Bouton's Xara Stuff: Volume 3

[Gare]

Hi—

It's not really important how I created the pink pussycat; I like it, I enjoyed drawing it, I even put it up on FB. I'm that unashamed of it.




The following is some fun-oriented magic, as I show you how to turn the pink pussycat to any number of different colors, using only a click or two, and by following my totally self-indulgent and verbose set of steps:


I thought this drawing of a low-poly pussy cat might make an interesting tutorial, but not about how I created it, but rather how I colored it.

If you download and open the Pink Panther.xar file, some screen captures and this text is also in the document, so learn at your own speed.

1. With the document open in Xara Designer, press Ctrl+Shift+C to display Xara’s Options. Click the view tab, toward the bottom of the panel, you’ll see Delete Unused color and styles on exit. Clear this box (make it “un-checked') before moving on, because you will probably want to tinker with this same color set I have in this document long after I’ve gone home and went to sleep. See Figure 1. Click Apply, then Click OK, and you’re done customized so shut the Options tabbed box.



Choose the Selector tool (The Pick tool, whatever!) and then click on any piece of the pink cat.

2. Pres Ctrl+E to display the Color Editor. Switch the color mode to HSB before moving on. You’ll see that the top of the palette reports that what you’ve clicked is a local color fill. This one took me a while to suss. It means the chosen color is local to this document, which is true and it’s not true.

This pink is a special tagged color—IOW, it’s been defined as a shade of a master color, the master color having been defined as a pinkish color. Actually, go to the first color swatch on the color bar. That’s the mater, or parent color. All the colors that make up the cat pieces are shades of that master color. What’s not true about this local color jazz is that if you copy the master color to a new document, you can repeat the steps to come to your heart’s delight.

So in Figure 2, the bottom field tells you the chosen color in the piece’s master color is “Pink Panther”, and just above that, the field reports that the current color based on the master color is a shade of the Pink Panther color.



A shade, usually a term you hear in a paint store: when you add a specific mixture of pure black and pure white to change a color you’re going to want and use, gray, a neutral value makes the target color lighter or darker, without changing the Hue at all, and the saturation might show a little change—for example if the color you add to the desired color is mostly a very light white, you’ll get a pastel of the original, which is both Vale and Saturation changes.
Now that you know much too much about color theory, let’s light this tutorial and thin image up. You have a pink cat, right?

3. To change the cat to blue:


Make sure nothing is selected on the page. Press Esc…that’ll do it. In figure 2, you were able to identify the swatch upon which all the shades of the pink cat are based. At the top of the Editor is a drop-down where you can choose any and all the colors on the color line. I put the “magic color” at the beginning of my custom color line, so all you have to do is drop the list down and choose the first swatch name.


By the way, if you like to have a lot of colors available, my color line doesn’t suck, you know. If you want to keep all these colors more or less arranged by hue, save this document as the default template. Give it a unique name, boogie time!


To make the cat blue, you’ll redefine the master color, and you do this with the Master color name at the top of the Editor, then mess around with the HSV color marker in the color field. You will get the most noticeable change by altering the hue strip—try this now.

Additionally, you can change the Saturation of the master color, still named Pink Panther but no longer reflects that original color. So Hue will get you to a green or an orange cat, and dragging the puck on the color field left or right adds or subtracts the element we perceive as color, called Hue.



Because the cat’s colors are based on shades (black and white values), Value, sometimes called brightness or lightness—won’t produce anything but a muddy new cat, because the Brightness was not keyed to the changeable elements. The shade of the original pink color is set, with an adjustable Hue and Saturation components.
Have fun, and admire my work, okay😊

Cheers,



Gary