Image using opacity mask

[Jonopen]

I was just having a quick catchup on the forum and Acorn’s post, 'fancy corners with masks' caught my eye.

Obviously it's a shame corner styles are not fully implemented as with other vector apps, but it did get me wondering if I had ever used an opacity mask in the past.

It turns out I had, back in 2019 for the image below. At the time I even made margin notes, but when it came to that crucial step, I just wrote 'apply opacity mask'!

Anyhoo, for the first time in weeks I fired up my Windows laptop and Xara and reversed engineered the drawing to see if I could work out how I did it.

Basically I used the mask painter tool to 'erase' areas, converting the masked area to an opacity mask (keyboard shortcut 'O').