Bouton's stuff, Volume 2

[ss-kalm]

it's funny, as an artist that may be how your brain functions. However, I'm a Architectural Designer, and I seem to want everything to be technically accurate (even to the stage where sometimes I'll work in the cad for a base, and import a PDF into Xara), rather than artistic. When I play with Xara, I get frustrated that I can't snap lines to exact locations especially when trying to do multiple offsets of angled lines and ensure that they are all spaced exactly alike. I end up just randomly intersecting shapes (normally regular shapes especially circles) and then decide that it all looks rubbish and throw it away. My second downfall is that my typical use of Xara is more for producing posters, or invitations or place cards etc, rather than pieces of artwork, and my skill with Xara is lacking when trying to reproduce items. I've just started drawing my wristwatch, and to be honest I have no idea how I'm going to duplicate some of the items I see (chrome) - trying not to use plug-ins as although I don't consider them cheating, I'd rather learn to do it without them if possible. Not only that I'm now second guessing whether shapes should be layered over each other to just cover things or should be actually cut round each other, so that they fit together.