Hidden Xara Feature: Pixel Art

[hseiken]

While Xara isn't aimed at pixel the pixel artist in general (and by pixel art, I mean stuff like this: , not large, and not especially colorful or anything), it seems it can do it just fine, though in an oddly vector way.

To set it up:

Go into your Page Options and set your grid to have major divisions at 16px and with 16 subdivisions. This gives you a 16x16 grid with 1 pixel grid. Turn on grid snap and if you want you can turn on the grid so you can see it (you'll have to zoom in a bit to get the grid to display the real density of the divisions, if you zoom out too far, it doesn't draw all of the grid points).

Now you can select the Rectangle tool (M) and draw all of your pixels as blocks. If you are really worried about it's construction, you can use Combine Shapes operations to trim off everything. Be careful, sometimes Xara will not always snap to the grid. If you suspect the grid to not be adhered to, just select the square with the select tool (V) and drag each edge a little bit to get it to snap to the closest point.

When you're finished making your masterpiece like so...


Select every 'pixel' you wish to export. Select Export PNG... from the File menu and accept it without changing any options. When you go back and look at the exported image, it's a nice png with a correct palette ready to go! Here's the example vector image viewed in Asperite without any edits.


I don't know if anyone will find this useful, but it's nice to know if you want something strange to try, Xara's there with it's vector-pixels!

Never export JPG using this method as it will not keep your palette clean. I haven't tried it, but I imagine you could use Xara to do animations the same way by using non named boxes every frame. I suspect exporting an Animated GIF would generate the frames out in which you could use a raster image editor to split the frames up into a sprite sheet (in Asperite, for instance, where the process is practically automatically done for you when you load it up).

Again, this is more of a 'trick' than a really useful aspect of Xara, but it's cool to know how to do just in case someone one day needs to do any pixel-perfect editing of some sort. It's still be preferrable to have a pixel-preview view mode/filter though....*hint hint*...that way we can use the regular tools and see instantly how it looks rasterized... :3

[David O'Neil]

And if you used only named colors, it would aid in making those impressive 8-bit graphics reproductions.

Mario Forever!

[Acorn]

Interesting approach.

What I do is create my colour palette made up of 16x16px boxes off the page.
Each has a black line width of 0px to show alignment better.
I then simply right-click on a pallete box and drag-click into position multiple times to build up that colour.

I have a datum box at an exact 16px multiple X- & Y-coord and simply use Snap to Objects.

A sort of Painting by Blocks.

if I am doing a trace of a cartoon, I place that on a top locked layer and with Screen Bleach onto a black page.
When you drop your boxes in place, you can see the coverage through it more clearly.

Acorn

[Acorn]

Acorn

[David O'Neil]

Love it!

(Now back to obscurity.)

[Egg Bramhill]

Fun to create. Used named colours. Worked on an 80 x 80 px grid with 1 subdivision. This way you can work at 100% zoom and I found snapping was easier.

[feklee]

I’ve created pixel art with Xara before, and I recall running into an issue with colors. In the exported PNG image, colors did not match exactly those that I set in Xara. Some were slightly off, maybe just by a value of 1 out of 256.

[Ron Duke]

Very creative hseiken! Thanks for sharing!