute collage, with an artistic rendering of faces and elements of the person's life.

My go-to strategy on this is TG member Big Frank- tracing and vectorizing the face and other elements, and filling them with some watercolor splashes.

http://www.talkgraphics.com/showthre...aitphoto/page2

Then I add more elements other than just the face to create an expressive montage.

So it ends up looking OK, but a bit flat and pedestrian. I add layers of very light dots and splashes to add depth.

What I'm not good at is drawing and using brushes to really achieve a next-level hand-painted, or hand-sketched look.

Take a look at this guy-

http://neo-innov.deviantart.com/gallery/?catpath=/
https://www.behance.net/neo_innov

especially this one:

http://neo-innov.deviantart.com/art/...pt-4-178061580

So what I see is light whisps of edges and mixed media (text, paint, lines, faces, script, etc), layered and composited to evoke an emotion, to describe the totality of the event or person portrayed. This would be great to remember a friend at a funeral, for the family to see a life and a personality.

How can I use Xara's brush facility (which I never use) to achieve this look?
Whatever I try with brushes to add some artistic watercolor texture and suble fill-elements ends up looking like 3rd grade amusement.

Any insight, tactic, method, hint, youtube tutorial link, etc would be most welcome. Need to get out of my box in time for when this is needed!
Thanks

[Gamerprinter]

I've done that kind of work in Xara, though its not easy to do, and I'd call myself a Xara creative expert. I very seldom use brushes per se, everything I do is drawn. Of course the expressive montage of emotional whisps and such aren't included in my versions of that kind of art, though I could have included that if I were so inclined.

I used this technique to replicate photos for publications where photos aren't the expected inclusions, and where I had no other resource, but a given photo. I create publications for the roleplaying game industry where everything is illustrative and not photographic.

I don't know of any specific tutorials that can help (though someone else might know one that I don't).

[gwpriester]

I think that it boils down to you have to know how to draw and draw/render very well.

Frank Wognum's tutorial can produce a good effect for the drawing challenged. Also you can experiment with making a bitmap copy using only a hand full of colors.

Or by playing with the contrast, brightness, etc. settings.

Also Redfield has a free plug-in Fine Touch that creates a painterly effect. http://www.redfieldplugins.com/filterFineTouch.htm

If you have an iPhone, there is a splendid plug-in called Waterlogue that creates a watercolor effect that is very convincing.

[Albacore]

Can I say right at the start you need PhotoShop as your tool to get the effect that have given with your examples. Firstly the blending modes used in PS are much more sophisticated than the ones used in the transparency modes in Xara products. The next ones again is the super brushes which can give you the required look. #BigFranks tutorial is a goer if you have a few hours to spend achieving that look but it does use a photo which has good contrast in the image to get that effect.

In a vector programme it is easier and sometimes quicker to make a caricature of a bitmap as in here: http://designinstruct.com/drawing-il...h-illustrator/ I also sometimes use the photo on a different layer and do a contone effect and sometimes I apply this effect on more than one copy: http://www.xaraxone.com/webxealot/wo...workbook_4.htm

There are no right and wrong ways to get this effect no single plugin that you can use with one click. Do a search on "photo to watercolour using PhotoShop/Illustrator" try both. I used to do a simple one which you can do using Live Effect tool in Xara using Glowing edges, threshold and levels then back into main set of tools and used a bleach type of transparency along with the blur tool. I did a quick search but couldn't find a tutorial to show what can be done. If I have a bit of time later I might have a try to put something together but don't hold your breath as my garden needs my attention and we have a dry day today. Do a search and have a look your self using Adobe products tutorials and if you see one and if you cant figure it out come back with the link and we will try and sort it out here using Xara.

[Tallis]

Thanks Albacore- hope the rain comes only when the garden is ready!
I"ll try to look around and post a tutoral I find relevant as you request- and look back here to see if you came up with something first.
I understand that the power in PS and that it surpasses Xara in raster capability by far- but it's so heavy with menus and feature complexity that I can't get my head around it like I should.
Thanks much

[Gamerprinter]

I've posted this before, but this was photograph of a mounted samurai, that was the best image I could find to represent what I needed in an illustrations (and as stated, the publications I work on only use illustrations and not photographs), so I converted it to vector painting completely by hand.

[Albacore]

What's that got to do with the exercise here! We have got a tutorial from #Big Frank that explains this. Let's us keep this within the bounds of what can be done here. Please try and give more info on how he can achieve how he can create the effect he wants within Xara without repeating what's gone before.

[Gamerprinter]

What's that got to do with the exercise here! We have got a tutorial from #Big Frank that explains this. Let's us keep this within the bounds of what can be done here. Please try and give more info on how he can achieve how he can create the effect he wants within Xara without repeating what's gone before.

That it can be done in Xara by hand, without the need for using Photoshop or plug-ins - I think my point is laser pointed and bound to the subject of this thread.

Except for adjusting color or contrast of bitmap images, I don't need nor use Photoshop for anything at all.

[crayola]

Try this, in place of changing the people's faces change the background. A few years ago a family member passed away. Julie wanted a poster about their life on the wheat farm. The wheat fields for the background and photos of her life over the wheat image combined for a lovely poster. I printed a few dozen to give out at the reception.

[wizard509]

Probably I would try abr viewer to get png's of photoshop brushes. those can be imported into Xara although it would still require a lot of work getting the colors and shapes to work together. Anyway it would be worth a try.

@ anyone, I am not familiar with Franks tutorial. could someone point me to it please.