Some new Digital Thangka drawings.

[Fred vanderZee]

Finished my Green Tara last week. The image is now being printed as a giclée print (museum quality reproduction) on canvas. Size is 1.5 x 2.2 m. After sewing it in brocade it will be 2.2 x 3.6 meters.
I'll have it shipped to Ulaanbaatar in Mongolia by UPS, where I will pick it up to try to get it into Russia to the customer.

Wish me luck !

[RKissane]

I really enjoy your art. In looking at the finally copy, I can see you have really put a lot of time into this. About how long do you figure it took you to do this?

Are these popular in Russia?

Ray

[mwenz]

Beautiful and good luck, Fred!

[wizard509]

Beautiful, Fred. You have been busy.

[Fred vanderZee]

I really enjoy your art. In looking at the finally copy, I can see you have really put a lot of time into this. About how long do you figure it took you to do this?

Are these popular in Russia?

Ray

Must be a few hundred hours, I have no idea how much exactly. One of the important goals in drawing these images is perfection; the last few days I was only checking for all kinds of mistakes. All the lines are coloured as well in different shades, so they have to be checked as well. Don't want to have lines crossing in the wrong sequence.

The thangkas are used by Buddhists in Russia for their practice, but there are also art collectors. Buddhism didn't escape the Stalin area at first but later it was re-established as a 'state-approved' religion. Especially in the bigger cities and areas close to the Mongolian border there are quite a few Buddhists.

[Fred vanderZee]

Thanks all! Was a pleasure to work on this piece.

[gwpriester]

Wow Fred! Did you have any difficulties in Xara with an image this size?

[Fred vanderZee]

Wow Fred! Did you have any difficulties in Xara with an image this size?

Only in exporting large images.

Response time during drawing is fast: that's why I still like Xara, although the developments in vector are sparse the last few years.
I use one trick to speed up the redrawing process though: in the background of the image is a huge gradient fill and the figure has an intricate aura with a lot of gradients as well - I switch both off. I discovered that gradient fills are slowing down response time to about 0.5 to 1 sec instead of "snap".
The image has over 7000 objects but is mostly drawn on my Surface Pro 3 with an extra screen attached. So I am not using super hardware as well.

About the exporting part: I export the image as a .jpg file so only the dpi and number of pixels are limiting. Xara still has a limit on the amount of pixels used. The canvas can be made 2.7 x 2.7 meters but generating a 300 dpi image doesn't work on that size. And PDF doesn't really work for me: it takes hours to generate and the results are not very good.
For the moment the maximum size is ok, but I like to make thangkas 4 m wide so that is not going to happen soon . Unless the Xara team is working on the one request I make every year: generating bigger images.

[Egg Bramhill]

Gobsmacked Fred, I envy you your talent

[handrawn]

superb art Fred - just shows what can be done despite the limitations...